I've also done some word games (Stacword) as well. I was thinking about the same things in order to boost the game's profile. I think areas to look at would be - (target audience) People who play crosswords. People who play words with friends. People who like trivia. People who read books usually like words and word games. Would be interested in hearing how you get on.
I think finding where your audience is, is a huge challenge in making a word game. The people that are really into word games and have iPhones don't really have a place where they go looking for new word games, I don't think anyway. Also, the correlation between books and word games is clever. I feel like there is potential to turn that into a good marketing strategy.
yea in coming up with BetterLetter, i was faced with having to research and find next to naught forums dedicated to iPhone users who love word games which brings up an interesting space here that can be used to our advantage. On the other side of things, word gamers are fanatics and look out for the next word game that tantalizes their brain cells so the question remains - where do they hear about the next word game? my research results reveal - 1. game forums 2. writing forums 3. board game forums so far..
Did some marketing yesterday. I've been looking at the book industry, people who like trivia, book clubs and all things to do with writing. I do think their's quite a potential market out their for people who like more intellectual games. with Stacword, which is free over the holiday season (shameless plug here) I've tried to add different elements to it, to make it more than just a word game and hopefully appeal to a wider audience. When you think about all the people who read books on the bus, on vacation and in their spare time - these are the people IMO who like to be surrounded by and interact with the written word.
Our best promotional tool so far has just been to release constant updates for our game, Cricket Words. We shoot for releasing an update within a couple days of the previous update being approved by Apple. Sometimes we've even gotten it done within the same day. These updates lead to major spikes in downloads. We included some of our data in this blog post: http://blog.thinktapwork.com/post/14466606768/developers-rush-to-beat-holiday-shutdown
I mentioned this in the article: http://blog.thinktapwork.com/post/14466606768/developers-rush-to-beat-holiday-shutdown Here were the increases comparing two days before the update hit to the first main day of the update: 1.0.1 - 635% increase 1.1 - 1,568% increase 1.1.1 - 1,390% increase 1.2 was just released last night (http://bit.ly/cricketwords) and while we don't have the exact download numbers yet it seems like it's going to be similar numbers if not even higher.