In the previous post, we’ve talked about how crucial it is to build a marketing plan in order to successfully disseminate your game. Here, we are going to delve a little deeper on how to use Digital Marketing to your advantage.
Digital marketing, in broader terms, divides the media channels into three categories: owned, paid and earned. As you can recall, we have already covered optimising your landing pages, social media profiles, and blog sites. Furthermore, I have also included some tips on how to build meaningful relationships with your game dev fellows and game reviewers such as on Twitch and Youtube. What’s left to discuss are your paid and earned channels.
Paid channels obviously demand more investment from you. But with it, you will have plenty of options to launch and re-launch your game. Yes, I am not an expert in this field but I would like to share my resources which could add up to your references.
First of all, choosing your target audience is very important so that you can identify which are the best channels you should get. For example, if you are doing an adventure game, you will probably target and spend money on forums and existing communities instead of spending your budget on Facebook ads. Most of these communities already have their paid plans to advertise — so then you can plan a soft launch just targeting a few and see the outcome.
Paid social media advertisements, such as Facebook and Twitter ads, are very unlikely to yield ROI for many reasons but it is mostly because people use these channels for sharing their personal thoughts or stalking their partners. A good recipe to follow would be:
- Use your OWNED value of content
- Support it by some PAID and focused ads
- People will inevitably start to notice you and they become EARNED channels by creating buzz over your game
For the sake of analysis, whatever you put out there, send them out with custom links so you will have a way to study audience interaction when the campaign is over. Simply, try to get useful insights from the data you can gather. For example, start comparing Facebook and Twitter interactions: which one got a better response in conversion rate? What about the copy of the ads? When you have a set of data, start making questions and always try to conclude them with an action — that’s the simplest trick to transform a set of data into useful insights.
To conclude: focus on your value proposition (your game content), find your target audience and find the best tool to get it. It’s useless to have followers on Facebook if you don’t have any conversion rate. Since your game graphics are awesome, why don’t you try Pinterest? Always ask questions to yourself and brainstorm with your team to get most of the things ready for paying anything!
SOSTAC Model can help with the definition of a good marketing plan:
Situation — where are we now?
Objectives — where do we want to be?
Strategy — how do we get there?
Tactics — how exactly do we get there?
Action — what is our plan?
Control — did we get there?