You can be the world’s most ingenious entrepreneur, with an amazing and addicting app, but let’s just admit that the chances of your game being the next Flappy Bird are not likely. Unlike Flappy Bird creator and destroyer, Dong Nguyen, you need to promote your game a lot to get the virality of a No.1 app.
As you probably already know, Facebook is a great marketing channel to help game and app developers reach their target audience. You may have already seen the power of Facebook marketing with your initial player recruitment campaign. But it’s time to get some fresh players addicted to your game by leveraging the data you already have.
Share your app in the social media playground
Gaming is all about competition and community. If you didn’t already position social plug-ins into your game, it’s time to update your app and smear social all over it. You want your players to be able to share their in-game achievements, gloat to their friends about their advancements and ask their friends for help when they’re stuck.
As an app developer, you need your game to show up on people’s Facebook news feeds. All the Farmville and Candy Crush nostalgia of the past may be giving you bad vibes about Facebook spamming. But those were viral apps, right? So don’t worry about it. Gamers love to hate, and live to share. Make your app sharable and encourage your users to spread the love.
In order to create a viral sensation, your game needs to be easily sharable. To do this, you need a Facebook presence. Does your game already have a Facebook fan page? If not, create one. If yes, it’s time to encourage your players to like your page and build a community. By providing your fans with great content, you are more likely to organically generate shares.
Create a custom audience and turn it into a look alike audience
Facebook offers a great way to leverage your data about your users. You can upload data that you have collected from your app to Facebook so that it can identify who your users are and build a custom audience for your ads to target. With a custom audience you will have the highest quality acquisition and retention campaign technologically available. In my experience, ad campaigns that use custom audiences for targeting had on average a conversion rate 2.7 times higher than standard interest targeting.
You can use your custom audience to advertise to the players you already have or to make sure that you are only spending your advertising dollars on new player acquisition. Once you have your custom audience, Facebook is able to do something that no advertising platform has ever done before: they create a lookalike audience. This is an audience that shares the same demographic characteristics and interests as your current audience, making it the perfect target for your ads.
Your user is no longer the needle in the haystack. You now know exactly who you’re looking for and Facebook knows exactly how to find them. With a lookalike audience, you are able to target potential new users with similar interests and behaviors of the audience you already know is enjoying your game. Targeting a lookalike audience is more beneficial than targeting your audience’s friends because you are focusing your ad efforts on potential users instead of people with completely different interests.
As the CEO of a former gaming agency, I know that Facebook is an amazing marketing channel to help game developers market to their target audience. By utilizing what Facebook does best to leverage your audience and find new users, you are able to get the most out of your advertising investment. And who knows, your app might just go viral!