Portal Management

Game Portal Marketing: 7 Approaches to Attract More Users

Dec 19 2022

Have you recently launched your games portal, and you’re seeing a low number of visitors? Are you looking for a way to reach a larger audience? The truth is, sometimes the game portal marketing can get confusing. However there are several strategies for attracting an audience, but before we dive into the possible choices, there are a few questions we need to answer.

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Who is your target audience? What social networks and websites does he use the most? What are their interests and preferences?

The first step in marketing is to figure out who you want to reach. Without this information, you’ll just waste your money and time.

In the following, we will discuss some tried-and-true methods that have successfully drawn larger audiences.

Be Active on Social Media

Today, it is impossible to ignore how social networks affect online businesses. You, as the owner of an HTML5 games portal, should make good use of this modern phenomenon. It is important to note that social networks serve various purposes. Some of them are used to share photos and videos, while others are used to establish communities.

Knowing the characteristics and effectiveness of each social media will allow you to put it to the best use.

In general, your social media activities include three main elements: Crafting content, Establishing a community, and having interactions with users.

Craft Valuable Contents

According to Landingi.com, from the business POV, content refers to engaging, meaningful and solution-giving pieces of information.

The main point is that not every piece of content is valuable. That means you need to produce engaging content that will initially attract the user and then direct him to your portal.

Let’s refer to Joe Polizzi’s well-known quote from his book Epic Content Marketing: “Customers aren’t interested in you, your products, or your services. They’re primarily concerned with their own needs.”

According to Polizzi’s statement, you should recognize your users’ video game preferences and interests. What’s their age? What type of games do they enjoy? What are their current favorite games? Once you have this information, you can provide your users with relevant content, which will include the introduction of your portal’s games.

Therefore, the first criterion for quality content is the content being meaningful. Here are your decent options and their proper applications for sharing quality content:

• YouTube: It’s a popular website for sharing and viewing videos online. Youtube is the best video-sharing platform for long and short videos. On this platform, you can post gameplay videos, amusing videos of people having fun playing your game, and any events you may arrange in the future.
• Instagram: Instagram works best when used for sharing game photos, video clips, and promotions. IG also allows your users to message you directly. Here, unlike on YouTube, you should focus on short, exciting game trailers and eye-catching cover photos of your games.
• Facebook: FB is best used for UGC (User Generated Content) and upcoming giveaways. It also works well for sharing videos and photos and also works great as a messenger. This platform is one of the most popular tools for attracting game-curious users. Also, with its gaming service, you can host your games on Facebook and promote them to a broader audience at a low cost.
• TikTok: A social media platform suitable for users to create, share, and discover short videos. You can share your game’s short clips.

Make Use of Game Trailers

Nowadays, game trailers are a must for the game industry and game portal marketing efforts. These trailers are short clips of games meant to give potential players an idea of what the full experience will be like. It serves as an introduction to your game and an incentive for people to try your game.

Today, game trailers are an essential component of marketing campaigns for video games. A well-made trailer can rocket a previously unknown game to the top of the pre-order lists in a matter of days.

On the flip side, a poorly made trailer can diminish a game’s allure and prevent it from connecting with its intended audience.

Establish Communities for Your Users

Users’ interactions with one another and their conversations can inspire you to choose your next games and to redefine your future marketing strategy. So, for your users to communicate with one another and discuss your most recent HTML5 game’ news, you need to establish online communities.

For this purpose, establishing a subreddit or a Discord server under your brand name are your best bets.

With these two social networks (Reddit & Discord), your users can talk to each other, and you can use gifs and short videos to show off your newest HTML5 games and announce upcoming events and promotions.

Another beneficial action you can take is to compile an email list of your users. Having such a list prepared allows you to directly communicate updates and specials to your target audience.

Interact with Your Customers/ Users

The content-sharing and group-forming features of social networks are just the tips of the iceberg. As you already know, the most valuable aspect of social media is meaningful connections and productive interactions with other users.

As a result, the best thing you can do is create your brand user account on Facebook or Instagram and interact with your old and new users based on the culture of the chosen platform. The point is to make it easy for current and potential customers to get in touch with you and your business directly.

After assembling such a group, you can prepare to hold engaging and precisely targeted competitions in your portal, which we’ll discuss in the following sections.

Effective SEO is Essential

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most crucial factors you shouldn’t overlook. It is an effort to improve your website’s and its content’s visibility in search engine results. Doing so will result in attracting targeted visitors to your HTML5 game portal. That’s why having a good understanding of a gaming portal’s SEO is so crucial.

While search engine optimization (SEO) takes more time and effort to implement correctly than Google’s paid search ads, it will provide you with more significant long-term benefits and is an excellent approach for achieving your business objectives. In any case, you can improve your site’s rankings by enhancing the quality of its content and using links from other trusted websites.

Since SEO is a too broad topic to discuss in this article, we recommend reading this to learn more about SEO and its applications.

Encourage Your Users to Share

Having your game shared is one of the most reliable indicators of your portal’s popularity and its games. In fact, when a user shares your games, it means that you have successfully intrigued the interest of your users to the point where they are willing to freely advertise for you.

