Ep 138: Marketing strategies for launching a mobile game

Dmitry Gubanenkov is a Marketing Manager at Space Ape Games, the London-based mobile game developer. He joins Apptivate’s Gaming Series to share his approach to launching new mobile games and install campaigns. You’ll learn how important your audio choice can be, the best ways to measure the performance of influencer campaigns, and where to launch your new game.

Dmitry leads user acquisition campaigns for Boom Beach: Frontlines, and previously, Beatstar. Before joining Space Ape Games, Dmitry was in a marketing leadership position at Kakao Games Europe B.V., ChimpWorks, and GamePoint. He’s based in the Netherlands.

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• How would you classify Beatstar as a gaming genre? What factors do you think led to the success of Beatstar?
• How does having music licenses affect the way you target users?
• How do you leverage community to enhance the ads experience and/or the endgame experience?
• How do you figure out the best approach to marketing the new mobile game and its release?
• What is your approach to figuring out which markets to initially push your new game?
• What are some methods you use to determine media mix? What platforms are working well right now? Not working so well?
• What is the primary KPI that you use to see success from influencer campaigns?
• How important do you think creative is in the success of install campaigns, and does that importance vary by channel?

• 1:29 Dmitry’s background
• 3:45 Dmitry’s role at Space Ape Games
• 6:12 Beatstar’s success
• 7:45 Audio choice in creative
• 11:11 Marketing a release of a new mobile game
• 13:33 Launching Boom Beach: Frontlines
• 18:04 Approach to media mix
• 20:34 Influencer marketing with gamers
• 22:47 Creative is king

(9:14-9:28) “We can see a big difference between songs. Even if we’re talking about a gameplay video, if you had two different songs CPI could be 10-20 times different. So it’s enormously important to have the right audio.”

(21:48-21:59) “You can see the organic uplift from the days the influencer released the video, so you can attribute these organic installs to the specific influencers.”