Mobile gaming has taken the world by storm. With the rise of smartphones, mobile gaming has become one of the most popular forms of entertainment in recent years, with millions of users around the world spending hours every day playing their favorite games. As a result, mobile game app marketing has become increasingly important for developers looking to grow their user base. Marketing a mobile game app can be a daunting task, but with the right strategies and tactics, it can be a highly rewarding one. In this article, we'll explore 3 best practices in mobile game app marketing to help you grow your mobile game and stand out from the competition.
3 Best Practices to Grow Your Mobile Game
- Scale your game with paid user acquisition
- Leverage the power of video ads
- Choose the most effective app marketing channels
Scale Your Mobile Game with Paid User Acquisition
Paid user acquisition is the fastest way to grow your mobile game app. Essentially, this practice involves a series of marketing activities, whose aim is to drive new users to install your mobile game.
Why is having a successful paid user acquisition strategy so crucial?
First of all, one of the key benefits of paid user acquisition is that it can help you reach a large number of users quickly. By running targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you can reach high quality users who are most likely to be interested in your game. This can help you grow your user base rapidly and increase your revenue.
The use of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible to gather data, examine user behavior, and forecast future trends, and ultimately to have a high targeting power. Being able to target high-quality people who are more likely to connect with an ad, download the app, and carry out post-install actions is essential for generating income.
However, it's important to note that paid user acquisition can be expensive. You'll need to carefully monitor your ad spend to ensure that you're getting a good return on investment (ROI). Additionally, you'll need to have effective tracking in place to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
What about Organic User Acquisition?
Making it short, organic user acquisition is the process of acquiring new users through non-paid channels. This UA method focuses on growing a user base and driving organic installs through word-of-mouth, social media, and app store optimization. Using Organic UA alone won’t give you immediate results, however, together with the paid one, it will help you to grow your mobile game more effectively. Therefore, to grow a mobile game it is crucial not to neglect organic user acquisition activities, such as app store optimization.
Leverage the Power of Video Ads to Promote Your Mobile Game
When dealing with strategies to grow a mobile game it is crucial to take into consideration creative formats. There are different ad formats that are possible to choose to run an advertising campaign, however, video ads are becoming more and more popular in mobile game app marketing. According to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, mobile video ads have twice the click-through rate than classic banners and interstitial ads, therefore, using this format for an ad campaign can be a strategic choice to grow your mobile game.
This ad format has been created specifically for social media like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, for this reason it is important to create effective video ads. Video Ads have indeed a better performance in terms of CTR, however, one must take into account that they are more expensive than banners as ad placements to purchase within apps.
What Makes a Video Ad Effective?
The ultimate goal in mobile game advertising is to get noticed by your potential users in such a saturated market. To scale your mobile game is crucial for the Video Ads you are using to grab users attention, to do so you have to create high quality videos that focus on storytelling and visual appeal. This means you need to make the game appealing to them. Think about all the game features and things that make it unique – gameplay mechanics, art, characters, etc.
Your video should be short (around 30 seconds) and should showcase the most exciting and engaging aspects of your game. Lastly, a video ad should also speak to gamers and make them want to play the game.
Another way to make video ads even more performing is by adding an End Card. Let me briefly explain that to you. An end card is a visual ad that is displayed to users at the end of a video, which shows basic information about the promoted app and a CTA (Call-To-Action) urging the reader to click on it.
Choose Effective App Marketing Channels to Grow your Mobile Game
Choosing the right app marketing channels is critical to grow your mobile game. One of the most effective ways to select app marketing channels is programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising is the practice of automatically buying and selling digital spaces using technological platforms. It offers quicker, wiser, and more convenient digital advertising by connecting publishers with advertisers. It also allows programmatic access to numerous formats and channels. This practice involves using demand-side platforms (DSPs) with programmatic traffic and machine learning (ML).
A Demand Side Platform, or DSP, is an operating system that enables advertisers to purchase optimized ad space and allows for fully automated digital advertising purchases. Running a programmatic advertising campaign through DSPs means to negotiate with them the pricing model, which can often either be CPI or CPA. DSPs also enable mobile advertisers to buy high-quality traffic at scale and help them improve their UA strategy.
Channels as Google and Facebook work with variable prices in the purchase of traffic instead. This means that even though you will be able to set budgets and price limits, you won’t have a precise idea about how much you are going to spend if you want to increase your install volumes. Basically, you can’t predict it and scaling up volumes of new users becomes very expensive.
To Sum Up
Mobile game industry is a highly competitive field, therefore, to grow your game and stand out from the crowd is essential to build a solid User Acquisition strategy. In this article, I showed you 3 best practices that can help you grow your mobile: using paid user acquisition to reach optimized results faster, leverage the power of video ads, and lastly, choose the most effective app marketing channels and utilize DSPs to organize programmatic advertising. By following these practices, you can reach your target audience, increase your visibility, and grow your mobile game.
