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.

Read this blog to know what all important aspects you must cover to create a video game trailer that fills your target audience with awe.

How to Create a Captivating Video Game Trailer

Keep it Short

The ideal length of a game trailer shouldn’t be more than two to three minutes. Keeping your video game trailer short allows you to exclude unnecessary content and make the trailer look simple and to the point.

Besides, a short trailer doesn’t overwhelm viewers with too much information, making it interesting and exciting by teasing them with what they’ve seen is only a glimpse of what’s to come. Leaving a room for imagination and mystery is a real good way to coax viewers to look for more and check out your game.

For example, watch the trailer of Clash of Clans: Hog Rider 360°

Create a Storyboard Beforehand

You should plan and create a storyboard beforehand in order to have a basic structure of the trailer. Creating a storyboard before your start recording helps answer important questions, like which scenes of gameplay would look interesting and gripping to viewers? What story the video game trailer is going to tell viewers? What’s the strength of the title?

Your video game trailer should be like a short story with a beginning, middle and end. Spending time on storyboarding beforehand is like creating a first prototype before jumping on to production, making you more efficient and giving clarity over what exactly the final product should look like.

Watch the trailer of Beyond Good & Evil 2 for good reference.

Also read why game developers in India are preferred for game development outsourcing.

Create an Intro that Grabs Attention

The first few seconds of your video game trailer decide its fate. So, the intro of your trailer must be short and attention grabbing, which can impel viewers to watch the rest of the entire video. If the intro of your game trailer is drab or vapid, viewers will not care to watch any further, resulting into loss of players, and therefore loss of revenue.

For the intro part, consider introducing a title and story line that sets your game apart. If players already know about your game, you can directly jump to the gameplay to unravel new aspects of the gameplay. A short animated sequence consisting of remixed cutscenes could also be the key to tell an interesting story.

One good example is the trailer of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle.

Record High Quality Gameplay Footage

Your video game trailer must tell viewers what your game is all about and how it feels. So, the duration between the intro and call to action should be gameplay related. You should not also shy away from showing in-game footage as it helps people see what exactly they are looking for in your video game trailer. Use a good quality screen recorder to record the gameplay.

You can also pick different sections of the game and present a story that viewers find sensible. The narrative of your video game should leave viewers wondering or anticipating what will happen next.

Among other things that you can do to make your gameplay part in the trailer look attractive and appealing is to add zooms, lens-effects, freeze-frame and slow-motions. Doing so, you can give viewers the feel of cinematographic effects similar to what they watch in movie trailers. But, you should not over edit as the quality and tone of your trailer must match your game.

Watch the trailer of Star Wars Battlefront 2 below.

Use Sound Effects or Music to Set the Mood

Since your video game trailer has visuals, adding an engaging soundtrack and sound effects could prove to be the icing on the cake. Music helps build pace and excitement in viewers and drives emotion. The background music in your video game trailer should match your game and help you structure the story as desired. So, you can go for running soundtrack or synched soundtrack based on what type your game is.

For example, watch the trailer of Shadow Fight 3.

Include a Call to Action Button

Always end your game trailer video with a call to action as it helps viewers see where they can play, download, purchase or learn more about your video game. Call to action is the next step to turn your viewers into players, therefore must be added at the end of your video game trailer.

Grab a look at the trailer of Assassin's Creed Origins below.

Use Animated Text and Not More than 5 or 6 Words Long

The best way to convey what makes your game great and stand out is to use short expressions, not more than 5 or 6 words long. For example, phrases like “Forge your own path” and “Unleash the might of charms” in the trailer of Hollow Knight have been effectively used to fuel interest in viewers to play the game.

You can make the visual style of the text impactful by using animation. However, the text must match your game. You can use Photoshop or Affinity Designer to style the text.

For example, watch the trailer of Hollow Knight below:

Add Reviews

It’s always a good idea to create a hype around your game and build trust in players by adding positive reviews in your video game trailer, if you have them. So, trying getting good reviews from reputable outlets early on. And if your able to get positive reviews from reliable reviewers like IGN or Gamespot, they are worth sharing. When your game trailer quotes renowned reviewers giving 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 to your video game, the likelihood of viewers to download or buy you game increases by many folds.

Have a look at the trailer of Resonance below for a good reference.

Don’t Rush Your Video Game Trailer

It’s not a good idea to edit as you go and keep switching between editing and recording. Editing is a great art work and takes time. So if you have a release in July, start your trailer three to four weeks prior. First collect all the resources, like music, footage, pictures, and then edit. Record more than what you think would be suffice as it gives your the freedom to select the best shots later for your game trailer. If you have not done video editing before, you can go for a game production and art creation studio to get it done from experts.

Watch the trailer of Super Mario Odyssey.

Sharing of video game trailers on social media networks and via other mediums plays a crucial role in reaching out to your target audience and have them heard about your amazing creation. But, in order to have your game trailer pay off, it must engage and excite viewers. Using the tips discussed above to create a impactful game trailer, you can bring success to your video game.

If you have any query related to video game trailer creation or looking for a game development company for hire, please write to us at enquiry@logicsimplified.com, and we will get back to you shorty to answer all your queries that will help you take your game or game idea forward.

