It takes hard work, creativity, and passion to develop games. However, the success of a game is only measured by the number of players it gets. This entails the need for a strategic marketing plan for your game/games. While big gaming brands have a massive budget and backup to promote their games, a recent or upcoming game company needs a systematic approach to promote the game within a limited budget. This is why, after reading this article on game marketing ideas, you will develop the necessary vision to successfully promote your game to the masses. Let’s move to the main ideas now:
1) Showcase the Detailed Aspects with a Website
Any game developed by you must have its own official website where potential players can learn more about the game. This will also help you get more trust and downloads because many people prefer to download the games from the official site rather than from a third-party site. It is also necessary that your site must have an excellent design to make the site visitor interested in your product (game). The site must list all the striking features of the company and the game as it will help increase the trust factor. Finally, the site must provide a way to get in touch with you for complaints, suggestions, doubts, etc.
2) Be Present on Google When People Search for Games
In most instances, whenever a person will need to search for a new game, he/she will most likely turn to Google to search for it. This explains why a favorable ranking position for your game website is required in Google. This target of achieving good ranking is possible by taking care of all the crucial factors that Google considers while determining the rank of websites in its search engine. Since detailing all the factors is not the scope of this article, you just need to understand that you must use the best SEO (search engine optimization) principles to achieve it for which any good and experienced SEO agency can help you out.
3) Use Press Release Marketing Strategy
The vast array of direct and indirect benefits provided by a press release marketing strategy makes it a good marketing choice for businesses and services. An optimized press release has the power to directly rank on its own for low-competition search queries which can generate many game players passively. Also, a quality press release syndication can land your game content on some of the well-known sites of the world which gives you the advantage of brand building for your game company. An indirect yet powerful advantage of your game press release is the formation of many powerful backlinks to your website that influences how well your site ranks in Google.
4) Get Game Ad Campaigns on Google
Since the organic ranking on Google for most businesses and services is dominated by big and established businesses, it can therefore take time for your game website to displace any existing site (on the first page) and get your website placed there. In such a case, you can quickly capture active potential gamers from Google search using paid advertising by Google Ads. It will allow your game ad to be displayed for your selected keywords which in turn will get clicks and visits to your website. There are many more factors that govern how well your ad is going to perform in Google. You can therefore gain more knowledge on the technicalities of Google Ads for better operation and results or can contract out the advertising task to any agency which is well versed in handling ads.
5) Start Getting Players through Social Media
One of the long-term assets for generating more and more players to your game can be social media. Though the mode of promotion will change slightly depending on the social media platform, it is a method to develop more loyal and close bonding with your players due to the informal interaction on these platforms. The most basic method for marketing on these platforms is to start producing and sharing good content (mainly visual and video) along with interacting with other groups and profiles. Hashtags, quizzes, contests, cross-promotion, etc are some other methods for game promotion on social media sites.
6) Make All Round Use of Videos for Promotion
It is normal for people to come across videos while they perform searches for certain keywords in Google. Such video rankings can happen for your game company too if you carefully select keywords and start posting videos around these keywords with basic optimization methods like a good title, description, and tags. By doing it consistently for some time, you will start seeing traffic coming from a new source i.e. videos. You can also combine this method with other marketing methods for getting better results. For example, you can start sharing these videos on your social media profiles to get more engagement. You can also promote these videos for cheap using Youtube advertising.
7) Find New Collaboration Partners with LinkedIn
Many new and emerging game companies face the same challenge of promoting their games. If you can collaborate with them for cross-promotion, all the involved sides will benefit. For this, LinkedIn gives the necessary framework to send a connect request to decision-makers of big companies (other gaming companies in this case). With LinkedIn, it becomes extremely easy to get connected with professionals from small and big companies alike which makes it the best network for high-end collaborations.
8) Push Your Games Faster Through Game Influencers
Many game influencers on social media get massive engagement on posts made by them. If you begin working with them to promote your game, you will see a fast growth in the number of players of your game along with a quick rise in the following of your own social media profiles. To make this process even more effective, you can announce influencer-specific points and upgrades to your game.
9) Get Publicity Through Gaming Blogs and Forums
Find gaming blogs and forums with good monthly traffic to advertise your game on them. You can get posts published on these blogs and forums, can book and run ads on them, can utilize their newsletter or email subscriber list (if any) to promote your game.
10) Start Cross Promotions to Grow Your Game
Games are of different genres. You can tie up with game owners of other non-competing genres to cross-promote each other so that all the interested parties would benefit from this method. The most potential partners for the cross-promotion of games are those game businesses that are fairly new to the market and are looking to grow their gaming audience.
