Game Marketing - Daniel Parente Blog

Indie Game Marketing Resources

A collection of Indie game Marketing resources about marketing to allow game developers to increase their awareness of marketing for their games and businesses.

A Modern Approach to Indie Game Dev Marketing in 2020

https://www.mattkander.com/post/a-modern-approach-to-indie-game-dev-marketing-in-2020

The Author spent 8 months consulting with an indie games studio on how to market their game
The result? A YouTube channel, a decent meme generator and a sprinkling of influencers is by far best way to go about it
Provide exceptional value in the form of entertainment and educational content resulting in a long-term marketing asset
Matched with a library of videos related to game development and gaming, YouTube will be actively promoting that content to viewers it thinks will be most receptive
YouTube Strategy: Create value – a balance of entertainment and educational content in the form of tutorials, developer updates and behind the scenes

11 points marketing guide for small indie developers

https://vginsights.com/insights/article/a-11-point-marketing-guide-for-small-indie-developers

A good introduction to marketing for game developers with the advices being break-down by phases associated with the game design and development.

Steam, Google Play and App Store all use algorithms to put your game in trending lists which will result a lot of visibility, but in order for them to do so, you’ll have to send the algorithms the right signals to begin with.This allows you to build up interest ahead of launch and get the required momentum to support word of mouth, trending lists and journalists, reviewers and streamers picking up your game and giving free promotions.
Research blogs, sites and journalists who have posted about games similar to yours and create a list with contact details.
Have a list of all the streamers who play games similar to yours and their contact details.

Indie Mobile Game Marketing: Best Strategies for 2020

View at Medium.com

With so many mobile games in the app stores, it’s hard to get noticed and get people to play your game, the author gathers several points to help you getting the most of your marketing effort.

You just need to learn some basic indie mobile game marketing strategies.
You might think the time to start promoting your mobile game is after you release it.
One of the first steps of indie mobile game marketing is creating a landing page for your game.
Create content to add to your website and use to promote your game on social media.
Love it or hate it, it’s the most effective way to market your indie mobile game, Use them to promote your mobile game and build a community around it.
Besides social media, you should also be active in indie mobile game communities.
Other important ASO steps are indexing your mobile game, adding screenshots and videos, including relevant keywords, localization, and adding an eye-catching icon.

Marketing Your Indie Game 101

https://www.buildbox.com/marketing-your-indie-game-101/?980

Very interesting and Useful overview on Marketing Your Indie Game 101 by Builbox

An excellent game design technique to follow when you’re designing your app icon and screenshots is to study the top trending games similar to yours to see what they’re doing and do it better
These images and videos can be used during both your game’s pre and post-launch marketing strategy to spark interest. They play a role in your App Store listing and optimization which helps with rank and discoverability too
Landing pages are a great way to promote your game app. They provide you with a home base to connect with fans and even press
You can create an entire community centered around your game all via your website
The second thing that Notch did that you can do too for free when marketing your indie game is getting active on forums
Things like your app icon, screenshots, and game trailer are important to nail in the beginning.
You can also create multiple sites like a game dev blog and a website for your indie studio to help market your game too.
Creating your landing page in the early stages of development is best if you want to build up a following pre-release.
As you progress in development, start adding your app icon, gameplay trailer, and screenshots to the page.
They’re a convenient way to give bloggers, reviewers, and journalist access to all your app and studio info and media like screenshots and videos at once.
Step five and the second thing that Notch did that you can do too for free when marketing your indie game is getting active on forums.
If you get active before you start your game’s development and continue to share and connect with other devs and gamers you can establish an entire fanbase around your game before its launch.
High-resolution screenshots (at least 3 or more) An exciting 30 to 90 seconds gameplay trailer App Icon Indie Studio Logo (if any) Banner Images Press Release

