6 Tips to Create an Ultimate Mobile Game Marketing Strategy

If you are thinking that you have made a ground breaking mobile game and you don’t need any strategy to make it popular, make sure you are walking in a wrong direction with right resources. Mobile app marketing is must for every newly built or old app and mobile game. Marketing delivers the letter of your mobile game directly to users’ like a postman. If a mobile game doesn’t have any marketing strategy that means it is not exist. This is because ranking in app store is probably typical with million+ apps and games.

 

Still if you want to experiment with your marketing free game, you must get results if it’s better, but you have to wait a lot – around 1 year or long and if you want results fast, then you can deal with the following steps.

1. Launch it as a service

Don’t launch your game as another game or app at app store. Launch it like a service for users. A few days before launching, talk about it with your audience via any network like social media. Create a loyal audience that instantly download your game as soon as it enters the app store.

2. Right Business Model

Basically there are three types of business model: freemium, free game with in-app purchases and premium. It would be better to choose your business model from the beginning of your app development process as last-minute decision may not be perfect for your game.

3. Targeted Audience

You have to struggle to find your targeted audience. First answer one question: Who can play your game? Kids, teenagers, adults, aged or all? Find your game-relevant audience and start studying them. This is the most approved way to nurture users’ needs and get better results. You can take help from users’ behaviour stats to design your game in a way that they like the most and to insert the features that they appreciate the most.

4. Choose Your App Stores Wisely

If you want to open the doors of revenue fully, you should choose a right platform for your game. Apple Play Store, Google Play Store, Amazon App store, etc., search for all and determine which platform can grab maximum audience for your game.

5. Geographic Research

May be a specific region is waiting for a game similar to yours. Game shows its best results when it reach to the place where the demand is more.  So, I think research for a particular country is not a bad idea especially when it has chances of making your game popular.

6. Marketing Means

Social Media, PR, TV, Radio, News, Review Sites, etc., whatever can promote your game, you should contact them all. These are the most effective sources of promotion.

If your game is still developing and take some more days to get ready, instead of resting, you should start research on topic I have mentioned above. This will reduce your burden and confusion as well at the time when game will be ready to launch. You will have more confidence to bring your game in front.

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8 Quick Splits to Reach 1 Million App Downloads

The real party of app developers begin when their apps hit the 1 million downloads. As usual it’s easy said than done. Developers and app marketers struggle a lot to reach at this stage. From A to Z, they apply everything that can raise their app downloads. Their process takes much time than expected.

Don’t get panic as we have discovered some solutions to cut out your long term process and make your app reach 1 million downloads within a little to no time.

Smart UI   

Take some time out of your busy schedule and have a thorough look at your app. Ask yourself: Does my app possesses a smart UI?
 

Here is the definition of Smart UI: Smart UI is responsive across devices and most important, it impresses users at their first visit.
 

Does you app have both these qualities? If not, then start your efforts to promote smartness to your App UI.

Flawless App

Is your app buggy? Full proof way to prove this is take some devices with different hardware profiles and test your app with each one. If your app is at app store, reviews will tell you deeply about this matter. May be a small bug is a big reason to your app failure.

Users Ratings

Not only bugs are responsible for poor ratings, umpteen reasons are there that prove your app’s inability to knock users’ heart. To know what the actual reasons are, it’s essential to read each and every review and understand the issues of users with the app.

In-app Referrals

Word-of-mouth is still a best solution to make your app reach to maximum users. It demands for constant activeness on social media or anything where users are looking for similar types of apps.

Presence of Press

Presence of press is mandatory in any of your app marketing strategy. As the press has millions of users, anything they publish will reach to maximum users. Find out people with same profession and discuss with them about your app. Their articles would be enough to raise your app downloads.

Launch on Right Platform

Go there where it makes sense. You can’t follow social networking people for your game app. Find out a platform that have active and interested-in-your-app users. For e.g. there are many forums where users are discussing about various types or newly released games or apps.

In-app Share Intent

In-app share intent allows users to share the app or its content on various suggested social media channels. Some apps possess necessary as well as unnecessary sharing channels like Google+, Facebook and Evernote. Now tell me, what’s the need to share on Evernote? A good app holds limited and popular channels like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc.

