Best Uses for a $150 marketing budget

How would you use $150 for an entertainment app with broad appeal?

buy coffee

seriously... $150 will do nothing to get you any marketing of real worth. Probably even the case for adding an extra zero to that. Spend it on booze instead to forget the misery that is game development (am I being to heavy-handed here?)

In all honesty, the only real use I could suggest is to buy a ton of extra gift codes with it (beyond the 50 promos you are given) and spam them out to several media sources, but even that is very likely not going to guarantee any ROI at this point.

"Real" useful marketing will cost you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per day on the level you'd need to do it to generally have useful impact.

It is pretty bad. I've been there. I've talked to countless other devs who've been through the same routine likewise. Marketing is really the biggest hurdle in indie development at this point (if visibility/making money is your goal) and simply blindly throwing money in the general direction of marketing requires a huge amount of it (unless you have some wonderful connections). My advice is to seek out other methods that don't require a lot of money, as far as being more creative and hope that helps your project stand out (concoct some interesting/crazy story, a youtube video that could go viral, etc) Of course none of these are guaranteed to work either, but such approaches can be done fairly cheaply and won't necessarily waste a lot of time/money compared to the alternative. Hey, it worked for Fruit Ninja...

150$ hmm... lets say your app costs a dollar.. make a raffle... once you hit a million paid customers one of the lucky ones gets the 150$ ??? sounds good?

not? comeone.. hmm.. how about 3 winners 50$ each? or maybe send the money into headcase's ios&mac hardware fund.. he'll probably promote your app on his blog.. maybee..

hmm.. damn.. how about you print couple thousand flyers with it and litter the streets of your local town with it?

go to one of thoose crowdsourcing website where people do crazy stuff for you for a few dollars

or add 50$ buy an nexus7 and start porting over to android to reach a bigger market?



honestly.. 150$ is not a budget and most likely there will be no ROI

prolly keep the money for the developer program renewal ?

tricky tricky..

$150 = 75 lottery tickets

or on a more realistic note:

Why not buy $150 worth of gift cards for itunes and then offer them up as prizes for higher score on GC etc

I would recommend using £11 of it to submit your app to The FWA Mobile of the Day Awards here. Originally a website awards website it now has a mobile awards section. We submitted our game and we won. They will showcase your game for 24 hours and get it in front of a bunch more people. And plus, winning the award will help boost your prestige when you go to apply for grants to develop games, etc. in the future.

aww, someone still reads my blog! blush

I too am on a shoestring budget. I'd go PRMAC just to get out there, then a few iTunes Gift Card contests (I just posted one just a few minutes ago in this forum), then FWA (just found out about FWA, will be submitting soon).

@Mr. Ugly, I want to know your ideas on how you can get people to learn about the GC high score contest for $150.

I ran a high score contest, it was pretty much a huge and costly failure which will make a hilarious footnote someday. Long story short, you should only give out very cheap prizes if anything :P