It’s Time Mobile Game Developers Pay Attention to Influencer Marketing

You are commuting to work. To pass the time, you check out some new apps and games to install on your phone. Among the countless options, one of them catches your attention. You remember watching it on YouTube. Some hardcore gamer was talking about how awesome it is. He’s a passionate gamer. You’ve seen his game reviews before. Now you’re interested to check this game out for yourself. You install it and start playing it. Soon, you realize that the review was legit. It is actually an awesome game. Now, there’s a smile on your face and you can’t wait for the lunch break when you’ll play it again. Congratulations, you’ve been “influenced.”

What’s This Influencer Marketing All About?

Influencers are people who have been doing something passionately all their lives. It could be anything from playing video games to cooking, from investing money to fitness. They are extremely passionate about that particular thing and they often talk about the ins and outs of it – on their blogs, on social networks, on podcasts, you name it. They share their experiences, their mistakes, their journey. Through their words, they move people. People listen to them for advice, ideas, and improvement tips. Ideally, influencers don’t expect or ask for anything in return. However, there are influencers who get paid or ask for something in return (not necessarily in monetary terms) to review, mention, or endorse a particular brand or product.

Influencer Marketing for Mobile Games

YouTube and Twitch help gamers explore new games before they download those. According to Chartboost (a business engine for mobile games), influencer marketing is heavily on the rise. Certain games are standing out from the crowd because of influencer reviews.

If Google is to be believed, 90% of gamers watch YouTube videos for tips on gaming advancements and discovering new games. The lion’s share of these views come from mobile devices.

Influencer marketing helps gamers find games they would actually like from the sea of options available and keeps them highly engaged.

Influencer reviews of mobile games breathe authenticity into the marketing message. It
convinces the audience that the game is actually great.

What Does This Indicate for Mobile Game Developers?

This presents a huge scope to strategically market your game through influencers. As a mobile game developer, you have two options – either make a great game or offer some sort of benefit to an influencer to review your game. Now, if you’re an indie game developer, the first is likely to be your preferred option. Concentrate on it with your heart and soul. Put all your mobile game development skills to use. Make it your life’s goal for a while. Then contact influencers with a loyal follower base on YouTube. Persuade them to review your game. Maybe you won’t get an instant response. But when you do, it’s only a matter of time until the number of installs of your game skyrockets.

In a marketplace flooded with games, what do you do to get your creation noticed? You start brainstorming your influencer marketing strategy. According to the aforementioned Chartboost report, influencer marketing works better on mobile devices because on mobile, it’s possible to track the results. So, build, release, get your game reviewed by an influencer, and track the result. You don’t have to be one of the countless independent mobile game developers out there. You can be a professional developer with a full time job and still get your game noticed if an influencer reviews your game on YouTube.

In the end

Playing a game on a mobile device is a very personal experience. But at the same time, it’s also an activity that makes the player feel part of a community – the gaming community. The influencer is like a mutual friend of both you and gamers. They connect the two of you. They praise your game’s beautiful interface, user-friendliness, gameplay and so on. They analyze the finesse of your mobile game development and gamers pay attention. So when you bring an influencer on board, not only do they influence your target audience, they also get your creation noticed by their own loyal audience. Just think about the exposure your game can get from an influencer! It’s high time you take influencer marketing seriously.

Concierge Apps: Is it the Future of Hotel Technology?

You must be kidding if you think that you can ignore technology and run your business as usual. Whatever is your business, a great way to differentiate your business is to innovate constantly. If innovative technologies are implemented correctly, they can boost your hotel business by:

• Generating revenue
• Reducing overhead costs
• Increased Customer loyalty

  Over the years, mobile apps have dived deeper into major technological innovations which have redefined the hospitality industry.

Mobile, no longer a trend…

According to an infographic data published by Go-Gulf.com, U.S. alone has about 91.4 million smartphone users. To call it a big market would be an understatement as mobile is no longer a trend but rather it’s here to stay for long. Businesses all around the world are taking advantage of the “mobile consumerism” and the hotel industry is not an exception. Hoteliers now have the opportunity to get on the mobile wagon and enjoy a variety of mobile apps such as check in/out apps, food beverage apps and concierge apps.

Yes, there’s an app for concierges …

Before I get into the discussion on how concierge apps are helping the hotel industry, it is better to say what actually are those apps.

A concierge app is basically a virtual integration that allows guests to access all the luxury services available in hotels , all at your fingertips. It also provides the freedom to customise the details of your stay before and during the visit.

Hotel concierge apps have become a “must-have” for major hotel brands (such as Marriott, Four Seasons, Wyndham). Having these mobile apps help hotels to understand guest behavior so that they can deliver services according to their needs before arrival on premises. With recent embracing of mobile technologies, many hotel brands have engaged their own or third party concierge solutions to initiate easy room service and speedy communication with staff. This is basically done to personalise guest stays even better.

Thus, it’s no surprise that hotels are looking to increase communication with their guests as that brings on more revenue per room or through repeat bookings.

Business Abilities

Mobile concierge platforms provide a variety of opportunities for the hotels to build their brand applications to drive business. A perfect example would be Gansevoort Hotel Group who integrated service-on-demand application via Alice app which provides convenient features to the guests. At just a click guests can easily get their drinks delivered at the pool tables. These will surely elevate the moods of the guests and increase loyalty and prompt favourable reviews.

