This is the first article in a series about how startups can use games to engage their target customers on mobile. We’ll post one new article every Wednesday, so stay tuned.

Before we go into the details of how you should use games in your mobile marketing strategy, I want to step back and talk about why you should use games in your mobile marketing strategy.

The answer is pretty straightforward – adding a game to a marketing campaign can increase click-through-rates by 7x (see this infographic from Celtra for more stats) and decrease customer acquisition costs by 30%. In non-marketing speak, this means you end up getting a higher return on your advertising budget.

Normally, if a company wanted to enjoy these benefits, they’d need to hire a game studio or an ad agency to build them a custom game. Most startups and small businesses just don’t have the time, budget or expertise to do that.

Gamewheel was designed with these smaller advertisers in mind. It’s a self-service tool that allows you to create custom ad games and use them in your marketing campaigns, all without knowing anything about game design or coding.

So games are a great tool for marketers, and Gamewheel makes them much more accessible. But like any tool, games are only effective when you know how to use them. That’s why we started this blog series – to help you get as much value as possible out of Gamewheel.

Next week, we’ll kick things off with a post about product-market fit, minimum viable customer segments and how it all relates to ad games. Until then, have a great week!