Yesterday I attended a panel discussion about marketing mobile apps, which included some interesting data from Flurry and Mobclix. ONe thing all the panelists agreed upon is that there is no one strategy that works for all apps; companies are trying different things, and no one has a magic formula that always works. SOmething that was clear to them, though was that the first month was a very good indicator (usually) of how an app would perform over time. If you didn't become a hit then, your chance of becoming a hit was much less later on. Not impossible, just much less likely. So your marketing should be planned for maximum effect in that time frame, or else it may not have as much impact.
Also interesting were the numbers on Android. The iPhone is still the big dog, but Android seems to be growing well also... both are eating share from Windows and Blackberry. Nokia who? Microsoft is anticipating sales of 11 million units of Windows 7 Mobile by the end of 2011... there must be something in the water in Redmond. Android's problem is the multiple versions, which make it difficult to support with one app. One thing I found most interesting is that most developers seem to be developing for one platform only; there's only a 5% overlap between iPhone and Android apps. Really? Seems like a missed play to me.
Finally, since 87% of app downloads are of free apps, that seems like a powerful marketing tool. You are left with the difficulty of monetizing your app, which needs to be considered from the beginning of the design process to really be effective. Advertising may work well, but for games the freemium model seems to be really popular.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Creating Story Lines for Marketing
The handy tools of social marketing make it inexpensive to put a message out there, but problems remain. First, social marketing needs messages that are interesting; the message won't be passed along unless it has some interest to readers, and the more interesting it is the greater the reach will be. Second, you have to maintain the message over time; one single tweet will soon be forgotten, even if it reaches a large audience. The implication is that you have to develop a story line for your product in order to create visibility through social marketing.
In this context, your "story line" is merely the series of messages that you want to transmit and how they connect to your product. The story line may be inherent in the product, or it may be about things external to the product, such as the company, the creators, the creation process, or the impact of the product on some users.
Examples: Let's say you have a simple arcade game about a squirrel gathering nuts and evading various hazards. Rather plain, nothing terribly interesting here, right? Here's where the creativity comes into play. Perhaps you can create a more interesting back story for the squirrel... something humorous, perhaps linked to current events... maybe he's on his way to American Idol tryouts, or he's auditioning for a job with the CIA in order to infiltrate Iran . Then you can create a series of posts about this, and point back to the game. (Ideally the game itself would have some connection, visual or otherwise, with this narrative you're crafting.) For external narratives, perhaps you might talk about endangered squirrel populations and how you will use this game to raise awareness, or perhaps donate some of the proceeds of the game to a wildlife preservation group. Maybe you connect the game to different fictional squirrels, or other wildlife used in gaming, or a popular cartoon. A different tack entirely might be your personal story about how you came to create the game, or your company's narrative about how it arose in a kitchen to be the #1 squirrel arcade game creators worldwide.
You may even decide to use multiple narratives over time, in order to keep awareness up and help spread the message in different directions. As you can see, developing such marketing narratives is a creative endeavor in itself. (The astute reader will also see that developing the marketing narratives in connection with developing the game itself can lead to better interaction between the game and the marketing, with better results for both.) Once you've developed a narrative, you then have to determine how to break it down into useful chunks for social media, connect the different social media together, graft in some sales incentives into the narrative, plan how this will proceed over time, and then alter your plans in response to the feedback you get...Is it a lot of work? Yes. What's the alternative? Waiting around for your game to be "discovered" among hundreds of thousands of other things... not a great alternative, is it?
In this context, your "story line" is merely the series of messages that you want to transmit and how they connect to your product. The story line may be inherent in the product, or it may be about things external to the product, such as the company, the creators, the creation process, or the impact of the product on some users.
Examples: Let's say you have a simple arcade game about a squirrel gathering nuts and evading various hazards. Rather plain, nothing terribly interesting here, right? Here's where the creativity comes into play. Perhaps you can create a more interesting back story for the squirrel... something humorous, perhaps linked to current events... maybe he's on his way to American Idol tryouts, or he's auditioning for a job with the CIA in order to infiltrate Iran . Then you can create a series of posts about this, and point back to the game. (Ideally the game itself would have some connection, visual or otherwise, with this narrative you're crafting.) For external narratives, perhaps you might talk about endangered squirrel populations and how you will use this game to raise awareness, or perhaps donate some of the proceeds of the game to a wildlife preservation group. Maybe you connect the game to different fictional squirrels, or other wildlife used in gaming, or a popular cartoon. A different tack entirely might be your personal story about how you came to create the game, or your company's narrative about how it arose in a kitchen to be the #1 squirrel arcade game creators worldwide.
You may even decide to use multiple narratives over time, in order to keep awareness up and help spread the message in different directions. As you can see, developing such marketing narratives is a creative endeavor in itself. (The astute reader will also see that developing the marketing narratives in connection with developing the game itself can lead to better interaction between the game and the marketing, with better results for both.) Once you've developed a narrative, you then have to determine how to break it down into useful chunks for social media, connect the different social media together, graft in some sales incentives into the narrative, plan how this will proceed over time, and then alter your plans in response to the feedback you get...Is it a lot of work? Yes. What's the alternative? Waiting around for your game to be "discovered" among hundreds of thousands of other things... not a great alternative, is it?
