M.4 Week 4: Building Awareness of Your Game

 

Subject:

Create a marketing plan for an indie game.  

Use social media and content marketing to build product awareness. 

Use email lists and community forums to capture sales leads. 

Evaluate the return on investment of different forms of promotion. 

Discuss what platforms and channels you would use for marketing, and create a marketing timeline.

1. 1. Development Phase: Existing player community promotion through personal Twitter, Patreon, and Discord.

   2. Demo Release: In addition to posting on the aforementioned social media platforms, emails will be sent to the existing player email lists.

   3. Fundraising Phase: In addition to crowdfunding on Kickstarter (Worldwide) and Zeczec (Taiwan), electronic rewards will be created to encourage sponsors to voluntarily help spread the promotion.

   4. Official Release: Thanks to the school for sharing Auronen's video. I will follow his approach and reach out to YouTubers to try to get promotion. I will also attempt to utilize Reddit.

Explain how your marketing strategy supports your particular genre, game design, marketing hooks and USP.

Due to the niche and specific nature of my game genre, players outside of this target audience might not be interested in playing my game. Therefore, I think two key approaches make sense:

• • Collaborate with YouTubers: Find content creators, not necessarily exclusive to gaming, who resonate with your audience. Let them try your game and leverage their reach for exposure.
  • Reward backers for promoting: Offer electronic rewards to your backers, encouraging them to spread the word on platforms they frequent. This is because there is a significant opportunity to meet other potential target demographics there. 

Where possible use references and evidence to support your decisions and explain your choices. 

• • I previously used electronic rewards to encourage players to help me promote my crowdfunding campaign on Zeczec (Taiwan), and it yielded almost 1 million TWD. It might not be a huge amount, but I think it's a good method, especially considering my audience is relatively smaller in Taiwan. Also, besides this, I didn't do any other promotion; this outcome is entirely attributed to this approach.
    
  • Additionally, I believe released a game demo and pre-release Kickstarters campaign on itch.io is a good combination.
    (Perhaps doing this on Steam could be more effective, but I was suspended there due to an argument with their arrogant testing team, so it's hard to say.) I raised £16,811 without any promotion but released a demo and pre-release Kickstarters campaign on itch.io. (not even an electronic rewards campaign because I was really busy at that time.) So I can say this outcome is entirely contributed by itch.io players. Considering my game's niche audience, if your game is targeting mainstream players, I believe this approach can bring you more revenue.
    
  • Week 4: Tuomas Auronen on Getting Noticed