Nintendo has taken the world by storm with its Pokemon Go reality app launch. The app’s success has led to over 15 million downloads, increasing Nintendo’s market value by almost a whopping 60 percent in one, little measly week. This has also reignited a fire under the buns of ole’ Pokemon fans all over again.
3 Things Pokemon Go Succeeded at in Its Content Marketing Approach
What’s the key to Pokemon Go’s almost instantaneous success? It went viral, of course! That’s the dream of any online business or brand. You want the word of your products or services to spread like a California wildfire, creating an uncontrollable buzz around your solutions. Nintendo was able to accomplish this with great success. Here are three content marketing lessons you can learn from the Pokemon Go craze created and nurtured by Nintendo.
Image Source: flickr
1. Create and Offer High Quality Products and Services
One reason for Pokemon Go’s great success is the fact that Nintendo, the world’s largest video game company by revenue, spared no change when having the game created. A partnership was created with Niantic Labs to produce the reality video game. Yet, neither of the company’s put any efforts into advertising. Rumor has it, that the only advertising that went down were a few tweets and retweets from Niantic.
Much of the traffic this new craze is experiencing can be contributed to word of mouth. But, the fact that the game seems to work as expected majority of the time tends to keep players coming back for more, and more, and more, and more… And, it doesn’t hurt that the game is free to download and play.
2. Pokemon was Modernized to Impress an Evolved Market
Image Source: YouTube
Originally, the Pokemon character could be found on trading cards, TV and Gameboy, Nintendo’s handheld 8-bit video game device, more than 20 years ago. The Japanese video game manufacturer decided to take its existing Pokemon content, and repurpose it to capture and recapture both new and old Pokemon fans.
In order to create a brand new game, Nintendo would have had to start from scratch. That would have meant creating new characters, marketing the new game as well as building a brand new buzz and audience for the new game. Because the original Pokemon game had already proven itself to be a valuable asset to the video game world, leveraging (and modernizing) this ole’ gaming solution made much more sense.
3. Augmented Reality is the New “Thing” in Video Gaming
What is augmented reality? It’s the process of integrating digital content in real-time with the user’s environment. The ultimate aim is to duplicate the environment of the real world in a computer. Many experts are pinning augmented reality as the number one reason for the continuously growing success of this reality app.
Image Source: flickr
Snapchat is a prime example of just how much users love augmented reality technology in mobile apps. Its users have “gone mad” over the Snapchat filters that give you the ability to overlay (or, literally distort) you face. It seems there’s no turning back from here. Reality apps are here to stay!
Content Marketing the Pokemon Go Way
Why do you believe Pokemon Go has become one of the most popular mobile game apps on the market? Do you believe that reusing old Pokemon content was a smart move on Nintendo’s part? Tell us what you think about this content marketing strategy in the comments below?