Social Game Marketing: Discover the Right Path

Social gaming industry is growing at a rapid pace and is expected to become a whopping $25.4b market by 2025. The rise of social games strongly depicts a shift in players’ behaviour as they now increasingly prefer to play games that utilize social features and encourage social interaction with other players over traditional games being played in solitude. Players enjoy immersing themselves in a virtual world where they can communicate and compete with others and keep coming back to maintain a high position on the leaderboard that they can brag on social media. The changing pulse of gamers is now keeping more and more game businesses interested in building social games to tap into their huge monetization potential. Social RPGs, casual games, word games, board games and social casino games are a few good examples of such games that are currently operating in the gaming world. However, developing a social game is just the beginning of a long road ahead and requires the right marketing strategy to create success like Angry Birds and Temple Run did. So, without further ado, I am discussing below the right path to choose for social game marketing.

Social Game Marketing: The Right Way

Set up a YouTube Channel

Game marketing on YouTube is an excellent way to reach out to potential players and engage them. Create a YouTube channel and post a promo video with great graphics and soundtrack to show the most exciting part of your video game. Ask your designers to also create videos that show other pieces of important information that users will find attractive and helpful to quickly get the idea of what your game is all about. Don’t forget to add the video links to the description page on app stores and other social media channels. YouTube’s advertising services also provide an option where your promo video is played before a user gets to watch their requested video. Yes, the user can skip your teaser video if they want to, but you will only pay if the user watched the advertisement right to the end. It’s also a good idea to promote your game and increase your reach by sharing videos on other famous video sharing channels, such as Vimeo, Twitch and DailyMotion.

Create a Blog on Your Website for Game Marketing

Blogging goes a long way in drawing traffic to your website using SEO techniques. Through blogs, you can make people aware about your games and also keep them abreast of new updates and releases. The content of your blogs should be valuable and interesting for readers as your goal is to turn your website into a place users would find worth engaging. There must be some fun quotient involved in your blogs as your marketing team will share them on social media channels where only sharing information is not enough to coax readers into landing on your site or directly installing your game from app stores, but something humorous and creative to touch their heart. Blog sharing around the Internet is an effective social game marketing strategy as it increases your game’s visibility manyfold and attracts new players even after the official launch date.

App Store Optimization

App Store Optimization (ASO) is a marketing technique that is used to rank your game higher on app stores. By using the right ASO strategy, your marketing team can greatly increase the visibility and discoverability of your game in app store’s search results. One way is to use keywords that best describe your game. Put in a decent research and look for powerful keywords that relate to your game and appear often at the top of search results. Use these keywords five to six times in the description page of your game to let app stores easily catch your game and increase its visibility in search results. Other key areas you should consider for ASO are game’s rating and reviews, number of downloads, user experience, eye catchy icon, exciting pictures of your game, etc. ASO is highly recommended to convert visitors who are looking for a game similar to yours into players.

Multiple App Stores

Without a doubt, Android and iOS are the most popular mobile platforms, but you can also go for other platforms to expand the boundaries of your game’s reach. There are multiple stores that give your game access to specific countries and markets not covered by Android and iOS. Some popular ones are as follows:

• Amazon
• Xiaomi
• Baidu
• App Brain
• Mobile 9

Facebook and Instagram Game Marketing

Facebook and Instagram are brilliant marketing platforms, with the former having more than 2.45bn active monthly users and the latter having more than 1bn active monthly users. You simply can’t afford to ignore these two giant marketing platforms for a huge chunk of your target audience existing there. Use them to your advantage by running marketing campaigns and ads to increase your userbase and have people spread the word of mouth about your game. The best thing is you don’t get to target each and every Facebook and Instagram user, but only the potential customers of a specific demographic and look alikes of your existing customers, which greatly increases the chances of conversions and good returns on your investments.

