I have $5000-10000 to put into my marketing budget for my new app, what should I do?

Hi!

I plan to spend all my money on Crosspromotion networks like Chartboost, TapforTap and Vungle. Because my game has in-app purchases this seems like the best step - gaining users through crosspromotion and monetizing them with in-app pruchases. Right now the plan is to target one or two Europian countries with the intent to get into at least top 50-100, I might choose one of the Scandinavian markets as UK and Germany seem to be too big for my budget. I also will probably spend $500-1k on facebook advertising to gain followers for my Facebook page who will later share my stuff and maybe try my app. How my plan sounds so far? Is it any good?

I have a suggestion as well as a question:

Suggestion: If you have not localized your game till now. Do spend some part of your budget on it. Believe me, you would thank me.
As far as I am concerned, I will advertise on admob and airpush but I won’t buy those reviews and G+ or 5 stars.

Question: The amount $5000-10000 you are talking about is from your earnings from other apps/games or from your savings?

I havent read much on localization so far, is it really that necessary? I do not intend to buy any reviews, I highly doubt ill get anything out from it though I will have a press kit that I will send pretty much anyone who reviews apps although I dont expect anything to come out of it.

And to answer your question, the marketing budget amount comes from savings that were gathered specifically for this purpose, it wont break my bank completely.

With localization, I have seen many of my apps go into Trending list of many countries. Somewhere I had read that 68% of world population is non-english.

You can start with automated translation from google translate and also target for manual translation. When using text from google translate, don’t forget to show a dialog about using google translate as automated translation is not perfect.

Hope that helps.

This might be a stupid question, but, what do you mean with localization?

Localization -translating apps to other languages. For example by localizing your app for Poland you would translate everything to polish (app description in Google Play store page, all the texts in your main menu and any other menus, etc).

Oh ok, sure, i thought he meant some kind of marketing strategy

I think 5000$ is way too much, you could probably get to the trending/new apps lists with 500$ using adwords. The trick is to get the most downloads you can in the shortest amount of time, with 500$/day campaign you can get 2000-3000 downloads a day and thats enough to get you trending if in the previous day you have 0-100 downloads. so if you’re smart about how you would advertise you could save a few grands.

Im pretty sure that adwords isnt an effective marketing tool for games compared to networks like Chartboost, TapforTap and Vungle.

>>Im pretty sure that adwords isnt an effective marketing tool

Why is that?

You should set your objectives, what do you want to achieve? 5000 downloads a day? 50,000 downloads a month? ratings? +1’s? specific countries your want to dominate?

My suggestion is that you should aim for the trending lists/top new apps lists (assuming your app has been published for less than 30 days). To get into those lists you need a big relative push in download which can be achieved using adwords/admob, which is my favorite 1-2 cents a click, spend in one day 100$ means ~50,000 visits to you Google Play page in one day. And the rest is up to you…

Right now the plan is to launch in a single country and reach top 50 at the least in top new apps list there. As my budget is limited I cant launch in USA, UK, Germany, etc. I havent yet checked how big is Norway market but as my game has trolls in it, it could be a good idea to launch in Norway.

50,000 visits doesn’t mean 50,000 installs though. I just ran an ad-mob campaign on the new admob site and the cost per install was $1. Much higher than the cost per install for places like appbrain, which start at $0.20.

Don’t launch in a single country!!! You still get your 30 days to be in the Top Free started whether you launch in one country or all of them! It’s fine if you want to target your advertising to one country, but don’t limit the countries it’s available in for no reason.

That is true, visits are not installs and sometimes people click by mistake. but 50K visits for 100$ is pretty good in my opinion, 10% conversion rate means 5000 installs. and an almost definite entrance to the trending/new app lists.

I get a much lower cost per install, probably because of a focused multilingual description and screenshots. I don’t use admob but adwords instead which is much more customizable targeting, not sure about the new admob but the ‘old’ one didn’t give you a lot of targeting options.

We`ll launch basically everywhere but the marketing will probably be targeted at a single country.

nup spend of 100$ in a day means 100x100 = 10000 visits on google play page assuming 1 cent of cost also another truth is that 1 cent amount is much low so might be your ad will never go live in good country

true, even calculators can’t multiply at 4am :confused:

4 am cool

:slight_smile:

Does anyone here have experience with TapforTap crosspromotion service?

Maybe its a dumb question, but how do you check how big the market is? And if possible, how do you correlate that with the $$ to invest?