Content Investment

Create website that reveals the story of your app – what it is, what it delivers, how it is beneficial, or anything that you can say. Create blogs and share them at maximum places where you can grab maximum users. Invest your time in content and content-posting places to make your app float at the surface.

Bring them All Together

Now you know what you can do to cut your time out and reach to 1 million app downloads, you should hurry up as soon as possible. Combine all the above given ingredients and apply them with your app to get the results.

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Simple Tips to Kick-Start Your Apple Watch App Store Optimization Campaign

Currently 3000+ Apple watch apps are available there at app store. You can see that competition is low giving you a high chance to get ranks on your Apple watch app with a little time and effort investment. Apple Watch app store optimization will help your app achieve its deserving stage.

 

In this post, you will learn about initials steps to be taken towards the success of Apple Watch app store optimization.

A New App Store

As I said in first para, Apple Watch app store is totally new to app market. It is not overcrowded like smartphones apps because of its initial steps. This only factor will help you a lot with your app’s discovery.
 

For e.g. when people type a keyword like “war” at smartphones app stores, they will overcrowd with 14000+ apps. But if they type the same keyword (war) at Apple Watch app store, they will get only 7 apps.
 

Overall, you will be benefitted with a newly entered app store.

ASO (App Store Optimzation) Meta Data

As you all know that Apple Watch apps are paired with iPhone apps, their (Apple Watch apps) metadata are almost similar to each other. Keywords, title and preview video, all are shared between Apple Watch Store and App Store. But there are some elements that needed a close attention because of the Apple Watch sensitivity in some matters. Here they are:

App Icon

You have to design a separate icon for Apple watch. Make sure that Apple watch app icon must show the relevancy with iPhone app – it should be design in such a way. We are not saying to design it same as like the iPhone app icon, but it must show some relevancy to get easily recognized. And its design must fit in the circular icon to show easily up on Apple watch.

Using “Apple Watch” Keyword

Adding “Apple Watch” to your keywords is not allowed, but you need to show that your app is exclusively designed for Apple Watch. For this, you can mention “Apple Watch” words to your description and in What’s New Section.

Screenshots

Yes, you need a different layer of screenshots for Apple Watch app because an Apple watch app and iphone app both have different images and functions. To place Apple watch app screenshots, you have to utilize the space given above the screenshots of iphone app.

App Quality

ASO works well only with high quality apps. This is the initial stage of Apple Watch, may be you don’t have in-depth data for what an Apple watch app should have to grab users attention. It requires a deep research and creativity to develop a worthwhile app for apple watch. So, before you go for any app marketing campaign, make sure that your app is able to deliver good ROI in exchange of your app marketing cost.

Final Thoughts
Smartwatch market is too small in front of smartphone market. It will take time or a short time to come up and raise the competition in the market. But for now, it is a small market which may affect your keyword ranking. It means if your keywords rank higher on Apple watch app store, it might not deliver same results as when it ranks higher on smartphones app store. Better to wait and keep going with your efforts.

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You Need These Five Tools to Manage Your Users Reviews and Ratings

If you are an app marketer, it’s not a big deal for you to meet with hoards of pleased and upsetting reviews. Good reviews take your app up for a choice while bad reviews put it down making it avoidable when users are searching with similar keywords. You can enjoy the pleasure of good reviews, but you can’t manage the stress of bad ones. That’s why you need to learn managing good and bad reviews, so that your app shouldn’t be avoid just because getting off on the wrong foots.

When it comes to manage app reviews, you have to first collect some great user review tools and learn how to use them. Luckily, we have those great tools to save your searching time.

1. Appsfire

 

Appsfire helps you manage reviews of both Android and iOS apps. It is too light to learn and too easy to execute. You can start with it within a few minutes.

Appsfire is a mobile native advertising company who has introduced Appsfire SDK to help you manage mobile app reviews. Capturing users’ attention at the right time is an exceptional quality of this SDK.
 

This SDK sends users’ opinions or suggestions directly to your inbox where you can manage them by separating good reviews from the bad ones. Bad reviews will end up in your inbox and good ones will reach to their right place.

