Halfbrick's Shaniel Deo on how marketing savvy pulled in $2 million on App Store

It's not just the games industry that writes off marketing.

Bad businesses the world over are willing to leave any form of promotion to the last minute and then wonder why their products disappear without a trace.

At least that's the view of Fruit Ninja and Monster Dash developer Halfbrick.

Indeed, chief executive Shaniel Deo attributes much of the $2 million the studio has made from the App Store in the last six months to its ability to master the art of marketing.

Forward planning

"Marketing was a huge part of it all, and it played a huge roll," says Deo in an interview with Smart Company.

"We needed to get the viral word out through Twitter and Facebook," he says of Fruit Ninja's debut, "and we also incorporated things like allowing people to post about their scores, having leaderboards and so on encouraging competition.

"Twitter and so on have been the biggest methods through which the game has spread."

As a result, Halfbrick was able to engage with early adopters from the word go, and its approach to the press was just as crucial.

"It takes time to build relationships with the press, you can't just finish a product and then get them to feature you.

"We started a process of getting contacts in the press, expanding that to iOS press generally as well, and then we studied what those games were doing right," he adds.

Closing the deal

Halfbrick's strategy revolved around sending out embargoed press releases at launch ("all of a sudden we had this burst of information," claims Deo) and keeping Fruit Ninja regularly updated, so people would keep the game on their handsets and spread the title through word of mouth as a result.

Both Fruit Ninja and Monster Dash made it into the top 10 in the studio's home territory of Australia as a result, with the latter currently approaching sales of 400,000.

Without such advanced planning, however, Deo believes the situation could have been very different.

"You're always surprised with the App Store. It's a roll of the dice, and we knew we had the launch right," he concludes.

"I think the whole process has shown how crucial marketing is. A lot of people don't even think about marketing themselves until their product is finished, but we made sure we had everything in place to go."

[source: Smart Company]