How to engage with a broader audience in today’s tougher games climate

• Mobile developers are competing for screen time with social media and should adapt to this knowledge
• Building a game around a well-known franchise gives developers brand recognition from the get go

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Mobile game developers already face stiff competition from the volume of new games being released and the many long-lived games that continue to captivate. What’s more, studios have to compete with more than just video games as the average social media user spends over two hours each day on their favourite platforms.

We spoke with Proxima AI’s CEO, Alex Song, who shared with us how mobile game studios can engage with audiences and adapt to the increasing time mobile users spend on social media.

PocketGamer.biz: How has reaching players changed over recent years? What strategies don’t work as well as they used to and which ones are on the rise?

Alex Song: Since the Apple iOS privacy changes in March 2021, marketing directly to users through social channels, particularly Facebook and Instagram, has suffered. It’s become significantly harder on all social channels, but those are the ones that lost the most efficiency. This has also caused challenges for many mobile game companies as they try to determine how to be more efficient at scale. 

While Google Adwords has seen some success because the tracking signal is stronger and uninterrupted, TikTok has been shown to be a better strategy. It’s a younger company that came to rise in a post-iOS world, so they’ve only known how to figure out targeting in this environment. They didn’t have to figure out how to replace the signal.

Having said that, their consumers spend less in aggregate as a whole, gravitating more toward free or nearly free games with in-app purchases. But even with the lower LTV purchasers, it’s a strong lower-cost acquisition channel.

And how can companies make themselves stand out in such a crowded market? 

The overarching strategy should be to deploy into multiple channels. Users want to play games that other people are playing. There’s a social and community element to what you play and recommend. Being good at performance marketing isn’t good enough.

The strongest apps and games are building their brand and developing solid content across the web and sometimes in the physical world.

To stay in people’s minds, it’s important to create aspects that differentiate your game but are also recognisable. First, think about how to best create a social concept – such as competing challenges, quests, etc., that users can play with their friends. These are highly addictive and lead to increased spending.

Second, consider building a fun game concept around a well-known franchise with a lot of brand recognition, something like Monopoly GO! The developers of this game preserved Monopoly’s classic look and rule set while making it a fun experience whether you’re playing solo or with friends.

What about the effective use of data? This year, we’ve seen changes in data regulation. How can developers navigate these changes and challenges? 

Data will give you a stronger read on who your customers are, where they’re spending their time, and what they’re buying. Pay the closest attention to what customers are buying, namely because games and apps want to make money, and it’s helpful to know where they’re spending money elsewhere.

That’s exactly what we do at Proxima. Our audience solutions are designed to support this type of customer acquisition by giving developers insight into purchases and transactions. That data is then refreshed regularly to provide our clients with the latest information and insights to optimise their ad spend across social platforms and significantly cut their cost of acquisition.

Leading mobile, gaming, and retail clients, including Horseplay, LivePlay Bingo, Homa Games, and Joe & the Juice, rely on us to inform their mobile audience targeting strategies. While other audience solutions take static data purchased from an audience reseller, we provide a live network of first-party transactional data from a proprietary network made up of more than 70 million unique shopper personas.

As you mentioned, Proxima has worked with various mobile game companies. How do you help these teams optimise their ad spend or tackle rising acquisition costs? 

We take a three-pronged approach: 

1. We create a unique data signal that improves the targeting for customers who are very much interested in what the publisher is selling. We have access to more transactional data from more e-commerce sites than anyone else in the world.

2. We also provide support and advice on the media strategy itself. How you spend, how much you spend, and when you spend. We support our clients in the execution itself, which is an area that can sometimes be taken for granted.

3. A new area that we’re entering into is on the creative side. It’s critical that creative assets are high quality and effective. We provide a data-driven approach to help our clients understand what type of creative their ideal customer is going to engage with the best and provide predictive scoring to analyse projected performance.

This multi-tiered approach enables marketers to put the right creative in front of the right people and execute successfully with data-driven insights that are both human and tech-enabled, delivering outsized outcomes for our clients.

To give you a sense of our effectiveness, we work with three of the five largest public company mobile app publishers in the world. Their spend through our audience platform is in the millions per month. On average, these clients are seeing cost-per-install improvement of over 30%.

Do apps and games have to compete with social platforms, or can they use these spaces to better engage with users?

Game developers are 100% competing for a smaller pool of attention on mobile devices than ever before. Because mobile devices are predominantly used for social media, you must be where your users are spending time. This is an art that not every mobile marketer has leaned into.

Too many mobile marketers are still performance-driven because that’s what has proven to be the most effective historically. But in today’s climate, mobile apps must take a more brand-focused approach, developing long-term engagement and awareness with a community of users. That’s the path to success. 

Are there any major changes you see coming in the way that users engage with apps and games? 

Social gaming is going to continue to explode. With so many people already spending time on social media, it’s a natural extension to tie games into your social media usage. You want to share when you achieve certain levels or unlock things in the game. This creates a flywheel for reinforcing engagement among users.

And what about Proxima AI specifically. Is there anything you have coming up that you can tell us about?

Our focus is on audience targeting, consultative advice on campaign management and data-powered creative insights to ensure stronger, better, and more successful creative development. Over time, we’ll tie that together with AI so we can deliver the desired results for you as seamlessly and swiftly as possible.

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