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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperBusinessPaid Marketing vs Self Marketing
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Carlos224
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« on: September 16, 2014, 07:19:55 AM »

Hi folks,
I'm wondering if anyone has any experiences to share where they have paid for marketing (or advice) and have done solo marketing?
I want your stories and experiences!

Was paying for marketing the best thing ever? Do you swear by doing it yourself?

I've been doing my own marketing thus far, it's not very flash or exciting. I want to find out if it's worth hiring someone. I realize experiences may vary, but it would be good to hear your experiences.
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joe_eyemobi
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« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2014, 12:58:59 PM »

It depends on your budget I guess, and if you go for a pro marketer the results may vary.  If you go down the latter path just do your due diligence - e.g. find out if they've done a project like yours before, their track record, etc...
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« Reply #2 on: September 17, 2014, 10:04:18 AM »

I've heard that personally emailing writiers for "the biggies" is much more effective than hiring a press-release company, as press releases just look like copy and paste and get ignored once opened.

Now, not only does that have your game not looked at, your relationship with that writer is somewhat tainted, as you could have just sent a simple email.
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Carlos224
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« Reply #3 on: September 23, 2014, 06:14:02 AM »

What approach have you both taken?
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Muz
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« Reply #4 on: September 23, 2014, 08:18:25 AM »

I've done marketing for physical products, not with games so far.

Marketing is a full time job. It's not like you bombard marketing on release of your game. Good marketing is repetitive. If you're lucky, someone will hear about you once and buy it on the spot. But that's not the norm. Normally people hear about a product several times before purchasing.

Take something like Destiny for example. How many have bought it? How many times did they hear from it? I hear it from a friend on Facebook. A couple of gaming sites. I still haven't bought it, but if my brother suddenly loads it up and claims it's the best thing ever, I'd buy it. My siblings do claim a lot of games are the best thing ever, but if I haven't heard of it before, I likely won't buy.

It's best done from multiple angles hitting in close succession. A lot of indie marketers have this rather dum concept of using one channel. They'll use one channel, analyze the results, stop, then move to another channel. That's like trying to get a girlfriend by dating her once every few months. It's just not going to work unless you keep dating her steadily, but you have to time things so you don't sound too pushy.

Look at cliffski - he hits from Facebook, Google, blogs, posts on forums, Steam, writes articles, gets his name up on gaming sites. That's how it's supposed to be done.

A lot of indies talk about the long tail. But honestly, there's only a long tail because some people are only recently crossing the purchase bar.

Alternatively, you just raise the quality extremely high that people will buy it no matter how vague it is. Then you've got yourself a cult classic. But unless you've spent millions developing it, it's not going to be good enough to cross that mark. Dwarf Fortress is arguably one of the most complex games ever made, but it's got a full time programmer and a full time marketer/designer/fundraiser.

Marketing is also a lot of hard work. If you're maintaining a Facebook page, website, or a blog, you'd need to update Facebook daily, website/blog at least once a month. Blogs/sites are even more picky, because if you're not consistently updating them, your Google ranking drops.


So, to answer the question, you can get the ball rolling yourself to decide if it's worth marketing. But you better be marketing consistently, not only at launch. If you're going to keep making new games, then just pay someone to do marketing.
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Carlos224
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« Reply #5 on: September 24, 2014, 01:31:42 AM »

Thanks that's really informative. I can see how maintaining each medium (twitter fbook + several blogs) becomes job in itself. I think I need to invest more time in marketing, at the moment I'm most certainly doing it ineffectively.
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hagbardgroup
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« Reply #6 on: October 14, 2014, 07:55:51 AM »

Speaking as a marketer, we need a certain budget level to provide comprehensive service.

For example, for an ad campaign, if the spending is below $5k/month minus fees, and doesn't go on for more than several months, there's no way that I can provide the kind of ongoing support and optimization that needs to be done for the client to get the most possible out of the work arrangement. That's really at a bare minimum, also.

Similarly, a good SEO firm will charge you north of $5k just to do an audit of your site and make initial recommendations.

For web development for marketing, this is a good tool that will puke out solid estimates for professional caliber work.

While there are agencies that serve companies with small budgets, they tend to rely on nickel + diming on fees, automation, low wage labor,  and a lot of templates. That approach might work acceptably for a locksmith, but it's not great for a creative product like a game.

One-off projects like sales pages, trailers, hourly consults, and other similar services can make a difference at a lower price, but it runs the risk of creating a campaign that is disconnected and dis-coordinated.

For example, blowing an entire budget on a trailer but having nothing left over to actually promote it could wind up being wasteful. If the only people who see the trailer are the people who land on your website or your store page, and there's no systematic effort dedicated towards bringing people to those pages, it's a tree falling in the forest without anyone there to see it. It feels really good to spend money on high quality assets, but doing so risks leaving nothing over to actually promote them.

This is actually more important for games than most other product categories, because games don't tend to have ambient pre-existing market demand for them to grab onto. While all homeowners need to have their lawns mowed somehow, and people in the first world expect to wear shoes, very few people feel a strong need for any particular game. This is one of the reasons why the big publishers spend so much on demand-generation advertising and PR: because without that, no one would care or be aware of the games or want to buy them.