Game Marketing via Podcasts

Many gamers prefer listening to podcasts for exciting news and reviews of games. If you can manage to get an interview on a gaming podcast, you can actually reach out to people who are in love with games and significantly increase the number of game installs. You can always request some of the video game podcasts to help you give your game the voice it needs to find a home on the devices of your target audience.

Get Review Websites do the Talking for your Game

Getting positive reviews of your game on game review sites is a very effective marketing strategy to build trust among new gamers and drive the urge to try out your game. However, game review sites don’t review every game that comes across their way, which is why a great pitch is of utmost importance. Also, your review application must have an engaging game description and a video that gives the adrenaline rush to make it worth reviewing for the popular game review sites. Include a link to your website too so as to make your submission look professional and help reviewers get all the information they need about your game. Since there are so many games out there that gamers find it difficult to choose the right one that is real fun, they tend to seek help from review websites that provide latest game news, reviews, previews, tips, trailers, etc. to make the best choice. And, you should also try to make the best of that for your game.

Game Influencer Marketing

Game influencers have thousands and even millions of game followers who go by their words. So, if you can get one or more game influencers to sing praises for your game, your game will certainly catch the eye of many potential players. Yes, you may need to pay game influencers depending on the number of followers they have, but it’s worth going for as influencer marketing is considered to be a killer marketing strategy of modern times to target millennial audiences and find the right people for your game. Various social media channels harbour game influencers you can reach out to you now know what exactly for.

Facebook Page for Game Marketing

Create a Facebook page to market your game via promotional posts, videos, memes, tips and tricks, etc. Your Facebook page for game marketing can do wonders for you by increasing engagement and number of downloads. It lets you answer questions of users and also ask questions, like what they like about your game or a trick to solve a puzzle, thereby encouraging them to engage more and produce more user-generated content. Make sure that your content is fun and creative so that users feel impelled to open up and give their views in the comments of your posts.

A Landing Page on the Web for your game

Creating a landing page on the web is a highly effective marketing strategy to reach out to potential customers outside app stores and get your social gaming app installed from there. Your landing page will help you achieve your marketing goals such as lead generation, get email Ids for email marketing, collection of demographic information of your target audience, get insight into potential customer engagement, to name a few.

Keep these points in mine while creating a beautiful and informative landing page for your game:

• Thought-provoking headlines
• Relevant keywords
• Exciting images
• Social sharing buttons
• Smartly placed CTAs

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is widely used to increase game visibility, volume of lead generation and number of app installs. The most popular paid advertising platforms include Google Adwords, AdMob, Tapjoy, Instagram Ads, Twitter APP Cards, Facebook ads, and AppLovin. You can use banner ads, text ads and video ads to target your potential customers who after clicking can easily download your gaming app directly from app store. It’s always a good idea to dedicate some amount of your marketing budget for paid ads to help you effectively achieve your marketing goals. 

Build Trust with Forums

Creating forums help build trust among new users and enhance user-retention rate. Forums help a player interact with you and other players to discuss both positives and negatives of your social game. Having learnt about the improvements users are seeking in your game, you can quickly act on them and provide solutions to facilitate the desired user experience, which could otherwise result in app uninstalls. Forums also boost your customer support efforts to help users experience your gaming app in the best way possible. Check out 30 most popular video game forums to enable people to interact with other players so as to discuss their favorite section of your game, share tips to cross a difficulty level and much more.

Still Stuck on Your Social Game Marketing Plan?

Logic Simplified, a reputed game app developer based in Dehradun, India, helps gaming businesses build amazing games and market them too to realize their full monetization potential. We are a passonate team which offers quality game marketing, development and testing services. If you’re particularly struggling with your marketing initiatives or don’t have a team at your disposal to achieve dream numbers for your social game, our marketing experts can work with you and get your marketing machine run like a well oiled machine. Our service package covers all sorts of marketing activities, including PR, SEO, ASO, social media campaigns, ad campaigns, growth hacking and many more. To discuss your marketing goals, write to us at enquiry@logicsimplified.com, we promise to get back to you shortly to let you find out how we can help you with our marketing services.