How to Use Social Media for Indie Game Marketing: A Beginners Guide

https://www.process.st/indie-game-marketing/

.The term ‘social media marketing’ is a bit vague and encompasses a bunch of different approaches; the article looks at some of the different ways you can use social media to market your game in this article.
Social media marketing is great for connecting on an intimate level with your fans and building lasting communities around your game, from early development until launch, and beyond.
The key to social media success, whether for games or any industry, is consistency.
The purpose of your social media marketing should be to give your game a consistent presence that it maintains over time.
The most common mistake that game devs make when first getting into social media marketing is thinking that if you just post your art, your videos, and your sales, people will automatically start flocking to you.
You need to find people who like the same things you do – who play the same games, follow the same content creators, and use the same hashtags – and start conversations with them.
Post whatever you’re working on every Saturday, and use the #screenshotsaturday hashtag so people find you.
Before you share a post or any piece of content, ask yourself these questions: Games that use Twitter really effectively include Potionomics, A Juggler’s Tale, and Mongrel.
On Discord, you’ll mainly communicate through text discussion, so it’s best that you’re as present as you can be on your server to keep your audience engaged, and feel as though they’re building a more intimate relationship with you.
The algorithm works on the following principle: “see what content people like and engage with, then show them more of that” It’s also a feature-rich platform that has a lot of ways you can use it: stories, stickers, IGTV, live videos, etc.
There are a number of measurements, or analytics, you want to pay attention to when you’re gauging how many people are seeing your posts, interacting with them, and then going on to buy or wishlist your game.
Social media marketing is time-consuming and can easily turn into a grueling process unless you have a way of streamlining it, which is why you need to make it easier on yourself with effective workflow management and software.
It allows you to plan your instagram posts weeks in advance and offers things like: Be warned however that it’s an image-first platform.
At the end of the day, the key to a successful marketing strategy comes down to a single process that you only have to figure out once; and then it’s as simple as following a checklist every time after that.
Productivity apps, like Evernote, have a social media calendar to help you keep track of what you’re posting when and on what channel.
The best way you can use social media as a game developer is to experiment, get creative, be nice to people and just have fun!

The Basic Marketing Plan For Indie Games

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131104/the_basic_marketing_plan_for_indie_.php

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131104/the_basic_marketing_plan_for_indie_.php?page=2

A marketing plan might sound something awfully hard to do for a game developer, but to briefly put it: the marketing plan is your flightplan on how to get your game to your players
The contents of a marketing plan can be divided into several sections
The marketing plan will focus on those major objectives, and how to reach those goals
Depending on your company’s strategy, your marketing plan might use more than one distribution methods

Then, you continue by adding the goals for sales, downloads, conversion rate, and the price for your product.
Depending on your game, the company’s profile, target market, you might price your game differently.
Indie and casual games tend to follow these main distribution channels: Depending on your company’s strategy, your marketing plan might use more than one distribution methods.
There are many indie game publishers that can get a deal for you: Each publisher provide different terms, and your marketing plan can change depending on the deals you make.
Your marketing plan should tell you which channels you are going to use, and which ones you’ll ignore.
Ask people: if you hear comments that say that your product is fine but the website or the demo are poor, then forget polishing the product and move on to the next step in the marketing plan.
If you position yourself as offering the lowest price for young strategy gamers then the market message is much different than if you try to get offer high-quality, non-violent games for very religious players.
The Website main purpose is to get people to download the demo of your game. The indie game marketing plan lists what you will do for your website.
If the conversion rate – the rate of people who purchase the game after testing it – is low, then you might need to adjust your demo.
Your marketing plan will tell you how you will deal with the relationship: it will tell you whether you let your publisher or portals handle customer support, or use all or some of the methods discussed earlier.
As you double your download number goal you know that you need to focus on more promotion rather than optimizing the demo, website or product.
On the other hand, if you choose to refine the conversion rate, then you know that you should focus on the quality of your game, demo or website rather than promotion.
There are different types of players, games and needs. “Casual gamers” have different playing habits than “hardcore gamers”. 6-year old kids play differently compared to 15- or 30-year old players
The indie game marketing plan describes the goals derived from a company’s strategic objectives

HOW TO MAKE AN INDIE GAME MARKETING PLAN (WITH TEMPLATE)

https://www.rengenmarketing.com/how-to-make-an-indie-game-marketing-plan-with-template/

How much is it worth you making your indie game? If you’re extremely passionate about making games and want to make a living doing that, why would even bother without having an indie game marketing plan?
As you start posting you want to make sure you monitor your game’s and brand’s online reputation
Even with a well-formatted plan, it can still be difficult to fully visualize everything that needs to be done. For this reason, having tables and schedules is a great way to look at your entire marketing plan at a high level to fully visualize everything that needs to be implemented

