Marketing Goals
As part of my team role, I want to focus on the marketing side of our game. It's something that I'm really interested in and enjoy doing. I think I'll be pretty useful with this being part of my role for the team as nobody else in the team likes doing it.
The purpose of marketing our game is to create an audience. We need people to buy our game, to attend the end of year show, and to engage with a Kickstarter if we choose to create one. (I'll worry about the crowdfunding stuff next semester.)
Theoretically, these could be three different audiences. The people who buy our game may not be able to attend our end of year event. Additionally, we need to figure out the type of people who engage with online content. These people will help grow our audience quicker, increase the number of people who hear about our game and help us reach our desired audiences.
Creating an Audience
This article from gamemarketinggenie.com suggests several ways of marking your game:
1) Using Social Media
We should find out what social media platforms to use/what platforms our audience uses the most.
2) Going on gaming Podcast
3) Using Reddit
Set up a subreddit.
4) Contact Influencers
Relevant influencers for us would be gaming Youtubers and Twitch streamers.
5) Drive Traffic to Your Website
Create a website for our game and link to it when we post online content.
6) Marketing Stunts
Not sure what stunts we could do, but maybe we could have competitions? Like a competition to have your character in the game?
7) Using Review Websites
Social Media Platforms
According to this article, the top used social media platforms were: Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat. Not all of these are appropriate for our marketing purposes. TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat especially all use formats that I don't think will show off our game well. Snapchat is used more for connecting with people, Tiktok focuses on viral dances and people orientated videos and Pinterest caters to an older female audience of mothers (not our gamer demographic.)
Twitter is used most commonly by other game dev studios and has a wide variety of game design focused hashtags including: #gamedev #indiegame #gamedevlife. Instagram's main purpose is for sharing images and can help us build up an appealing visual portfolio for our game. I have used Instagram in the past to share my art, it is my prefered platform, but I know within my friendship group people have found they get better engagement on Twitter. I think it could be good to use Instagram as a more professional platform for finished assets, posters, etc. and Twitter for a platform for more regular general updates with concepts and unfinished assets.
Youtube is a video sharing platform that also has the ability to host live streams. I think videos are suited for showing off how our game plays and would create variety in our content. I also think the appeal of Youtube is allowing your audience to get to know you, the game devs, a little better as it feels more personal if the audience can see and hear you. Streaming is even better for this as people can engage in real-time. The streaming platform Twitch could be good for live streaming and even has a dedicated category for people creating art.
Target Audience
To figure out our target audience I think we should start by surveying players of similar games to ours. The most similar games that our team agreed on was Viscera Cleanup Detail and Houseflipper. I think we should survey these type of people, probably by posting the survey in relevant subreddits. The only problems with this is that Reddit has its own user base (25 to 29 age group, 69% male), which may influence the results of the surveys.
To combat this I want to create a general survey that can be posted elsewhere, such as on discord servers and to friends. The general survey should have a graphic explaining what our game is, so we can figure out of the people survey would be interested in our game, and find out more info from there.
I want to find out general demographics such as age, location, gender; as well as more focused info such as the types of games they like, what social media they use, etc. I want this information so I can tailor our social media accounts to get engagement from these people.
(EDIT: you can read about the surveys here.)
Name on Social Media
Before we can set up social media accounts we need to know what we've going to call ourselves. I created a google doc wich the other team members could contribute to (which you can access here) with a list of games of game dev studios.
There isn't really a pattern between these names, so we can pretty much choose whatever we want. Alternatively, we could go by our game name. I think this may make more sense as when I asked, people, seem to remember game names rather than studio names. By calling ourselves by our game name, it could make us easier to find on social media.
Game Name
We ended up organically choosing a name that is a play on words. Our character designs are based on muppets and in the game you mop up messes. So Moppit. We all liked it and thought it was catchy. We did a quick google search to see if there were any existing products or companies with that name, but all we found was a brand of toilet roll that isn't even available for purchase anymore.
NEXT SEMESTER
Next semester we're going to be looking at marketing in more detail. I would like to research the below topics:
What content do we post?
Images?
Videos?
Updates on game
Engaging with other creators
What content is the most successful on which social media platforms?
Networking
Which people/companies to interact with?
Hashtag and events to engage with?
Should we connect our personal accounts to the team social media?
Brand Image
logo
banners
langauge
Competitors
Who are our competitors?
At what price do our competitors sell their games?
Any similar upcoming Kickstarters/IndieGoGos?
What content do our competitors post?
I want to make the marketing for our game as effective as possible. I've already attended some UKIE events on branding. For my Professional Context module, I wrote an essay about what I learnt from these events, which you can read here.
I'm really excited to make a social media schedule for us next semester to make posting easier. I'd like to use a website like Buffer that will allow us to have posts queued up on multiple platforms; this will be useful for keeping consistent on social media, even if we have a slow week. My teammates recommended a similar website called https://www.postybirb.com/. Postybirb is able to post to various sites such as Pillowfort, Patreon, Tumblr and more. I'd like to compare the scheduling websites to see which would suit our needs the best.
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