Feedback Your experience with marketing agencies / freelance marketing specialist

Hello guys,
I'm having a look to marketing agencies with the aim to improve the the performances of my recently released racing game.
I contacted a bunch of marketing agencies via clutch and I was impressed by their quotes and demands.
Essentially they offer a "package" of services and demand a commitment of minimum of 3 / 6 with a monthly fee of minimum 3000€, with some of them asking up to 20k€ of ads budget monthly (they ask around 10% of the ads budget to manage the campaigns).

Do you have any experience with this kind of agencies? I'm interested manly in the creative part in order to improve the presentation of the game on the store so probably a freelance is a better bet.
Which is the best place to look for freelance? Upwork, freelancer.com, Unity forum?

 

anyone?

 

Subject is not as simple as Marketing.
It matters what you try to market, on which social media and for what audience.

I wouldn't be surprise many of agancies basically praying on naive customers. Some maybe good. But ask them for prove and portfolio.

 

Do they have any kind of experience in marketing for video games? Lots of predators in this space, same as publishers. There are people doing key art for indies for affordable prices. Don't look for large faceless agencies with next to no success in video game markets. Look for freelancers who specialise in making trailers, key art, etc for video games, maybe even with focus on Steam if that's your main platform.

Something like this: https://www.kertgartner.com/

And real artists on Behance: https://www.behance.net/search/projects/game key art/

And artstation: https://www.artstation.com/search?sort_by=relevance&query=game key art

 

They are all taken from clutch, and they got most positive reviews. They probably target medium or big sized company.

 

Thanks for the suggestions

 

Are these reviews outside of their website and service? Are these reviews on multiple social media? Or just in one place? Asking, in case these are not bought, or fudged.

 

https://clutch.co/agencies/app-marketing?sort_by=ClutchRank

I contacted the agencies more focused on mobile games, like
https://rplg.io/
https://thegamemarketer.com/
https://redboxmobile.com/

 

Anyway, Upwork has a very interesting section called project catalog where you can buy a "package" of services like for example ASO optimizations:
https://www.upwork.com/services/mobile-marketing-advertising/app-store-optimization

 

Of those 3, it looked like only one of them did games. The others were "apps". App marketing is different than game marketing. Different audience and different drives/markets. I would suggest looking at those who focus on games specifically.

 

Those prices seem suspicious to me, or rather for a typical 'indie' dev are way over-priced!

For example according to VGInsights
- 50% of indie games never make more than $4000
- Median indie game makes $3947!
- 66% of games don't cross $10,000 in their life time earnings!

Which for me means even the lower $3k just for a single month is way out of budget and at 3 to 6 months is just ridiculous. The marketing would have to increase sales by what 300% just to match the spending on marketing and that is just revenue, not profit!

So just simple back of the napkin maths this doesn't check out. I don't think it would be much different for applications. The only way any of them make sense is if you are in top 20% ( $50k+) or top 9% ($200k) of dev's.

From checking out 'clutch' everything is so generic that I don't think i'd trust any of them. You best bet would be to find personal recommendations, though depending upon your expected sales that might be difficult too. I guess if it were me i'd be doing more general searches to find any 'post-mortem' or guides from dev's who have released games and discussed their marketing techniques, thats likely to give a better idea on what is possible and maybe even some recommendations as to how to find an agency.

 

Again, you don't need an ad agency, you need a publisher.

 

The hard part of marketing is making engaging visual content like videos, gifs, and clips. A marketing company won't help you with that. Something that marketing company does is post stuff and pay for ads, but that is easy to learn and not time-consuming.

If you want to pay for something, then pay for ads and someone who will review your marketing materials, even before publishing.

 

Avoid them. A company that only charges you an upfront cost has no incentive for you to be successful. You want a publisher that wants a percentage because then they're not successful if you're not successful, and you're also not out of as much money if for some reason things don't work out.

 

I'm biased but... If they actually could scale mobile games, they'd be publishers because that's where the money's at.

If the counter argument is that they don't want to restrain the scope of their activities to mobile games, then they sure as hell won't beat someone who's specialized in it... like a publisher.

Plus I don't know if you know the actual costs of scaling a game globally, but it's no joke.

 

That's exactly what I'm doing right now, I contacted an ASO specialist on upwork that is also able to make engaging creatives (screenshots and trailers) that hopefully will help to improve the metrics

 

We don't have the data to make that conclusion. OP could have a scalable game and dumping 20k a month into UA is standard and definitely the right call if his game can support it.

 

what is a scalable game?

You're also the only one here saying it's a good idea. So yeah op should totally listen to you.

 

A scalable game is a game where the ARPI will exceed UA costs up to a point.

The vast majority of mobile games are made popular via UA. Making more games isn't going to make that problem go away.

 

OP, in the March you have received lots of good advice.

I would gave yourself a question, how much you are realistically expect to make from your game? But be honest based on research.
Like
0?
100$?
1000$?
100 000$?

Because if your expectations are far below any additional costs, your additional investment like discussed OP marketting may not be worth it.

I rarely hear from indies, they invest in such marketing agencies, with a successful results. So definatelly it is something to watching out at.