If you’re looking to create a gaming app or you have one in the pipeline ready to send out into the world, you’ll no doubt be wondering how it should be marketed. Gaming marketing has been well refined and honed, but mobile game marketing isn’t nearly as common. Mobile games typically tend to hope to go viral or simply pique the interest of people who go looking for them. So, what is the secret sauce to mobile gaming marketing? Take a look at our guide to figure it out for yourself.

What is mobile game marketing?

The goal of mobile game marketing is to increase the number of downloads and revenue generated by the game. In order to do this, game marketers must take a comprehensive approach to ensure that their games remain current and relevant to the ever-evolving mobile games market, with the market being highly competitive and growing.

Understand your demographic

There are many ways for a game developer to market their game and increase the number of users, but the first step that every game developer takes when planning any game marketing strategy is to understand the target audience of their game. Mobile gamers are a large and diverse audience, and developers cannot simply target them. They must be more specific. The target audience will vary depending on the game type, game features, and which markets the game is available in. You can help this along with a social media listening platform from Oktopost. After understanding the target audience, developers would need to identify the type of gamers that they would like to target and target them with the appropriate messaging.

Promotional videos

Another method that developers use to promote their game is to create promotional videos. These videos give potential users an opportunity to see the game in action. It is always enjoyable to watch the game in action, and it also creates an emotional response in potential players which will encourage them to download.

Social media advertising

Developers also use social media advertising campaigns as one of the most effective and lucrative ways to draw in users. These campaigns enable developers to accurately segment their target audience and assess post-download activities, including in-game purchases. Moreover, social media advertising has many advantages, such as

  •  helping developers grow their target audience at a faster rate than their organic growth.
  •  setting parameters.
  •  helping them to decide who they want to target and how they want to reach them.

Developers often employ cross-promotion as one of their most effective and cost-effective methods of increasing installs. This technique involves promoting a new game in an existing application or game if the developer has one, or by inquiring if other developers are interested in doing the same.

There are various methods of cross-promotion, such as:

  • social media: create posts, videos, or ads that promote the game to their followers.
  • in-game ads: place ads for their other games within their current game. These can be things like banner ads, and pop-ups that appear when a player hits a certain level, or when a certain task is completed.        
  • cross-promotion networks: this allows developers to advertise their games to gamers who are playing other games, and the networks also enable developers to share ads with each other, so that their games are advertised in their game, and vice versa.