Branded versus third party

While some hotel brands might have the necessary technological infrastructure to develop their own concierge solutions while others depend on third-party agents. Integrating customer service in concierge mobile apps have provided a major opportunity for the hotel brands as this will create new revenue streams.

Final take away

There is increased productivity when concierge mobile apps are available on multiple platforms. This benefits the hotel brands tremendously. Guests no longer have to line up at the concierge desk to get help with related services. Hotel staffs are more readily available to attend the guests. As concierge apps is still a new technology, it makes hotels to stand out in the industry.

As for the guests, it will give them an opportunity to choose vacation activities as per their preference. Customised itinerary section shall also be provided to the guests keeping their needs and priorities in mind. These services will create a unique perspective in the guests mind making their trip enjoyable. A concierge app allows guests to request room service, extra linens, dining reservations and even to switch rooms. Thus, there is nothing that a concierge app cannot do that a person on a phone can handle.

So what’s the wait, why not make a concierge app for your hotel to let guests have a memorable experience at your hotel. To make a fantastic concierge app with customisation options, consult us at business@innofied.com.

Do You Want to Know Why Your Enterprise App Has Failed?

Before the app enters the development room it, before a single line of code is written many enterprises fail on their mobile apps.

Failure is not something defined by how many downloads or how much revenue an app is able to generate, but where does it fall short? – may be budget, time or scope.

What Matters?

In both business and consumer environment – mobile is the new paradigm. Yet organizational thinking fails to keep in line with the reality. The many reasons for the failure in enterprise apps are due to stakeholders who are not really convinced that mobile is one of the important ways to build. Many still tried to stick to the ideology of desktop is the king and mobile are secondary. But there are many industries for whom this principle does not work out.

It is tough to have success through mobile

Even if you have already tried to implement a mobile solution, we might like to tell you once more that mobile is a tough space. Many of the enterprise apps fail simply due to lack of organizational readiness.

If you want to make mobile solutions work internally, you need to add some spur and have a new way of thinking. From a skill and strategy standpoint, it needs organizational knowledge, employee and managerial implementation, in some cases, you might need to introduce a shift in your business culture.

Apart from that, despite your people and organization being ready, implementation of a mobile solution requires your systems to capacitate the change. Applications at the same time need to communicate with the services in order to feature particular functions to operate correctly, means these services must stay prepared for the app to develop and implement everything in the right order.

Now let us dive into the enterprise mobile app challenges –

Technology

Legacy Systems – It is often difficult to integrate legacy system and new platform, which is one of the major barrier faced by the large organization that has used a particular system for a long time.

Scalability – This is a concern for mobile as it can put strains particularly for those who are seeking real-time business solutions when the users base expands rapidly.

Cross-System Integration – Needs cross system integration otherwise it fails to communicate with each other. Without these systems, any mobile app development project is going to miss the deadline over budget.

Business

Exposing Business Logic Via App – If you are exposing your business logic via an app, then define the rules in a central location. These rules often exist in the mind of people, but formally they are not defined or centralized. This further adds time to a project because these requires time to gather materials for distinct sources and then organized.

New Organizational Thinking – This also requires to ensure the mobile success as you cannot apply the same business and development rules to other mobile or platform, neither you can assume a user to interact with your products in the same way.

Trying everything together – One of the costliest mistakes that every enterprise makes is trying to do everything at once. Just like any significant change in business, mobile also needs a phased approach. You need to focus on the key features at first, then iterate to include roadmap items, then pass on to setting your priorities, take a decision on critical features. This type of approach is going to make you grasp the market faster with a viable product as opposed to delaying and unfinished products.

Operations

Internal App Ownership – Yes, having an internal app is a key to many locks and without a person or a team that champions the project internally, monitors the time frame, budget, and scope, you will find so a sense of accountability. This might lead to deadlines and budget issues.

Not Having the Right Team – Simply not having the right team to execute your strategy will lead to failure. Having right team means two things – internally having the subject matter experts, support, stakeholders, and developers and for external you need to work with the right development partner.

Lack of Development Philosophy – Traditional software development phase followed up the waterfall approach, but with the use of other methods such as agile development, it is no longer an option. Agile methodology is faster, efficient and meant particularly for mobile app development. It is worth evaluating the newer development philosophies to determine what type of approach is right for you and make sure that the entire team is on the same page.

What is the correct recipe for enterprise app success?

To implement an enterprise mobile app development solution on time and within the same scope and budget, you simply can achieve it if the right foundation is in place. The key ingredients to cook the right enterprise app recipe are –

• Executives and stakeholders need to adopt the mobile mindset and can stay committed to assuring project success
• Internally there needs to be a project manager to encourage project accountability and mediating the things in a flow
• Embracing philosophies for mobile app projects that evolve your business as well steer new operational thinking
• Whether it is technical, operational, or business-related one needs to break down internal silos for mobile implementation to be effective. You need to maintain a consistent strategy, make it popular across teams to steer coordination

To steer an enterprise application development with right kind of knowledge in technology, business, and operations, drop us a mail at – business@innofied.com