Need help with my $25K marketing plan

Hi all! Mark from Uglysoft here. Been lurking on this forum for a week and figured I should start an account and invite everyone to evaluate my plans to blow $25,000 on marketing. To return your favor, I’d be glad to share the aftermath here. Here’s my app:

Sacred Guns - Trailer | iOS | Play Store

My game currently costs $0.99 with IAP. It is a simple 3D shooter that comes with voiced cut-scenes presented in comic style and can be completed within 6 hours without IAP. It’s intentionally made to be a short-and-sweet title that doesn't drag the player on forever. In other words, you can play through the entire game with very little pressure to pay a single cent. However, as you can tell from the humor, the game itself doesn't have a mainstream appeal.

We've so far made 800 downloads and $1,000 in revenue with some marketing with Promoted Videos (which I set an unprofitable bid to get some traffic).

I then came to the realization that there is much more room to maneuver with marketing a free app, so I've decided to set it free forever and try my luck at scoring the top charts on the App Store. Hopefully it’s good enough to stick around the charts for a while! As a side benefit with giving this game exposure, I’m also hoping to build up Uglysoft’s reputation as a developer that comes up with bizarre games.

This forum’s consensus is that it is better to spend your budget within a small window than to drag it out over a longer period of time. Yet, correct me if I’m wrong, certain methods yield much less effective results if done in a short period of time. For instance, a 24-hour burst of incentivized installs burns significantly more money than spreading the campaign to a 5-day window for the same amount of installs.

Advantage of YouTube Promoted Videos: When I design games, I always think of what kind of epic trailer we can come up with. So far, we were able to maintain a profitable campaign that drives reasonable traffic at a cost-per-view bid - a good amount of targeted viewers do click on our ads, view the trailer and purchase the game. Moreover, this campaign drives sales to both iOS and Android platforms. At a bid of $0.04 CPV it’s $6 per purchase. When I set it to free, I expect 20 times more viewers to download the app, which lowers the cost to $0.3 per install. If I crank up my bid a little I should get around 2,000 installations a day at $1,000. It’s all guesswork, though, as I have no idea how bad the diminishing returns is for raising the bid. Lastly, I do have 10,000 subscribers from silly videos I made in the past. Coupled with the fact that the video is at 150k views, it’s already getting a healthy amount of organic traffic. Boosting the trailer’s total views can further increase organic traffic in the long run. TL;DR: The game’s strength is its trailer, and I’m inclined to exploit it.

Below are my plans for the ‘burst campaign’.

FreeAppaDay - $8,500 (featured within "Today's Free App" section of FAAD apps for 48 hours
then under "Featured Free Apps" for 5 additional days)
Gnome Escape - $1,250 (to show up on the 4th position of their Free Hits list for one week, which would put us on the 1st page out of their 3 pages)
FreeAppParty - $500 (3-day campaign)
YouTube - $3,000 (to get around 200K views within a week)
Fiverr Gigs - $200 to bump up our ratings, should we receive harsher ratings upon going free (let me know if Apple deems this as illegal)
TapJoy - $2,000 (2-day campaign to buy 4K users)
App-o-Day - $?,000 (in discussion, and we signed an NDA)
Chartboost - $?,000 (in discussion)

Questions:

Given my situation, what would you do otherwise? Would you for example further squeeze the window to within 24 to 48 hours instead of spanning 48 hours to a week?

Can you confirm that money spent on banner ads are better spent elsewhere?

I don’t need to spend all of my 25K. For a game like this, can you estimate the amount that I should invest to yield the maximum profit?

For CPI services, is it better to go with different networks to reduce risk, or is it more effective to pick one service and concentrate my funds there?

With CPI services and YouTube, it doesn’t seem to be cost-effective to do simply raise the bid and do a one-day burst campaign. With Tapjoy’s CPI service, there’s no guarantee that I can yield 3,000 installations within 48 hours with a bid lower than $2. Should I even bother?

What do ad agencies like Fiksu do that I can’t do with some research and educated guesses? Are they for example, more likely to convince reviewers to give us better reviews?

If you are so kind as to have tried out Sacred Guns, what quick changes would you make to the game before you launch the campaign? For example, would you decrease the difficulty at the first chapter?

Any additional tips to choose between different similar marketing services other than consulting the forums here?

How important and reliable are Alexa rankings? The Global Ranking at Freeappwin.com is 4,176,126 and Gnomeescape.com is 1,244,504, which don’t seem to make sense.

 

That would mean banner-advertising. Am I right?