Tips and Tricks #1 Marketing your game
In this first tips and tricks I will share my personal experiences marketing my first game.
★ Start with marketing before even creating a game.
As a graphic designer I automatically start with designing when starting on a new game. My natural first step is to create a concept and name and designing a logo. With Glitch Pong that's exactly what I did. From where I'm sitting now, I can see that this was maybe not the smartest thing to do. The name itself should be thought out carefully, thinking about the competition in terms of keywords. Your name is the most important keyword(s) you have, so choose your name wisely. In my case Glitch Pong was not the best choice to go for as the word Pong is used on a large scale.
The best thing is to start with marketing in the first place, something I really didn't think about seriously until my game was already released. The first question you're wanna ask yourself is, who is going to play my game? The problem is that when you are a starting game developer that question is usually difficult to answer. Unless you are making it for yourself or your friends, you'll just have to make a little guess on who your target audience is going to be. The first indication of a main target group in my case became clear when I witnessed the first returning players using Analytics. The users that were playing most frequently are from China. Later we discovered that our store page on Google Play was copied and translated into Chinese on another website and was attracting players, installing our game. One thing I learned from this is that I need to start translating our Google Play store page to Chinese ;)
★ Getting your game higher up on search results. Or maybe even featured on the homepage.
As you release your game you want it to get as much installs as possible. (duh) But to get there it takes some hard work. From the top you need to make sure your game is of high quality so people that install the game want to keep playing it. To have some guidelines to follow, here is a good way of checking the quality requirements for a good game: Essentials for a Successful App
The presentation of your play store page is what matters most. Make sure your icon is appealing and looks professionally designed. Most users will quickly scroll the page so make sure your icon stands out. Use the best images you have as the first 3 images as these are the only ones most users get to see. Keep your description short and try to add important keywords into the first lines of the text.
Next up is to get as many links to your store page as you can possibly get. Use social media and gamer communities to spread the link. As like I'm doing in this article you can use platforms like SLIDEDB to incease your audience by sharing news updates, personal experiences, and other tutorials.
The best thing you could have is to get featured by Google. Here are some tips and tricks to increase your chances of getting there: How To Get Your App Featured On Google Play
★ Use tools to analyze your users and their behavior.
This sounds quite disturbing if I read it up out loud, but it's more innocent then it sounds. What we did was link our game to Analytics. This way you can see a lot of useful information that you can use for creating updates and marketing campaigns. In general it is the easiest way of checking if your game is being played. For marketing purposes it is a good way of seeing if a particular campaign has fulfilled its goals.
★ Share your Tips and Tricks
If you like to react on what I've figured out so far, or could give me more tips on how to market and promote games, feel free to share your own experiences or questions in the comments section.