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Our Game Designers with their deep understanding of game mechanics, cognitive psychology, player behaviors and vast experience in the gaming industry

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Choose Best Game Marketing Strategies

The next thing to consider is the adoption of the best game marketing strategies, which is responsible to re-direct huge amount of genuine traffic towards our application which in turn reflects the real success of the app. Now, the first step to promote an application involves the selection of top most marketing tasks and as per the current digital marketing standard following are the best fit list of tasks that need to be implemented for an application success:

1. Marketing of game in social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
2. Online news distribution for application release.
3. Promoting game application on niche gaming websites.
4. Video marketing of game application on video sharing sites.
5. Presenting gaming app in popular PPT sharing sites.
6. Forum discussion about game or any application on related forums.
7. Blogging about the application on blogging sites.
8. Using advertising platform for games.
9. Starting e-mail campaign for game or application.
10. Gaming app integration with social media.

Detailed Analysis of Marketing Tricks

Now lets discuss each and every step of marketing strategy in details. As we come to know there are 10 best marketing techniques available as per the current guidelines defined by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. So, every online marketer needs. to know the quality technique for using these marketing tasks which will surely give remarkable ROI of marketing efforts applied. Now, let's see step by step procedure- How to implement these tasks for the marketing of your mobile gaming application?

Marketing of game in social media:

As social networking is highly popular among all the people across the globe, so gaining initial base of targeted audience become very easy towards your application. Promoting your game app on social media involves integration of game with social sites like Fb & promoting game through marketing page creation of game or app.

• Marketing Page Promotion Creating a business page of the application or game and promoting it on all important social channels like Fb, Tw, G+, LinkedIn, etc., with regular updates including daily posting, sharing and commenting with tagging of images help increasing the reach of your business page to global users.

Online news distribution for gaming app release:

After a product or game application is launched, it is required to announce its release in front of the targeted audience. It can easily be done through press release distribution which includes complete information about the game such as, the launching date, main theme & special features of that game or product.

Promoting gaming app on niche gaming websites:

Now a days, search engines like Google and Yahoo are becoming too smart, as they show highly relevant results to the users search query. So, it's always considered an excellent approach to promote a game in niche gaming websites where the users are specifically looking for game related content. Through this we get good amount of relevant traffic towards our gaming app.

Also read top trends surrounding mobile game studios of today. 

Video marketing of game application on video sharing sites:

Videos are extremely popular among the users because people are now looking for easy & time saving content on the Internet and mark are easy to understand than written content. The marketing of gaming application on popular video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, MotionPicture, etc., boosts the popularity of game amongst the users. Incorporating AI voice cloning into your video marketing strategy, especially for game trailers, can enhance engagement by providing realistic and captivating voiceovers. When doing video marketing, it's essential to focus on attractiveness, duration length, and the main description of the game.

Presenting gaming app in popular PPT sharing sites:

Presenting gaming app in highly popular PPT/presentation sharing websites boost the number of visitors towards your application. As PPT sharing sites are good source of visitors and a game intro presented in a PPT develop interest in users towards the application. A well defined PPT should should have a complete description of games, attractive images & best features of your gaming application.

Forum discussion about gaming application on related forums:

Participating in open discussion forums which are related to niche gaming industry, allows us to discuss about the features & specialty of the game. In these forums we can also participate in replying to other's post along with starting a poll to our gaming app and about its popularity & quality etc. In this way the users are engaged and more users get attracted towards the application.

Blogging about the application on blogging sites:

There are various guest blogging websites where content related to mobile gaming application can be embedded. Guest blogging on general and technology blog sites is an important factor because content is always considered as the king when we talk about online marketing of any product or service. Before picking a website for guest blogging you must ensure that the website is highly relevant to your gaming application and the other SEO metrics should be high like the domain rating, organic traffic, Google indexed pages, total number of referring domains and at the same time the spam score of those blogging site should be least. Beside sharing the content on quality blogging sites, we can also post our comment & views on other's blog post related to gaming app. Before doing blogging, few things need to be taken care of:

• Share content only on highly related gaming websites.
• The blog content should be unique & contain everything about the game, starting from, about game till its special features.

Using advertising platform for games/apps:

Display advertising of games/apps on various game advertising platforms is also helpful in attaining targeted audience towards the gaming application or a simple application. These advertisements can be displayed on related games, so that a user can be re-directed to the download link for our game easily.

Starting e-mail campaign for game or application:

Starting an e-mail marketing campaign for the game is also an efficient process to drive genuine users towards the application. Through this we can reach out to maximum number of targeted audience who are game/app lover & increase the probability to enhance the number of game or app users. The only thing that need to be considered, the selection of e-mail data base to which we want to reach, as it need to be highly relevant to game or app users.

Gaming app integration with social media:

Its always good to integrate our gaming application with social sites specially like Facebook. In this way users can also play game on social platform and can invite more users towards the game.

Conclusion

Finally, we can say if you follow the above mention top ten game marketing plan strategically then, it's a 100% surety for the success of your mobile gaming application. If you want to get it done from experts, Logic Simplified a reputed game development company in India can help you meet your goals at a faster pace and at a market-competitive cost. For any game related query, contact our game development company or write to us at enquiry@logicsimplified.com