What kind of marketing / advertising works best for you?

I want to know which marketing and advertising strategies work best for you guys, as I am just terrible at this whole aspect of game development.

To give more perspective here, I'm a solo indie for now, and usually work on either solo projects or very small teams, and sometimes contracting work. I'd love to hear from anybody though, even if your part of a huge team at some AAA studio...

What strategies have paid off the best for your games and or mobile apps? Do you pile tons of cash into advertising? Do you carefully select the most perfect ASO descriptions on mobile app stores? Facebook/Social marketing pushes? Do you do absolutely nothing and just try and make an awesome game???

Maybe something really crazy, like have any of you used any of those really shady sounding "we give totally real positive reviews and its totally super ok with apple and google" kinds of crazy sounding offers that developer accounts get emails from all the time?

Any horror stories of things NOT to try that worked out really bad in the end?

Thanks ahead of time for any input!

 

Reviews from TouchArcade gave us some nice downloads.

 

As an indie I am thinking to use something like following since I do not know much about marketing:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Level-Up/Episode-25-Interview-with-Sibel-Sunar

 

That is a cool video, thanks for sharing @DragonSAR2013

 

Thanks, Level up Series on Channel9 has some great practical advice from Successful Indie developers.

 

Social sharing and SEO drives the traffic for me. While SEO is a bit difficult, but once you get hands on it helps alot.

 

You guys are right, ASO / SEO does wonders for organic downloads, and there's a lot to be said about what kind of difference it can make doing some research on sensor tower or comparable sites and trying to focus on related apps for good keywords and those types of strategies.

I would like to hear more about this topic from more of the community so keep the replies coming!

 

How did you get them to review your game? Did you approach them or did they just find it amongst the haystack and review it themselves?

 

I second that @Thrawn75 - was it because you pitched them on reviewing it over an email? Did you hire a marketing company who did that legwork? Was there an up front cost of any kind?

 

I created a pre-launch campaign and a bunch of beta testers joined Test Flight (I'm talking about a game I created with Xcode for iOS - at that time I was not using Unity) and also was actively discussing the game on TouchArcade forums. I guess some hype was created around Noir Run. Ultimately the editorial picked the game in one of their weekly news post when the game launched.

It was not an in-game review, just a referral to the game launch along 4 or 5 others. But I can say that just referring the game in a single paragraph brought lot of downloads for a few days while it was under spotlight on the front page.

 

That is the most authentic IMO

 

Asking smaller game sites to review your game, uploading youtube videos, and telling your friends is the best strategy I ever used. (This is an idea. I am a lazy person.)

 

Out of the three i think small game sites reviewing your game is a much better option.

 

About the mobile advertising aspect, you can look through our free cost per install statistics:
https://clickky.biz/whitepaper/clickky-s-cpi-index-november-16/

 

Why are those CPI's so low? From what I've read the industry average CPI's are $4-6 for Tier 1 markets, and $0.80 to $3 - for emerging markets.

 

Platforms create industry reports based on their own data, so the numbers could vary through the different solution providers. Also, it might be that I've shared a November's whitepaper in a previous post. You can view the most recent data (but not so detailed) here https://clickky.biz/advertise/self-serve/

By the way, what industry reports do you usually rely on?