Mobile game and app developers and publishers should coordinate their various marketing activities to ensure their products are given the maximum visibility possible, according to Oli Christie, CEO and founder of UK mobile games developer Neon Play.

Christie told Mobile Apps Briefing that the amount of competition in the mobile game space means that getting your product noticed is becoming increasingly difficult: “it’s really, really, really hard and I think that’s going to be the big challenge going forward.”

The best way to boost visibility is to have a game or app featured by the app store in question. “That can give you a massive boost – especially on the home page on Apple. That’s the Holy Grail,” he continued.

A most effective approach for getting your game into this position is to generate a buzz on social networks. Neon Play has 60,000 Facebook fans, 3,500 Twitter followers and has had 100,000 video views on YouTube.

But this marketing activity needs to be timed correctly, according to Christie. “It’s important that you try and launch all [marketing efforts] together at the same time. It’s like a scrum, if all eight people are pushing at the same time, it’s going to be more effective than people pushing individually at the different time,” he said.

Another approach Neon Play successfully employs is cross-promotion of games across its portfolio. “I think the way that we cross promote our apps is fairly unique in the industry – I don’t think many people do it as well as us,” Christie said.

However, old-fashioned advertising is less of a sure-fire way of increasing visibility, with a return on investment that only makes sense if you’re generating a huge number of downloads.

Neon Play is looking at other ways in which it can improve games visibility. The company is currently looking at how to better analyse how users discover and use its games to help optimise revenues and ensure its limited marketing budget is used to good effect.

“So [we have] people to look at the game stats we’ve got and work out how we can optimise the revenues from the games we’ve currently got. Marketing and getting it out there is definitely a key thing but there’s only so much you can do with a limited budget,” Christie said.

And Neon Play also aims to help smaller developers increase the visibility of their mobile games and apps. From the beginning of next year, Neon Play’s Brightside publishing division will provide developers with advice and give them access to its own existing audience.

Read more from our interview with Neon Play here.