Mobile Game Marketing Plan: A Template and How to Set the Budget

A marketing plan for a mobile game is not a deck. It is a short document that answers a few questions in writing before money is spent: what stage the game is at, who it is for, what a player is worth, where those players will come from, what the ads will look like, how results will be read, and how much will be spent before the next decision. Teams that skip it usually discover the answers one invoice at a time.

Below is a template you can copy section by section, followed by the two ways to set the budget. It complements how to advertise a mobile game, which covers the channels themselves.

Section 1: stage and goal

A game's marketing depends on its stage far more than on its genre. Write down which one you are in and the single goal for it.

• Pre-launch: build a list of interested players and learn which pitch lands. Goal: pre-registrations or wishlist sign-ups at a known cost. See pre-registration campaigns.
• Soft launch: release in a few test markets and buy small volumes to measure retention and monetization. Goal: trustworthy numbers, not scale. See soft launch playable ads.
• Global launch: spend to scale in the markets where the numbers work. Goal: installs at or below the cost the game can afford.
• Live: keep acquisition profitable, bring lapsed players back, and support events. Goal: return on ad spend within a set payback window.

Section 2: audience and positioning

Describe the player in terms an ad platform can act on: the games they already play, the platform (iOS and Android audiences often behave differently), the markets, and what they want from a session. Then write one sentence that says why this game rather than the ones they already have. That sentence becomes the hook of your first ads, so test whether it survives being shown rather than told.

Section 3: unit economics

This is the section that decides whether paid marketing is possible at all. Three numbers matter:

• Lifetime value (LTV): what an average acquired player is expected to pay you, through purchases and ads, over a chosen window.
• Cost per install (CPI): what you pay, on average, to acquire that player.
• Payback period: how long it takes for a cohort's revenue to cover what it cost to acquire.

Before soft launch these are estimates; after it, they are measurements. ROAS and LTV for mobile game UA shows how they are calculated, and D1, D7 and D30 retention explains the input that moves LTV the most.

Section 4: channels by stage

List each channel, its role and the stage it serves. A typical plan for a casual game uses a few in-app networks for most paid installs, one or two social platforms, app store optimization for organic conversion, and cross-promotion from any games you already run. The best ad networks for mobile games compares the paid options. Start narrow: two channels you can read properly beat six you cannot.

Section 5: creative plan

Creative usually decides performance more than targeting does, so give it its own section. State the formats you will run (video, playables, interactive end cards, static images), how many new concepts you will test each month, and who makes them. Plan for refresh: every creative wears out, and creative fatigue and refresh cadence explains how to see it coming.

• Concepts: a short list of hooks to test, each a different reason to play.
• Formats per channel: what each network and platform accepts and favours.
• Volume and cadence: how many new creatives per week or month, and how many variants of a winner.
• Production: in-house, agency or a builder. The cost of playable ads compares the routes.

Section 6: measurement

Write down how installs are attributed, which events are tracked, and where results are read. Most teams use a mobile measurement partner to compare channels on one scale; on iOS, attribution runs largely through Apple's privacy framework, which SKAdNetwork for playables explains. Name the metric each decision will be made on, so that a cheap install and a valuable one are never confused.

Section 7: the budget

There are two honest ways to set a marketing budget, and a good plan uses both and takes the smaller answer.

Top-down: what you can afford to lose

Start from the money available and decide how much of it can be spent learning. In pre-launch and soft launch, marketing spend buys information, not profit, so the question is how much information you need. A soft-launch budget should be large enough to reach a meaningful number of installs per market and per creative concept, and no larger; buying more installs at this stage does not improve the game.

Bottom-up: what a player is worth

Once LTV is measured, the budget follows from it. If players are worth more than they cost within your payback window, spend can grow until the cost of the next install rises to meet the value; if they are worth less, more spend loses more money, and the right move is to improve retention, monetization or creative before buying again. This is why no fixed percentage of revenue makes a good marketing budget for a game: the ceiling is set by unit economics, not by a ratio.

Split the budget

• Proven spend: channels and creatives that already meet target.
• Testing: new channels, markets and concepts, ring-fenced so that winners can emerge without being judged against mature campaigns.
• Creative production: the cost of making the ads, which is easy to forget and grows with spend.
• Tools and measurement: attribution, analytics and production software.

Section 8: calendar and checkpoints

Put dates on the stages, on major content updates and on seasonal moments that matter to your audience. Add a checkpoint after each stage where the plan is reviewed against the numbers: continue, change, or stop. A plan with no stopping rule tends to keep spending after it should have stopped.

Section 9: risks

List what would break the plan: a store featuring that does not happen, a platform policy change, a metric that comes in under the threshold, a creative pipeline that cannot keep up. For each, write the response in advance. It takes ten minutes and saves the panicked version of the same decision later.

A one-page version for small teams

An indie developer does not need nine sections. One page will do: the stage and goal, the player and the one-sentence pitch, the target CPI or the amount you can afford to learn with, two channels, four ad concepts, the metric you will judge them on, and the date of the next decision. Everything else can be added as the game earns it.

Creative is the part of the plan that has to be repeated every month. Playable Ads Maker's templates give you a working playable or end card to re-skin for each concept, exported for every network on the plan, so the creative section is not limited by how fast a developer can build.