Game Marketing Best Practices?

PeterNorth

Hello all,

I'm interested in hearing any advertising/marketing methods that have worked for you. Additionally, is there a viable method of advertising for a game with a low ARPU?

Thanks for your response! And all of the awesome help in the past that has gotten me to this step!

-Peter

Moik

Does your game have a niche, or is a general mass appeal game?

Niche can be pretty straight-forward by just finding where that niche community gathers (reddit or something) then talking with them about the game (be open that it's your game, pretending to be a neutral commenter on your own product is literally illegal in most places).

General mass appeal is hard since there's so many for-gamers games coming out and competing for attention. You can get washed away and forgotten really easily. Most apps that become successful got Featured on the app store or a review website. Sending queries to app review sites may help. It's still hit and miss over whether or not you'll get covered, but it's better to try than not. But don't just try big names like IGN, TouchArcade, or 148apps. Look for smaller reviewers since the big ones are being bombarded by major publishers and don't have the bandwidth to handle indies. Then you're more likely to see a return on the time you're spending contacting reviewers. With the big review sites you may as well be throwing your hours down a well.

Regardless of ARPU, it's free to get the players to promote your game. If you use the Tweetsheet mechanics to let them tweet a high score, your game gets in front of maybe a few hundred to a few thousand followers for each player that does it, which is a strong signal boost since it's more of an endorsement rather than an advertisement. You could even offer a bonus in-game for tweeting to encourage it and let the player get a sort of thanks in return getting you a higher rate of tweets out of your user base, giving the cost of development time a better return.