Mobile Marketing: Minimize Risks by Avoiding Three Common Misconceptions

Mobile marketing for apps and games is a rapidly growing industry that operates with considerable amounts of money. Not knowing the ropes, it is dangerously easy to lose all of your money at once: hundreds and thousands of dollars can go down the drain literally in a few seconds. However, lack of marketing activities will result in loss of precious time: too many expensive man-months invested in the app that no one wanted to download. To prevent situations like these, let's start from three most common and dangerous misconceptions of mobile developers.

1. "We don't need marketing"

"Indies" tend to think that developers of great apps and games gain wealth and respect without any marketing, PR or active sales. If we dig deeper, in most cases we find out that developers promote products on their own behalf, in their spare time, which means working 10 to 12 hours every day and sacrificing time that could be spent on development, creativity or simply taking a rest. Many of us have heard of Ridiculous Fishing, an outstanding and very popular game. This is a classic case of indie success, but, for some reason, talking about it, many indie developers forget that a half of the Vlambeer two-men team, namely their frequent conference speaker Rami Ismael, is responsible exclusively for business and marketing, and he does it over 12, and sometimes even 18 hours a day.

2. "We don't care what audience thinks" 

Most probably you'll recall another popular game, Monument Valley, and the fact that they haven't spent a dime on advertising. Let's listen to their lead designer, Ken Wong. In his own words, the ultimate question that the developers of Monument Valley asked themselves was:  "How are we going to stand out in the marketplace? What are our unique selling points?" (Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/215141/Designing_the_surprise_mobile_game_hit_Monument_Valley.php ) These experienced and talented people reached success not by letting their creative juices flow, but because they had been studying needs, habits and wishes of their future games for several years. And this is also a part of their marketing efforts.

3. "We don't care what competitors do"

Today App Store is an oversaturated, highly competitive market, with marketing budgets that might exceed an annual budget on education of a small Eastern European country. For example, King, a well-known publisher of internationally successful Candy Crush Saga and other games, have already spend 455 million US dollars on marketing. Total marketing expenses of Supercell, whose Clash Of Clans has been topping the list of the most money-making games for a while, exceeded 400 million US dollars. (Source: http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/27/why-king-and-supercell-spent-nearly-500m-marketing-their-games-and-how-you-can-spend-way-less/ ). You should keep that in mind if you want to design a game about putting three candies in a row or another castle defense game. Or, maybe, you got a better idea?

Does it necessarily mean that a successful mobile game needs big investments in advertising? As you may see from the examples above, marketing without budget is possible if you have time, competence and experience which are worth more than money. Lesser budgets lead to more sophisticated and creative marketing strategies. What you can always do is avoid wild guesses, plan every move and every dollar, test your hypotheses and discard them as quickly as possible if facts don't prove them.