I need Marketing Ideas...(Paid & Free)

Adam,

after looking over your "competition" you are very much in a position to gain a large amount of growth. I will be brutally honest and tell you that your site basically sucks. And the truth is, every site in your industry sucks. Yours some how is one of the better ones over all. However when you compare your industry to others, you all are W A Y behind... as in W A Y W A Y behind.

Have you ever been to a gamers dev convention? Do you really understand who you are targeting? Do you understand the real motivation that a gamer Dev would have to use your service?

Let me set a scenario and then ask a question. YOU just finished developing a game. 100's of hours of your hard work, who knows how many cans of Mtn Dew Listening to either metal or hip hop.. your mom constantly telling you to turn it down. and you finally did it, you finished your baby. you release it and it gets a few downloads.

So you go seeking someway to get more downloads. "Place Banners" brilliant.. they get to your site and what is the last thing a person wants to put in their game they just spent all that time on... a blinky flashy banner.. go to your page.. what is your video ( before it even plays?) a blinky flashy banner.

So let me answer some of the questions from above for you.. well I cant answer weather you have been to a gaming dev convention... "who are you targeting".. well you are probably targeting males 12 to 18. and what is their motivation? Their motivation is completely SOCIAL. they want to brag about the number of downloads that their game has and nothing more. Some may be looking to monetize, but I bet the vast majority simply want the social proof.

Speaking of Social Proof... you have NONE on your site... Really?

So my over all growth plan for you would be to:
#1 get your web site in order... make it a demographic targeted conversion machine!
#2 get social and start networking that
#3 start working the TON of forums you have on your subject
#4 You SHOULD be at those Dev Conventions.. as in not just there.. but you should have a booth
#5 by doing this all the help you are asking for IE interviews and coverage will happen naturally!

Hope that Helps!

It always comes down to how well you are marketing your website or product. The service or product could be the best thing out there, or even better than your competitors, however, without a great marketing plan you will not see any conversions. 80% of my sales come from inbound marketing. I would suggest you try the same thing. Also, it does not have to be complicated. You can use software to simplify the process.

Some great tools for inbound marketing are:

OSI Affiliate Software - this one helps you create a referral program and you can reward your partners for all the inbound sales they send you

HubSpot - this one helps operate your inbound process. they have powerful tools that work together; some of their tools are for blogging, social media marketing, email, and many more. definitely check them out.

https://www.getdrip.com/ - this one helps you with your marketing automation; you can send emails to your customers for lead nurturing, education, conversion. etc.

Do inbound marketing, use marketing automation tools, and provide great service. You should see better conversions when you have this up and running.

Lastly, another thing that has been working for me lately is creating Facebook ads. I just make sure when I create them that I really target the ad. I have seen an increase of 10% in my conversions since I started using Facebook.

I tried to use Twitter Ads, but it did not work as well as Facebook.

Hi - here's my input.

Strategy:

1. SWOT analysis of your competitors
2. Customer decision journey (Google Mckinsey study to understand this) and a customer journey of your website ( this is front end and back end) - this will allow you to analyse the current journey a customer is on going through your website..
3. Take the above information and turn it into insights - find out where you can capitalise, upsell, share, market etc... For example, look at your website - use analytic to learn about your customer and website

After you understand this (take your time), your market and your product. You can implement what other Warriors have noted in this thread.

1. Website Optimization is a definite. Look at Airbnb for great design. This is quite in at the moment,
2. inbound marketing
2. trade show marketing
3. social media marketing (facebook, twitter, pinterest, g+)
4. Adwords
5. Offline marketing (print etc..)

Finally: 'Also if there is anyone who can get us interviews/coverage in the gaming new or technology blogs. I'd appreciate it.'

This is part of the marketing - you will have to work hard to find influencers in the industry and send press releases to them, or write something unique for them and ask for a link back. You could also hire a PR agency (expensive) but perhaps they could get you into your national papers/magazines.

Try Social medias Like twitter, facebook.

Thanks!
Listedads | Free classifieds in India, Online Classified Advertising

Hey Digital Marketing is best.

Firstly research your target market, select specific keyword and arrange your onsite with final keyword then plan off-page marketing.