2. Apptentive

Apptentive follows a different way than Appsfire. Its SDK first collect your users’ feedback and let you have a word with them directly via your app. You can personally interact with your users and solve their app issues. You can run a survey for your users to ask them questions and their experience with the app. Overall, Apptentive is to improve your relationship with customers. 

3. Appboy

Appboy provides you a segmentation tool using which you can send personalize message to your users. Sounds familiar like Apptentive. But it is something more than that. It identifies your users and their behaviour as well to improve your app marketing skills.

4. UserVoice

 UserVoice has three tools to help you manage app reviews:

• An effective feedback-and-idea gathering tool to prioritize any users’ content and start in-app conversation.
• A helpdesk to resolve issues easier and quicker.
• Knowledge based management tools to delegate your customer support campaign.

5. Instabug

 

The most interesting thing about Instabug is users can reach to you by shaking their smartphone. When they tilt their mobile, a screenshot will be captured and it will reach to you to make you understand the parts of app where users are facing problems. This will decrease the number of bad reviews and improve app engagement. In bonus, Instabug gives you easy-to-read charts of bugs founded by users in your app for better tracking.

With the above given tools, you can kick-start your app review manoeuvre within minutes. You can make strong and long-term assets of reviews, ratings and feedbacks that give guidance to new users and also influence them to reach the download stage.

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6 Psychological Triggers to Boost Your App Engagement

No more app marketing books, I think you must start to read on books relevant to human psychology or human behaviour. Studies say that the key to success of any business is understanding psychology. And you are in business of app marketing where your daily schedule is applying activities to engage more and more app users. Where you are daily seeking for new tips to engage app users, why don’t you try a different approach starting with understanding users’ psychology?

App marketers, who have done this, admitted that it is truly an interesting activity to understand how human mind works and how an expert app marketer can boost app engagement by doing things in way humans actually appreciate.

Back to the point, getting tips from the psychological app marketing experts, we have collected here some essential tricks that will skyrocket your app engagement campaign. And we have assembled examples to explain you in detail.

Hide Negativity (Like Tinder)

Tinder hides negativity. No one likes to get rejected from the person he/she wish to connect with. When the opposite person accepts the request, Tinder says it happily, but when someone rejects the request, Tinder prefers to hide it by saying nothing to the requester. You must take an inspiration from Tinder and apply the same philosophy in your app too. Reveal positivity with happy words and hide negativity by saying nothing at all.

Reveal Social Proof (Like Basecamp)

Do you have a social proof of what your app has actually done yet? Refer to Basecamp, you will get an idea of how to show the social proof to inspire users about your app and its value for people using it. Users are quite scary people because they are aware of virus, hackers, etc attacking their smartphones these days. To remove their scare, you have to show them the real proof of number of users already using your app.

Curative Content (Like UPWORTHY)

Upworthy always share curative content – the content that create curiosity in users to read more about the story. Their titles leave a long lasting impression on users mind making them curious to read more. Take Upworthy as your example and start creating curative content for your app marketing campaign.

Add Personalization (Like Amazon)

Amazon fills its web pages with suggestions based on previous browsing and buying experience of users. Rich suggestions let the users understand what they are exactly looking for and where they will get it. This is called Personalization which must be there with your app to deliver better user experience.

Reward Users (Like Yelp)

You will get coupons, gift certificates, etc for yelping – for posting reviews on yelp. What an inspiring approach to get users on site and tell them to post reviews of their personal experience with the place. Rewards inspire users to do the things. They feel like a champion when they get rewards for those things which are easy for them to do.

Give Come-Back Reason (Like CSR Racing)

It’s easy to forget any game after playing it for a month because we have lots of options to have different gaming experience. But users are still playing CSR Racing game because the game give users come-back reasons like push notifications for upgrades, buying new cars, etc.

Above given apps have very well understood the human psychology and applied the approach in way users like the most. Their app engagement is much better and still growing. If you apply some of the above strategies, your app will be able to walk on a way of growing users’ engagement.

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How Meerkat is Beneficial for App Marketers? 3 Ways to Explain

Meerkat is an app allowing users to live stream their videos via Twitter. The app didn’t take much time to get popular in crowded app market. Of course, if the app is useful enough, nobody can stop it to get popular within such a short time.