However, this does not mean you should stop encouraging users to share your games. If you want users to share content from your game portal and contribute to your game portal marketing efforts, ensure the share button is always displayed.

Pop-ups that suggest the sharing option during thrilling game moments or after beating challenging levels are another great way to boost your games’ sharing rate.

Attract More Users Through Paid Advertising

It’s a no brainer that in the gaming industry, many have been able to generate more income through in-game ads. In fact, everything we’ve mentioned so far contributes to drawing on a broader audience, but game portal marketing is more than that! If you want to get your message out to millions of people, paid advertisement is one of your top choices.

It’s also worth mentioning that just as the creation and use of effective and eye-catching advertisements will advance the objectives of your advertising campaigns, sloppy design or the incorrect selection of keywords will waste your advertising budget. Also, in the worst-case scenario, it may hurt your business.

However, when it comes to paid ads, there are two options for you:

Google Ads

When it comes to online advertising, Google Ads is among the most reliable options, trusted by millions of users worldwide. This Google service has many different features, each suitable for a particular purpose. However, the following options, among others, are the most suitable options for your HTML5 game advertising purposes:

Search Ads

This type of advertisement includes Google search results with the word ‘Ad’ next to them.

Picking the right keyword is crucial in this form of advertising, and if you don’t pay attention, you could end up wasting money on Google Ads.

Display Ads

You’ve probably encountered these ads a hundred times. These are the Google Ads’ banners you see on web pages.

What you should do is design eye-catching banners and choose the right demographic and credible sites to display them.

Video Ads

These include the promotional videos and ads YouTube shows before or middle of the playing the video. This form of advertisement, all you need to do is to choose appropriate keywords and create enticing video ads to maximize your audience-attracting efforts. You can also display a short video of your game with a “install” or “play” button at the end of the video.

Social Media Ads

In addition to Google, you can also rely on the paid advertising service provided by social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.). Taking into account the time users spend on social media, having your ad appear on top of their preferred content (feed) can dramatically increase your CTR (Click-through Rate) and traffic.

The prerequisites for achieving these two are:

• Creating engaging content
• Picking the right platform
• Choosing the right audience

Design UI for the People You’re Trying to Reach

If you want to be successful in game portal marketing, your portal’s design should consider the age and interests of your target audience to create an optimal environment for your visitors, regardless of how they feel when they first enter your site.

Most of your visitors are kids? Then opt for less text and more bright and colorful visual elements. Are the majority of your customers female? Use gentle and bright colors and themes. If most of your users are senior players, employing a simple and minimal design is best.

If you’re in charge of an HTML5 game portal, your goal should be to get as many players to try out your games as possible by maximizing their exposure to other games on the portal while enjoying one of yours. However, if you need to read more about UI designs, we suggest you read ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ by Steve Krug

Displaying your featured and most popular games to users in larger and different sizes is an excellent way to introduce your new games to your target audience. The image below shows how the Poki HTML5 games portal showcases its latest games and recommends them to its users:

Keep an Eye on the Calendar

Many events occur throughout the year, and each one may be significant and memorable to users. It doesn’t matter if these events are annual or occur every few years.

For example, Christmas and Halloween are yearly events, while the World Cup and Presidential Elections are held every few years. Dealing with these events and adapting your activities to them, such as:

• Producing occasion-based games
• Conveying the event’s mood to the audience on social networks
• Holding event-based contests or tournaments

can speed up the user attraction process and boost loyalty among your existing users.

Set Up Tournaments for Your Users

Users of your HTML5 games portal will be more engaged, motivated, and excited if you host tournaments and online competitions for them.

There’s a good chance they’ll tell their friends and family about your games’ website. That translates to a higher rate of sharing for you and your business!

You can encourage more visits to your portal from users by hosting engaging and time-limited competitions and tournaments that allow them to compete for fame, satisfy their competitive urge or even win cash prizes. It will help your games’ sharing rate, which we will discuss below.

Also, remember that leaderboards are necessary for tournament games. It is because users and players can access each other’s scores. So, if you ever plan to do it, remember to include a leaderboard.

In any case, there is no doubt that your user acquisition rate will skyrocket if you can successfully introduce a sense of healthy competition to your HTML5 games portal.

The Bottom Line

You must have realized by now that even if you have the highest quality portal with the most popular games, you cannot expect successful outcomes with your HTML5 game marketing unless your portal is accessible to your audience.

Therefore, for your portal to attract a large audience, it must be exposed to the target demographic.

With the help of all the ideas and tips in this article, you’ll be able to showcase your portal at the proper time and place to reach your audience and draw them in. But to reiterate an important point: despite all these interpretations, you cannot have a portal that is ideal for your audience until you have a proper knowledge and understanding of the audience. The more you know about your target demographic, the more effectively you can apply the strategies outlined in this article, and the more positive the outcome will be.

Other than the ideas already mentioned, many others support expanding our portal’s audience. These ideas are not covered in this article, but we will go into more detail about them in the future. What methods or tools do you use to get more people to your portal?