Taking YouTube Seriously.
At Seriously, we believe that in a world of unlimited content choices, it’s the brands that cut through. So our focus is on building products that feel like a Pixar movie but start their life as a mobile game.
Our first release is called Best Fiends and you can try it out for yourself by downloading the game here (warning: it’s quite addictive!).
We challenge ourselves to be just as creative in our marketing as with our product development.
As part of this, we have now had over a year’s worth of learnings working with different YouTube influencers.
And we’re excited about what we achieved with our most recent marketing effort.
‘The world’s biggest mobile treasure hunt’ was built around a social influencer campaign that saw us trend on App Store search worldwide.
It also took us to our highest levels yet of daily downloads, daily active users, revenue and in some key markets, a new peak chart position.
The data shows that our audience appreciates our creative work. Our first game has a strong foundation with, for example, Day One retention above 60%, 35 minutes per day average play time and over 1,000,000 hours of game play per day.
But even with strong foundations, for most independent app developers, it’s still hard to cut through, with over 1.6M apps to choose from on the App Store, and with competitors like Supercell, Machine Zone and King spending millions of dollars per day marketing their games.
We have always believed performance marketing on channels like Facebook and mobile advertising networks doesn’t scale and, in a highly competitive market, with app install prices rising higher and higher, relying on that would pretty much be a race to the bottom for a startup like us.
Before we launched our first game a year ago, we asked our competitors which marketing channels didn’t work for them. And YouTube came up a lot. Given that well over half of YouTube’s views are on mobile, we took that as a challenge, and decided to focus a significant amount of our marketing energies there.
A good example of one of our early social influencer efforts was a charity ‘Race Against Slime’ we ran with PewDiePie and friends in December 2014.
When working with YouTube stars, it’s important that they are a natural fit and enjoy the game. Rosanna Pansino included Best Fiends as one of her favorite apps on her iPhone earlier in the year.
And we’ve also worked with influencers internationally, which is an increasing focus for us.
And most recently for ‘the world’s biggest mobile treasure hunt’ we integrated a social influencer campaign with a fun in-product experience.
On Saturday 26th September at 10am LA time, 13 of the biggest YouTube stars in the world including Rosanna Pansino, CaptainSparklez, DanTDM and CutiePieMarzia, with a combined audience of over 60 million subscribers, went live with a video each giving a clue about where they had hidden their icons in the Best Fiends game. When players find all 13 icons, they unlock a treasure chest containing the rarest of all Fiends in the game, Newt, as well as gold and diamonds.
To see all the videos, hints and updates, visit bestfiends.com/treasurehunt and facebook.com/bestfiends.
This latest marketing campaign and content update may be considered an unconventional way to cut through and be discovered, but it worked, and we’re pleased with the results:
- The 13 YouTube videos were watched over 7,300,000 times in the first five days.
- We had our biggest ever download day (over 250,000 downloads in one day) and our biggest ever download week.
- We trended on App Stores all over the world.
- We grew our daily player base 40% in one weekend to over 1,600,000 DAU.
- We hit our biggest revenue day to date (more than $100,000).
We treat our game as a service and deliver new updates every three weeks with new events, characters, levels and content, all designed to re-engage our current audience as well as attract new players.
This update has been our most successful yet, and our approach has helped us grow our community to over 500,000 Facebook fans and an additional 250,000 followers on Instagram and Twitter combined.
It’s a real challenge finding creative ways to cut through a very crowded market. And now we increasingly have a formula that works, we are working on a plan to take it to a whole new level.