If you’re extremely passionate about making games and want to make a living doing that, then why would even bother without having an indie game marketing plan?
Once that you have an idea of your goals and purpose, you also want to think about some high-level objectives or mechanisms that are needed to reach those goals.
When you’re getting started on tackling your marketing plan, you really want to have a basic, high-level sense of what you are trying to achieve.
Setting up your indie game marketing plan, at the forefront of the production, makes things easier to follow and helps reduce potentially overwhelming you and your team.
The first thing that you need, before starting to flesh out some of your ideas and phases further, is to know the audience you’re targeting. It will help you determine and refine your messaging, give you insight where to target them and provide clarity on things they like and don’t.
You may think that you know your audience but for your marketing to work, you need to learn about them as much as possible outside of the types of games they may play.
This just scratches the surface, but it’s all valuable and helpful information which will slowly help you sculpt your indie game marketing plan.
If you struggled at all, it’s just an indicator that you don’t know your game as well as you need to.
Your messaging is going to be conveyed in a variety of ways throughout different channels of communication and it all needs to resonate with your targeted audience.
Conducting a SWOT analysis will help structure your indie game marketing plan and guide you on which strategies to use when you’re ready for distribution.
To sell your game but you need to think differently than just sales.
One of the most important aspects of your indie game marketing plan is to first identify which online assets you’ll be managing.
In terms of providing information, you at least want to have a synopsis of your game, some info about the team, a press kit, a dev blog, an awesome trailer and a demo.
You also don’t want to manage an asset that has a very low chance of helping you build your community either.
The point is, if you focus on helping others and engage the communities you want to promote to, you’ll be adding value.
All you have to do is make sure the communities you choose are ones you want to be involved with and can help reach your goals.
There was a lot covered about managing your assets, but as you start posting you want to make sure you monitor your game’s and brand’s online reputation.
Conducting audits will provide you with valuable insight and determine if shifts need to be made, in either your marketing strategy or game development.
What you really want to look for are trends that will help you decide if you should change your plans or not.
In terms of frequency, you’ll probably want to start with the following breakout: Promotional: 15% Informative/News: 25% Random/Fun: 60% This breakout is just a rough example, but it gives you a great starting point.
When making your website lists, it’s really good to keep track of any additional helpful information about the influencer or entity.
Press releases can be helpful and should be a part of your indie game marketing plan, however, they shouldn’t be the crutch of your entire campaign.
It’s absolutely fine if that’s the case, but you still need to understand the importance paid advertising can have and how it can help progress your marketing campaign.
There are a lot of platforms out there, but it’s best to stick with only a couple you feel are going to have the biggest impact and reach.
Once you have determined which platform you want to use you’re going to need to come up with a strategy.
What you want your target audience to do will help dictate what objective and strategy you should use.
There’s definitely a lot more that can be discussed on this subject, but the important thing to take away is to know your objective, understand its purpose and how you plan to measure its success.
For this reason, having tables and schedules is a great way to look at your entire marketing plan at a high level to fully visualize everything that needs to be implemented.

Practices of Game Design& Indie Game Marketing

Click to access SB3_Practices_of_Game_Design__Indie_Game_Marketing_FreeBook.pdf

The document is recompilation of several chapters from CRC Press that can be of interest to game developers, in your journey to design, develop, and market your game. These titles from CRC Press include: The Game Begins with an Idea from The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Second Edition written by Jesse Schell This book discusses how the basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games, and athletic games are the keys to making top-quality video games
Marketing Vehicles That Can Work Well For Indies from A Practical Guide to lndie Game Marketing, written by Joel Dreskin Marketing can be as vital to the success of an indie game as the game itself
Designer Chris Klug encourages all designers to find one key emotional experience to build your game around, which he calls “the emotional heart of art direction.” This notion is backed up by others. four graduate students undertook to create fifty videogames in a single semester and wrote about what they learned in the excellent essay “How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days.” The following is an excerpt: As an alternative to brainstorming, we found that gathering art and music with some personal significance was fruitful
Why? Partly because I can lay out all the sheets on the table, or on the floor, and consider all the ideas from a distance if I need to. Because it gives the process a certain dignity. but partly because it just feels right! and when brainstorming, you need to do what feels right for you—every little thing you do that makes you a little more creatively comfortable increases the chances that the great idea will come. and what is right for one person isn’t right for everyone—you must constantly experiment to find what works best. but if you can’t get the materials you prefer, don’t you dare whine about it—use what you’ve got!

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