How Marapets promoted its game in its early days
When Marapets opened up to the public, they went on to drive in a lot of new users very quickly by using a lot of viral marketing tactics. They had a “Promote Marapets” feature, which was apart of their referral system and this feature rewarded users that placed their referral link in forum signatures, blogs, social media sites and other websites across the internet. The promote Marapets feature helped them grow their game a lot. They were averaging thousands of users online at any given moment. A lot of their users took advantage of this feature because of the in-game rewards that they received from marketing Marapets.
Using a paid ads to capitalize on Marapets viral marketing.
Launching a viral marketing campaign wasn’t the only campaign that helped Marapets grow. They also strictly targeted Neopets users via a paid Google AdWords campign leveraged their growth. Everytime users would search for Neopets on Google, they’d see an ad for Marapets or they’d see an ad for Marapets on Neopets itself. Also, Mara advertised on neopets fansites by purchasing links and ad spaces on their fan sites.
Since Marapets has a lot of features and concepts that are similar to Neopets, they were able to attract and retain a lot of Neopets players. Some players from Neopets weren’t so pleased and called Marapets a neopets clone. Which, in turn, caused a huge uproar. Marapets also boasted how they had better support than Neopets so they were able to attract they were frozen in the past on Neopets.
They also targetted the “games” keyword on Google via Google AdWords. Marapets has a huge selection of games which allowed them to retain users and attract more daily players. Their games are all open to the public and guests were able to play. If they didn’t have a lot of games available, this campaign would of failed. The ad campaign went on for a few months as Marapets continued growth went on for awhile.
Combining a viral marketing campaign and a paid advertising campaign are the two reasons why Marapets has over 300k members to this day.