You Can use paid marketing like:
1. Google Adwords Campaign
2. Bing PPC
3. Facebook PPC etc

Free ..
1. SEO
2. SMM
3. Content Marketing
4. Email Marketing

For Increase Sells
1. Conversion Rate Optimization

Try digital marketing.

Savidge4, I agree with you that their website is poorly designed for customer targeting, but your lack of knowledge on phone game developers and you ignorance to them is quite astonishing.
Look at King, for example, they are set to be a $7 BILLION company, all thanks to mobile games. I don't think they account for your 'demo' of 12-18 YO boys.
If anything, you are targeting a sophisticated demographic of 16 -28 year old males, of whom have an interest in game development and design, have knowledge of multiple coding languages like JavaScript, C+, Python, etc.

My first bit of advice is find where game programmers hang out, especially 1st or 2nd time developers (find a few game dev how-to blogs/forums, as well as independent magazine and e-zines for advertising). Targeting this fresh crowd would open you up to people wanting to monitize on free games while they are still fresh to the marketing side of game development.
This can create an offshoot where you not only help them get their games promoted, you can work on helping them learn marketing techniques specifically for games through your blogging, giving a nice boost to your digital presence.

Look at hiring a decent sales copywriter, Press Release copywriter and PR person (Pr is expensive, but paying a high price gives you a better chance of getting close to higher publications) and look at submissions to blogs, magazines and any other publications that accept what you do (business publications will do too, just spin your articles to meet their criteria.)

I can't imagine that SMM and SEM is going to be very effective. There wouldn't be a huge portion of these game devs that would be search for banner exchange programs, and targeting a "How to market a game" or "how to get more game exposure/downloads" keyphrase is going to bring in very little conversions for you, causing you to have a low ROI, which is ultimately not worth it.

You really need to go to the source and market in specific areas, not just blanket to anyone looking to monitize a game.

Hey moregamers,
In my opinion Social Media is the way to go for you.
In your niche, FB and Instagram can play a crucial role to build the brand and create a list.
Another thing I would suggest is that you should run adword campaigns and do targeted media buying.
Just my 2 cents!
Ajay

Hi MoreGamers,
I have some unique and different suggestions to make the growth happen.

• Your website should make visitors to do the action you want them to do.
• Host videos with Wistia. When somebody embeds them on their site, you get the link and SEO juice, not YouTube.
• Focus on getting already engaged users to do more actions.
• Try referral programs instead of adwords or facebook ads.
• The most scalable approach is to get initial users to do growth for us.
• Try to market on Quora by answering questions.
• Almost every industry has networking sites that bring the community together. These sites are an amazing way to grow your brand and land new clients.
• Learn the anatomy of high converting landing page.
• Social proof goes a long way. Have testimonials on your website.
• Social proof and testimonials work much better if you include logos, personal pictures or high profile clients.

Thank you.

I think danlarkin1990 gave the best advice in this thread so far.

I would like to add that when running any type of marketing campaigns, target by age group in 5yr increments. Example: 16-21, 21-26, etc....Also try targeting based on game play types if possible. Test, test, test and the scale up once you find a winning campaign.

Good luck!

wow thats a great website, i actually create games haha. Finding developers can be hard. Your best bet is to do paid advertising and or reach out to app developers manually. You can outsource this process tho. Most developers on google play have an email you can send them. You gotta figure out where the developers hang out. Im apart of the construct 2 developer forum and the developers there would love you. http://www.scirra.com So yea either reach out directly on forums where people develop games or place ads on those sites.

Sounds like you need to do some PR.


Try looking at twitter, you can easily find the influencer of your audience on there, follow them, message them public tweets and re-tweet there tweets. You can then message them or email them with a light hearted email, no sales talk and make it personal. Once you have them as a contact you can talk about requesting a mention or a blog post. Offer them a review copy or special account in return.


Its a lot of work, and you may fail a few times before you get a successful contact. Once you do though you can directly get onto the blogs that the target users you are targeting are reading.


Also have a look at famebit.com Its a YouTube marketing website where you an get famous YouTubers to review your services.