Ways to market your app?
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My father & I have no clue how to market an app. I was going to try to go through Instagram knowing that I have total of 76k + with all 2 of my Instagram accounts plus another account which I Co - own. Besides Instagram , I have no clue how to market an app. We don't mind spending a reasonable amount of money into advertisement. I was going to try to advertise my app through social media, which most apps get their fame from like Flappy Bird. What I've come to learn through almost 2 years of app making is that , it doesn't really matter how good your app is or if its just a complete ripoff of another app like God of War or Boom Beach it depends on how great you advertise it! Can anyone give me any ideas of how to advertise my app? Thank you 
Comments
Make a great game, ask people to share and rate it. Word of mouth is the best advertising.
You have a lot of Instagram followers, find good hashtags associated with indie development such as #indiegame #indiedev etc and slowly share some of your games with other users.
Also like and share their stuff as well so it doesn't look one sided. When your game is released share some pictures and the link with your followers and hope it is shared between users.
I usually do this on Twitter but I hear Instagram followers are better at getting your app seen than Twitter followers.
https://ritetag.com/best-hashtags-for/indiegames
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@iamcartez thank you
@iamcartez will these hash tags also work for instagram ? or do these mainly work for twitter?
The hashtags work but I'm not sure how big the indiedev scene is on Instagram, I know indiemusic is big though... It wouldn't hurt using it though but if you can do hashtag searches on Instagram then I would try to see which hashtags are popular. The same goes for Tumblr as well.
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Your brain can only take you so far on looking up hashtags, but they're pretty useful for finding information. Something you could try doing is using a similar hashtag finder like: http://hashtagify.me/hashtag/indiegame to help you out.
Another thing to do contact some smaller gaming blogs and send it to them with a personalized message. They get tons of stuff from people every day, but a person being like "Hi, my dad and I made a game" is already a good story and it feels personal, which instantly grants a connection between them and you.
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To an extent. The app itself has to be polished and well balanced, otherwise you're spending you $$ just to have users play 1 round and delete the app. Yes there are exceptions to every case, but those are very very few, not enough to count on.
At this point, you are better off spending that money on hiring artist and game designers, build prototypes and concepts. Show off certain features of your work somewhat early to grab peoples attention. If no one seems interested, then you are most likely making a game that will land in the hopeless zombie pile.
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@owen_dennis Ill definitely contact the smaller game people! I'm also trying to submit my game for game of the month as soon as it gets released on Apple ! @Lovejoy I'm going to find an artiest for sure & try to fix the look of my game! @iamcartez I have no idea how tumblr works honestly, I know this one girl who has around 500 k tumblr followers... we don't talk much but maybe I can talk to her to help promo my app!
76k IG followers? Wow that is a lot.
What exactly is your expectation for your game? What has to happen for you to consider your game a success? Once you define that, it will help to fine tune your marketing and promotional efforts.
For example, even at a 3-4% retention rate based on your IG followers, that is very good contingent on what it is you are trying to do.
Buying ads is a waste unless you have a large budget and a popular game. Best route is word of mouth on social media and game review sites. Flappy bird grew by player word of mouth not by ads. It went viral and that is something you can't create. Once something goes vial the main stream press talk about it, this is how flappy grew so big. If a major network or two talk about your app that is basically a hundred thousand dollar ad buy.
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You might be able to trade some exposure as well. For your website and instagram etc.... Wont cost you anything...
I can tell you traditional media didn't work for me. I had lots of exposure with one game on radio interviews, paper and even online articles but generated hardly a 100 downloads. It was a decent game too!
Its a tough go out there.
This may sound crazy but the best luck I've had is setting my game paid for about 4 weeks and then changing it to free. This way the sites pick up the price change and sometimes will showcase your app's price change on their site which should bring in downloads, this is if you do not get bad reviews during the switching.
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