hi, i am looking through the forums, but cannot find the users. there where some users working for (or had their own) appstore / iphone marketing agency. any clues? rm
I asked this exact question recently, and got some good answers in another thread: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=30426 In the end, we contacted a few marketing firms, but ultimately decided that either they were out of our limited budget or that we could make our money go further. We are starting to get some traction for our latest game, Santa's Run, on our own, but can't draw any conclusions until after the Christmas season is over, I think. Hopefully we made the right choice. =)
hey, thank you. i saw your post, but i am still wondering what happend to the marketing guys who used to post at toucharcade. rm
You can do most things a marketing agency would offer by yourself. You should be looking to do two things: 1) Make a list of every website, magazine, newspaper, podcast, blog… anywhere that mentions/reviews iPhone games, and find out the name and email address of the person you should contact at each site. Prepare professional press releases, that slowly unveil your game piece by piece, and send them out with a space of 1-2 weeks between each press release. As you get toward release day, offer promo codes (or ad-hoc copies) so the editors at the relevant websites can review your game a couple of weeks ahead of your intended release day. Make sure to follow up with the editors every few days and ask about the review, gently reminding them about it, or they WILL forget. 2) Build hype in both forums and your website, by releasing little tid-bits of information gamers can get excited about, and make sure to interact with the gamers yourself. Further from this, you can do additional things if you have a marketing budget… 3) Invest in a viral attraction of some kind… Something interesting that will be newsworthy for a website or magazine to post about, or something you can put onto YouTube. It doesn't need to be necessarily about your game, but you need to tie it into your game somehow. This could also take form as a contest, for fans to make something for prizes - if either the idea, or the prize itself, is unique enough it should get you noticed by blogs and news sites. 4) Advertising. This is what I'd recommend lastly, as it's expensive, and has arbitrary results. I'd mostly suggest a page takeover (where you take the header and sides of the whole website with your graphic), but you need to have very good art, and a very good eye for image marketing - if you don't do the right amount of 'image marketing' into the graphic, your few thousand dollars could be a wasted effort. This goes for banner ads as well. What a PR firm / marketing agency will do is most of the above things, but they'll have a more experience, and already have established contacts in these areas. A company like this would definitely be helpful but don't be afraid to try yourself. There are lots of marketing links, especially related to App store marketing out there… One excellent post I found recently - http://weheartgames.com/2009/09/marketing-resources-for-iphone-devs/ Above all, Good luck!
Hi ALL ... We did most of these... but still not many downloads... You browse in Google for Lucky Me Lite.. You will find the places where all we are listed... We acquired ad space in some of the sites Any diffrerent techniques than we are doing...? Anywhere we are going wrong.. Ant right places to promote.. Looking forward to listen from the experts...
Is the problem that people are playing it but not writing about it, or are they just not playing it at all and don't know how good the game is? If it's the latter, then either the screenshots aren't interesting enough, the marketing literature isn't enthralling enough, or you're not bugging enough reviewers and websites. But if people are playing it but not writing about it, it might just be that they didn't find your game particularly notable. In which case, unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about it, but start work on your next title and consider this first one a learning experience. Not all games can be successful on the app store, there are literally hundreds of new games releasing each week. To be successful you either need it to look incredible, get great support from journalists who loved the gameplay, have a bunch of grassroots supporters, have a lot of attractive marketing, or ironically (with your game) just get lucky. And preferably all of those at once.
I've read a ton about App Store marketing (and I work in interactive marketing IRL) but one thing that isn't so easy to come by is a good, solid, comprehensive list of reputable, honest, respected iDevice App/Game review sites. Clearly TouchArcade is among the cream of the crop as far as those go (no, I'm not kissing someone's @$$, this site just has a nice slice of the traffic for this audience as well as an active, mature community). There are a few others that I find the reviews on pretty good and usually close enough to accurate. But I know for every 5 good sites I know of, there are probably a ton more that I'm just missing. So, how about we all contribute to make a list of the best of the best for iDevice App/Game review sites. I'll get the list started with the ones I think are among the best, please add any others you're aware of, frequent or have heard are good sites. Perhaps the entire indie dev community could benefit from having such a list to refer to when attempting to spread the word about their titles. My List So Far: TouchArcade - www.toucharcade.com FingerGaming - www.fingergaming.com 148 Apps - www.148apps.com Pocket Gamer - www.pocketgamer.co.uk App Gamer - www.appgamer.net iPhone Application List - iphoneapplicationlist.com App Craver - www.appcraver.com AppVee - www.appvee.com i use this - http://iphone.iusethis.com/ Got Apps - http://gotapps.com/ Apptism - http://www.apptism.com/ That's a good list to get this started. What can you add? Q
Yes.. I agree.. But how to get listed in TouchArcade, Fingergaming.. We acquired some ad space in Toucharcade... But how to get a revirew on all those places?? Please guide us...