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Digital Publishing Makes Progress
Now Barnes and Noble is offering digital self-publishing, joining Amazon. It's one more sign of the sea change in publishing, and the opening of new options for authors. I expect midlist authors to be taking up these opportunities, like J.A. Konrath is doing with Amazon (check out his blog here). The biggest barrier now is marketing, because the authors will have to figure out their own marketing plans and execute them.
It's true that authors who already have a fan base may not do much more than announce their new book and they'll sell enough to make it worthwhile. Most authors, though, would certainly be able to increase sales by expanding their user base through marketing efforts. Unfortunately, most authors aren't familiar with marketing and may not want to have much to do with it, even though they appreciate the results. I predict more services being offered (by publishers and others) to help authors with a variety of tasks. Essentially, the classic publisher role will be split into its component parts and offered by third-parties. Some companies may offer multiple services.
Let's say you're an author who has a completed novel, and you want to make some money from it. Previously, your options were to try and get a publishing deal, or to go to a vanity press, print a bunch of copies, and then try to sell them yourself. Now, you'll be able to self-publish through Amazon or B&N or even your own web site. Soon (maybe even now) you'll be able to get a professionally designed cover, and some help with the interior layout. You can already get your book professionally reviewed, and have the reviews posted widely. Arranging bookstore appearances, social marketing, other promotions... all the marketing tools are either available to authors or via third parties who will provide them to authors.
Yes, it's more work for an author... but in return the author gets a much greater percentage of the revenue, and can possibly make far more than on a traditional publishing deal. On the down side, the author loses the number one reason (the publisher) why their books don't sell...
It's true that authors who already have a fan base may not do much more than announce their new book and they'll sell enough to make it worthwhile. Most authors, though, would certainly be able to increase sales by expanding their user base through marketing efforts. Unfortunately, most authors aren't familiar with marketing and may not want to have much to do with it, even though they appreciate the results. I predict more services being offered (by publishers and others) to help authors with a variety of tasks. Essentially, the classic publisher role will be split into its component parts and offered by third-parties. Some companies may offer multiple services.
Let's say you're an author who has a completed novel, and you want to make some money from it. Previously, your options were to try and get a publishing deal, or to go to a vanity press, print a bunch of copies, and then try to sell them yourself. Now, you'll be able to self-publish through Amazon or B&N or even your own web site. Soon (maybe even now) you'll be able to get a professionally designed cover, and some help with the interior layout. You can already get your book professionally reviewed, and have the reviews posted widely. Arranging bookstore appearances, social marketing, other promotions... all the marketing tools are either available to authors or via third parties who will provide them to authors.
Yes, it's more work for an author... but in return the author gets a much greater percentage of the revenue, and can possibly make far more than on a traditional publishing deal. On the down side, the author loses the number one reason (the publisher) why their books don't sell...
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
XBox Live Arcade Analysis, and some PSN
As you can see from the list, the top games can hit over 1 million players... and then there are many games in the low thousands. Still, it's a wide range, and there's plenty of room for moving up in the numbers if you can do some effective marketing. Major Nelson promoted one game as a 33% off sale for one day, and that boosted numbers by about 6,000 over what would have been expected.
The marketplace for downloads continues to evolve, and the marketing tools tend to lag behind. It's really necessary to put some creativity into the marketing efforts, not just the game development.
Monday, May 24, 2010
FanFic as Social Marketing
Fan fiction is something that's been around for decades, but with the advent of the internet it's become much more popular. Essentially, fanfic is written by fans of a particular story; the quintessential example is Star Trek, but the concept goes back before then. And, of course, the Internet made the whole thing much more popular. If you're not familiar with it, this article will get you started... head over to George R.R. Martin's post to get the other side of things. The comments in both are pretty interesting.
I can understand the annoyance of authors who find fans playing around with characters the author created, and often doing things the author would never contemplate (there's a whole subset of Star Trek fiction about Kirk and Spock...). I do think it's better to look at it as a marketing tool. If you're lucky enough to have an audience enthusiastic enough and large enough to write fiction about your creations, you're getting additional value from their spreading of your ideas. Yes, you must make sure users know the difference between fanfic and the real, authorized (so to speak) fiction. Really, though, having an enthusiastic army of fans helping to push your IP is a benefit.
Make a clear statement about how you feel about fans using your IP (this is true of game publishers as well as authors). Perhaps use some of the Creative Commons licenses; you can modify them to suit your needs. Establish the ground rules and what fans can and cannot do, then encourage them. Use their enthusiasm to help drive more people to your sites where they can buy your products (you did put in the ground rules that all fanfic needs to contain a link to your web site, right? Even better, a trackable (unique) link so you can count how many people the fanfic brings in).
Social media marketing is time-consuming and labor intensive... if you can get fans to help you with it, and they enjoy the process, that sounds like a win all around.
