How to advertise my game?

The mobile gaming industry is expecting massive growth in the number of users, which is projected at 2,309.4 million by 2026. Such growth in user penetration gives advertisers solid visibility on how to strategize and advertise game apps. Furthermore, with the recent advent of COVID-19, in 2020, the total number of gaming video content (GVC) viewers reached a record 1.2 billion.

Over the recent years, we have witnessed an increased volume of mobile gaming apps break records concerning user downloads and revenue earned. Therefore, mobile game advertisers must galvanize their current advertising approaches and strategize for user acquisition, in-app marketing, and retention goals to stand out from the whole lot. Below are a few ways to advertise your game.

Research where you belong – The community

Have you heard of Indie DB or Product Hunt? If you know these platforms already, it’s high time you leverage these forums correctly to create a community around your mobile game and elevate your branding efforts. People want to know more about your product, its features, and how it should excite them. You can also gain access to relevant people who are early adopters, game testers, gaming influencers, etc.

Advertisers need to know what else is in the market – similar games in the app stores, audience segments, trending topics around your app, social media interactions in this particular category, etc.

Tap into Alternative App Stores

As per the latest data, Google Play Store has 2.59 million apps as of March 2022. In the first quarter of 2021, Apple App Store had 2.22 million mobile apps available. Now is the time to diversify your app distribution to alternative app stores such as Xiaomi’s Mi Store App, Oppo App Market Store, and Huawei App Gallery, among others, which lead the Indian market penetration with a dominance of 76% share of the total market. With alternative app stores, you can:

• Save hours of toil and hard work in building an effective strategy.
• Help yourself build the right channel mix.
• Get a personalized target audience and reach.
• Enable ROI at scale on the ad spends.
• Customize ads with multiple ad formats such as native ads, banner ads, interstitial ads, and paid ads.

If your research analysis from the beginning has been robust, it is evident that you’ll have a clearer vision of how to leverage alternative app stores to optimize your advertising efforts.

Read more about alternative app stores and how they benefit advertisers.

Study what your competitors are doing

Even when you A/B test and are confident with your product’s performance and features, don’t forget to stay on top of your competitors by learning and examining what they are doing to advertise game apps. To start:

• Learn what their visuals look like
• Their tone of communication with the community
• How they’ve designed the text around titles
• Descriptions, keywords, highlights features
• Their review and feedback section
• How users are talking about their experience, etc.

As you keep digging in, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of making your app unique to users and preparing every decision to advertise your game with a result-oriented mindset.

Test and soft launch before going big

Mobile app marketers need to ensure that their performance and quality are up to industry standards. If the game reports bugs or performance issues, getting it tested will help you make improvements to its overall development. Developing an app costs your hard work, time, and money. To ensure everything in your app from the tech perspective is seamless, you may want to:

• Alpha test your game to quality check its development efforts
• Beta test when the game is ready to launch in the app stores
• Measure and change things to enable a smooth user experience before launching
• Provide open beta testing that is open for the public to test

These stages will give you a confident heads-up for your launch strategy. In addition, incorporating the feedback and test analysis results from the initial users helps you increase the app’s exposure to the larger audience and gives you time to plan for further user acquisition goals.

Reach out and pitch to publishers

Reaching out to the masses can be a daunting task. You may consider identifying and partnering with significant publishers who can help you speed up the promotional steps to advertise your game. Elevating your promotional efforts with mobile game publishers will undoubtedly enable better visibility and traffic to your app, but be rest assured that they’ll taste a piece of cake from your app’s revenue earned.

Depending on the category, you can reach out to top game publishers such as EA Mobile and Activision, among others in this list. Even when certain game publishers sometimes deny publishing the app, they always have quick and real-time feedback to help you improve the app’s performance from a marketing standpoint.

Advertise game by cross-promotion

It is one of the easiest ways to promote and advertise your game for free. You’ll be able to identify and reach out to similar audiences while enabling you to fully utilize in-app advertising to display your game to interested users. In addition, partnering with other games similar to yours increases your brand value and trust among users in this portfolio segment. It will help you to:

• Understand the user behavior better
• Leverage users who play games with similar intents
• Cut costs from going too big on advertising your game

When you and the agreed party cross-promote each other’s app, it introduces users to another app similar to the one they are using, which they’re likely to download as it falls in their intent and usage.

Build tie-ups with the press

Search for media publications you can pitch to, such as VentureBeat and Pocket Gamer. Identify and create a list of journalists and gaming media publications and articulate a press release to draw their interest and motivate them to write about your product and its unique features.

If you are a developer who likes to go budget-friendly, creating press kits for digital gaming media portals like photos, videos, banners, etc., will help you visually pivot your app’s offerings to the interested audience and increase your brand value.

Conclusion

Due to increased mobile penetration rates, smartphone games accounted for nearly 50% of video gaming revenue globally. To identify and execute your game advertising efforts in all the right ways, you must build a marketing strategy that caters to the practices mentioned above. From creating press releases to working out the forums for building your app’s community, you need to make a collaborative effort to get the maximum results from advertising your game.

​​Read more about how you can leverage alternative app stores to monetize your mobile game.