Meerkat has taken its step towards app marketing world. And marketers are giving a warm welcome to this new app. Currently, Meerkat is being experimented by number of Brands. They are finding this app beneficial in many ways. Here we will look after 3 unique ways Meerkat can help app marketers reaching to wider audience.

1. Real-time Engagement at Free of Cost

When you are launching a new app or an update of already existed app, you have to wait till your messages reach to the users. You have to wait till the users land to your app via various app marketing resources. There is no waiting at all with Meerkat. You can go live with your app on Meerkat – you can explain your app, its features and much more about it. Interested users will come to you to see your live concert. And they will engage with your app in real time with zero cost. Isn’t it good?

2. Live Events

Do you know what – a video is thousand times more trustworthy than a very well-written promo, especially if it’s a live video. It shows what you want it to be. Users find it trustful just because it is live on their favourite social networking channel Twitter. An app video content highlights the best part of your app accompanied by the depth of information your users love to hear about. Live events bring an opportunity for app marketers to show off their latest and the greatest.

3. Instant Reviews, Ratings and Feedbacks

This is why Meerkat shines brightly in app marketing world. Why marketers are struggling a lot to make their products reachable to wider audience? Why they continuously ask you for suggestions? Why they are keen for your response? Because you are the only way to improve their app. Your reviews, ratings and feedbacks are their opportunity to make changes in their products.

Meerkat announces live events – it means you can launch your product or update live. If everything can go live, why not the reviews and ratings too. They will be instantly live. And you can response to it in real time.

Bottom Line

Live video is a future of app marketing. The way marketers are digging a deep with Meerkat, it seems that video app marketing will soon be added as a foremost part of campaign. Whole world is shrinking through social media; people are more interested for face to face interaction. Live events possess enough ability to fuel their interest.

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Top 4 App Marketing Services Highly used by Mobile Game Developers

Why some mobile game developers get hoards of downloads and why some remain limited to 500-1000-10,000 downloads? Most of times, you will hear the common answer: they built better than you. If you believe it, then leave the ground and if you don’t believe it or still have confidence that your game app is competitive in front of others, then admit it that you don’t use powerful app marketing services to promote your app.

Do you want to know about those app marketing services used by top mobile game developers? Let’s get started....

1. Ad Platforms: Game developers are using different ad platforms to promote their game.

• User Acquisition Ad Platforms: Facebook, Google, AdColony, Fiksu, NativeX and Chartboost – According to John Koetsier, VentureBeat. 
• Cross Promotion Ad Platforms: Chartboost, Tappx, Appflood, LunarAds, Appnext, etc. 
• Affiliate Distribution Networks: Mobyaffiliates, Yeahmobi, AppLift, Tapgerine, MobPatner, etc. You can find more within the list.

2. Install Attribution: Attribution refers to measuring user events like number of app installs, repeated app launch, level of completion, in-app purchases, etc. You have to measure them all to know where your game app has reached and where it needs to reach. Tools like Appboy, Appfireworks, etc., help you achieve proper analysis and in turn, great results.

3. In-App Analytics: You have to recognize users’ behaviour towards your game. Which part they like the most, which part throws them away from game, where they get stuck for a long time and finally leave the game or uninstall it? All these questions matter more for game developers because they can make changes as per their users’ desire. To identify your users’ behaviour, you need help of in-app analytics tools like Apptamin, Localytics, Flurry, etc. These tools will let you dig the depth of users’ behaviour and make changes accordingly.

4. Community Engagement: There are some tools which help you get directly engage with your game users like Netmera, Mobiledonky, Interakt, etc. These tools provide you different ways towards your users.

These tools help developers to maximize the chances of mobile game success. If you have good number of downloads with your game app, then also you need these tools to maintain the traffic numbers for the time app exist.

Apart from these tools, developers follow numerous ways to welcome users via mobile game marketing. They personally engage with users via various social networking and forum discussion sites. They promote their game on those networks where users are seeking to play something different. They keep a constant eye on users’ reviews, ratings and feedbacks to make necessary improvement in their game. Efforts list of game developers is quite big to mention in a single blog. At present, we have this much, but we will keep you updated with the best tools.

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