Cross-promotion is an underrated yet very useful mobile advertising tool. Cross-promotion is an effective way to increase app downloads, drive traffic, and generate revenue. If you are not convinced that cross-advertising contributes to promotional success, then you should consider the main advantages of this method before discussing three ways to use cross-advertising in your mobile game marketing strategy.
What is cross-advertising?
Cross-marketing is a collaborative promotion strategy in which two or more publishers promote each other's products through their own products and services. For example, an app for high school students might use its space to advertise a game for teenagers, and vice versa. As a result, the two apps connect to each other's audience and expand their reach.
The benefits of cross marketing are:
- the ability to promote the application with minimal costs or for free;
- reducing the cost of a contact;
- increasing the target audience;
- additional PR;
- an additional source of monetization.
Now, let's dive into the top 3 ways to cross-promote mobile games.
Internal cross promotion
Publishers with a portfolio of applications in their portfolio can promote other applications in their own products. The most successful example in this regard may be the strategy that Ketchapp has followed for a long time. In 2014, their game 2048 was released, which became the most downloaded game (# 1 Top Downloaded Total) in 53 countries. The success of 2048 has led to cross-promotion of the publisher's other products. Typically, other games are promoted with an advertising pop-up at the start of the game.
Another good example is Creative Intdeavor AB. They used their play store property to promote other games in their portfolio.
Using this strategy, the publisher reaches out to the gamers by creating a sense of communication across all products. Players who have been encouraged to switch to a different app will remain loyal and be more receptive to cross-promotion of new titles in the future, so they are more likely to remain loyal to all apps in the publisher's portfolio.
Direct deals with other game developers
This is the main idea behind cross-promotion. You can find another game studio (or any other development studio, for that matter) and agree to mutually promote each other's products. Through these strategic partnerships, you can confidently reach the right audience. Through mobile analytics, you can get a complete picture of the potential and actual reach of the reach, and understand how many users are clicking on the partner's recommendation.
The advantage of such a deal is that you can present your game to a huge audience, especially if your cross-promotion partner is a large game studio.
Advertising in the game
The third principle builds on the above two ideas, taking full advantage of both methods and mixing them with a few additional possibilities. To advertise in the game, ad networks are often used - services that bring developers together and create an opportunity to share their users with each other.
It's also a win-win situation as game developers get a much larger audience and the audience gets to experience a lot more games.
There are a lot of advertising networks that provide game developers with ample opportunities for such an exposure: Supersonic, Chartboost, Tapdaq. Among the Russian-language services, a cross-promotion partner can be found using the AKO-M platform.
Clearly, cross-marketing is a mobile game promotion strategy that works and guarantees results. Done right, cross-advertising will be cheaper and more effective than other methods. It's important to try different cross-advertising tools to find the one that works best for your particular product.