I can understand the annoyance of authors who find fans playing around with characters the author created, and often doing things the author would never contemplate (there's a whole subset of Star Trek fiction about Kirk and Spock...). I do think it's better to look at it as a marketing tool. If you're lucky enough to have an audience enthusiastic enough and large enough to write fiction about your creations, you're getting additional value from their spreading of your ideas. Yes, you must make sure users know the difference between fanfic and the real, authorized (so to speak) fiction. Really, though, having an enthusiastic army of fans helping to push your IP is a benefit.
Make a clear statement about how you feel about fans using your IP (this is true of game publishers as well as authors). Perhaps use some of the Creative Commons licenses; you can modify them to suit your needs. Establish the ground rules and what fans can and cannot do, then encourage them. Use their enthusiasm to help drive more people to your sites where they can buy your products (you did put in the ground rules that all fanfic needs to contain a link to your web site, right? Even better, a trackable (unique) link so you can count how many people the fanfic brings in).
Social media marketing is time-consuming and labor intensive... if you can get fans to help you with it, and they enjoy the process, that sounds like a win all around.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Hard Data on App Sales
TechCrunch has an excellent article on sales of iPhone apps. They were able to get actual sales numbers for a variety of apps, with a wide range of prices. The article is a a nice source of hard data in an area that's all too often filled with rumor and speculation. They got info on 124 different titles, and the results were interesting. Once you took off the top 10% of the most successful apps (likely to skew the results), you get average sales of about 44 units per day (totals of 11,625 for the titles studied), and 23% of apps sold less than 1,000 units from launch, with 56% of the apps selling less than 10,000 units, and 90% sold less than 100,000 units. On average developers made 15 times their development costs... but obviously things can go poorly more easily than well.
Some apps had sales measuring in dozens or low hundreds. With 200,000 apps in the App Store, the odds of getting lost are pretty good. So you have to figure out some way out of the wilderness, which means marketing (unless you just get really lucky, or have an app that's so compelling and unusual the world will beat a path to your door).
My feeling is that the app market will continue to grow, both in users and in number of apps. Don't forget the already large app market for Android (50,000 apps), and how they are selling plenty of those devices these days; most iPhone apps should be easy to implement on Android as well. The difficulty lies in marketing, and in gauging your development effort to your expected sales. If you can put together an app in a few days, then there's almost no downside. But if it takes a teams several months to create, and costs $200,000 to build, then you'd certainly want to see significant sales in order to get a return on your investment. Bottom line: before you embark on your development effort, consider the expected sales and how you're going to market your app. Check out the competition. Don't even start unless you have a good expectation your app is sufficiently useful or fun, different or interesting, and you can market it well enough to pay back your development effort. Unless, that is, your app is itself a marketing tool for some other way in which you make money, like your magazine or your bank or some such. Or maybe just a way to get players into your MMO or other game... apps can be marketing tools in and of themselves.
Some apps had sales measuring in dozens or low hundreds. With 200,000 apps in the App Store, the odds of getting lost are pretty good. So you have to figure out some way out of the wilderness, which means marketing (unless you just get really lucky, or have an app that's so compelling and unusual the world will beat a path to your door).
My feeling is that the app market will continue to grow, both in users and in number of apps. Don't forget the already large app market for Android (50,000 apps), and how they are selling plenty of those devices these days; most iPhone apps should be easy to implement on Android as well. The difficulty lies in marketing, and in gauging your development effort to your expected sales. If you can put together an app in a few days, then there's almost no downside. But if it takes a teams several months to create, and costs $200,000 to build, then you'd certainly want to see significant sales in order to get a return on your investment. Bottom line: before you embark on your development effort, consider the expected sales and how you're going to market your app. Check out the competition. Don't even start unless you have a good expectation your app is sufficiently useful or fun, different or interesting, and you can market it well enough to pay back your development effort. Unless, that is, your app is itself a marketing tool for some other way in which you make money, like your magazine or your bank or some such. Or maybe just a way to get players into your MMO or other game... apps can be marketing tools in and of themselves.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Social Marketing Tips
Social Media Marketing is the latest hotness, and so this article on Gamasutra.com is a useful primer on social marketing for games. It's important to note, though, that these tips are geared towards established companies and brands. Still, it gives you some ideas of where to start.
Some key takeaways from the article, with my own spin on them:
Some key takeaways from the article, with my own spin on them:
- Set goals for your marketing efforts. I'd like to think this is obvious, but all too often it gets ignored. Before you embark on any marketing effort, you really need to understand what you want to achieve, and how your going to measure your progress. This is very important if you're going to be spending precious resources like money or time... and you want to make sure you're getting the most out of those expenditures.
- Listen to what customers are saying. If you've already got products out there, what are your customers telling you? If you don't have a product out there yet, what are customers saying about similar products? There are tools to help you figure this out, as the article mentions. Use this info to refine your own product development and marketing efforts. You may find a different reason for people to buy your product that you hadn't thought of, or a different audience to reach.
- Check out the competition. Whether the competition is in the future or is already stealing your market share, you need to figure out what they're doing and how it affects what you should be doing.
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