11) Marketing Through Print Media and Magazines
Most people don’t pay attention to the ads placed in newspapers and magazines. However, if you indirectly promote your game by writing articles in these newspapers and magazines, you will get more publicity as well as branding for your game brand. The only bottleneck is getting the initial consent to contribute articles to these publications after which this entire marketing method becomes very easy.
12) Do Big Scale School and College Competitions
Since teenagers and youth are the prime demography for the game market, you can organize large-scale game competitions in schools and colleges to make your game popular. You can also get these students to share your game advertising message on their social media profiles to qualify for chances of winning rewards. This social sharing method will create an added marketing impact.
13) Let All Aspects of Your Game Promote You
Good marketing must also be complemented by a good product i.e. the game itself. Have good game graphics, sound, design, characters/elements, to make sure that your game doesn’t look unprofessional. You must collect feedback on these aspects in order to improve your game quality because, with so many games out there, people will make no delay in shifting to a new game if the design is an issue.
14) Make Gamers Promote You for Upgrades
Give the option to your game users to get upgrades (in the game) when they refer a certain number of their friends to download your game. This will have a better impact on marketing your game because people will be more likely to use your game when they are referred by their known ones.
15) Use Pay Per Install Services
There are advertising networks that offer pay per install (PPI) model of advertising apps. You can join the popular ones to get your game app downloaded and installed by people. Depending upon the price you are paying per install and the quality of the PPI network chosen by you, your results will vary.
16) Drive More Downloads with Mobile Advertising Networks
The advertising served to you while browsing apps on your mobile device is done through mobile advertising networks. The bigger mobile advertising networks give you many parameters to run the ad campaign like country, device type, etc. By running your game ads on other game apps through mobile advertising, you can effectively promote your game to a targeted gaming population.
17) Take Discord Marketing into Account
The social platform Discord has amassed a big user base and has many big gaming channels in it. The owners of these big channels on Discord can effectively promote your game if you work out a promotion deal with them.
18) Host Gaming Tournaments, Get Publicity
You can host gaming tournaments (both virtual and offline) to attract the gaming population along with gaining publicity for your game brand. To announce these gaming tournaments, you can make announcement in newspapers, social media, website, through influencers, etc.
19) Compare Games and Get More Gamers
Many people are on the constant look for alternatives to different games for one or the other reason. If you create text/video content on alternatives to popular games along with promoting your own game, then you can easily attract new gamers. To do this effectively, make a list of all popular games and start creating content on them.
20) Give Space to User Generated Content
If you start creating content for generating more downloads of your game, the process will be slow because few people will be involved in creating content. However, if you start accepting user-generated content on your website through a forum linked to your game, you will get bulk content contributed monthly by gamers which will attract more traffic from search engines and will cause more game downloads.
21) Make Add-ons Bring More Revenue
To increase the revenue you are earning from your game presently, you can provide add-ons like custom branded merchandise, different paid upgrades, direct sponsorship through ads, in-game ads, etc.
22) Get Publicity with Twitch Streaming
Twitch is popular among gamers and by providing game streaming on Twitch, you can win over many customers for your game. You can find many case studies of success on the Twitch platform online.
23) Use Playstore Ranking Optimization
An important aspect of promoting your game app on various app stores starts with good optimization. Good optimization will ensure that your game app will be seen more frequently for various search terms related to games. As optimization on Appstore is a big subject in itself, we won’t be discussing the nitty gritty here. You can learn app optimization online and can use it to rank better for more keywords.
24) Utilize Free Guides and Cheat Codes of Games to Grow Downloads
Start publishing free guides and cheat codes for popular games and succeeded with distributing these guides online through various mediums. These guides will be containing the link to your own game site/app and will hence promote your game too.
25) Use a Collective Approach of People for Marketing
Devise a social media contest through any of the available contest apps so that people can start promoting your game on social media channels in hope of winning rewards. As these apps will require sharing your game advertising content to pre-set number of friends to qualify, the entire process of such contests can make your game marketing reach thousands to millions of social media profiles.
26) Bring Up Reviews, Bring Up Players
The decision as to whether to download or buy a game is also influenced by the kind of reviews the game has from its previous users. Fewer ratings and negative reviews will dramatically slow down the growth of your game while favorable reviews and ratings will propel it. This is why you must request the players to rate and review your game online. You can also offer some free upgrades to the game in exchange for honest feedback.
With these up-to-date and working game marketing ideas, you are ready to taste success in growing your game. Let us know, in the comments below, if you have any doubts, questions, etc. If you really liked our effort in writing this article, share this article link on your social media.