Hiring a full-timer is also a risk. Experience working in a large marketing team with a big budget is an alien experience to working on a shoestring. Methods that a BigCo marketer thinks should work will not work for a bootstrapped indie game shop.

So, for indies, I would say that you need to KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID, because the more moving parts that you have in your campaign, the more things that can get screwed up.

Goat Simulator, for example, was promoted by a gameplay trailer, some press outreach, and a landing page. The landing page was even broken on mobile phones. It could have fallen completely flat, but it was so funny that people took it and ran with it.

If you're paying for asset creation (write my press release / write my sales copy / cut my trailer / design my website), ask yourself how people will get to see those assets. The more marketing channels that you try to manage, the more work needs to be done, generating higher expenses and risk.

DIY, if taken seriously, will be the best possible approach below a certain budget level.

One of the advantages of learning how to market yourself is that it will help you to evaluate business partners much better. Additionally, founders tend to be the best salespeople possible for any entrepreneurial company. For more on that, this course on entrepreneurial selling from the Kauffman Foundation is quite good.

My best suggestion for how to get better at DIY marketing is to read books on the topics that you need the most urgent help on. Free material is usually disorganized, fluffy, and sparse on detail.

To recap:

  • You & your team are the best possible salespeople, personally, for your game. Yes, even if you're cripplingly shy.
  • Professional caliber marketing work requires a professional-level budget. If you can't afford a professional, do as much as you can yourself until you can.
  • Paying for project work may be more affordable, but you need to make sure that it's connected to a good overall plan.
  • Keep it as simple as possible to reduce your risks & expenses while increasing your chances to succeed. Focus on channels that play to the strengths of your game and your team.
  • If you need advice, pay for advice to reduce your learning curve (from a book or from an adviser). Googling for tutorials eats time.

Hope that's helpful.
« Last Edit: October 14, 2014, 09:40:04 AM by hagbardgroup » Logged
rj
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« Reply #7 on: October 14, 2014, 08:04:01 AM »

thanks for that post, that's insanely helpful.

curious: aside from asset creation (press releases, trailers, etc) and running a social media account/accounts what else would a marketing firm like yours do?

in other words; i'm going to be handling all of the actual content created. what would i pay for that takes professional marketing over the top?
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hagbardgroup
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« Reply #8 on: October 14, 2014, 09:26:08 AM »

thanks for that post, that's insanely helpful.

Glad to hear that.

Quote
curious: aside from asset creation (press releases, trailers, etc) and running a social media account/accounts what else would a marketing firm like yours do?

in other words; i'm going to be handling all of the actual content created. what would i pay for that takes professional marketing over the top?

If you're doing all the content and all the video, the highest probable return for any single activity would be handing off the sales page copy and setting up split tests. The second-highest return would be developing a content and promotion plan. After that comes advertising, which is necessary, but requires a sustained effort and some up-front costs.

The costs of creating assets for ads can be defrayed by re-using other marketing material. For example, you can re-cut your 2 minute trailer to a 30 second ad and then run that on a selection of Youtube channels that are likely relevant to your game.

That's just off the top of my head, though: the best way is to tailor the solutions.

For example, a super-complex turn-based RPG probably needs more text that brings out all the crunchy details of the combat system.

A mobile infinite runner probably needs to be more video, image, and design heavy... and something that makes it stand out from all the others that are similar to it.

Otherwise, I'd tackle it by:

  • Coming up with a content marketing plan that fits the budget and the amount of labor you can dedicate to the task. This'd prevent you from wasting/time money on marginal concepts. What that means is planning what to make, when to publish it, and how to make sure it gets read.
  • We can edit your work with an eye for driving sales.
  • Identifying paid/organic search opportunities (for PC -- this is different on mobile but less so than it used to be), estimating costs and anticipated rate of return.
  • Sales copy, managing a/b copy + design tests on that. App store optimization.
  • Manage ad campaigns, ongoing testing, managing display placements, retargeting, etc.

I don't have any video editors on staff. I'm also leery of recommending outsourced social media management for small companies because it's tough to quantify the return. It's one thing when the budget is large and it's a rounding error, but it's another thing when it's not.  We can write scripts for videos and manage production, but it wouldn't be entirely in-house.

The company right now is me plus contractors that I hire when we have a project that warrants it. I'm someone who's been a freelance + staff copywriter for several years who also has some management experience. I've folded that into a company.

I would like to do more game work ('cause I love games to bits), but mostly I subcontract for ad agencies, SEO firms, some venture capitalists, etc.

Other companies with a different specialty would probably approach it in a different way. A PR firm will emphasize their existing relationships with the press, a video production company will emphasize their editing chops, and so on.
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aHumbleGameDev
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« Reply #9 on: October 18, 2014, 04:20:12 PM »

Wow HG very insightful info! Speaking from limited experience, it is so easy to drown in the sea of marketing channels and your tips help narrow the focus and process.

I am curious tho, do you have any suggestions for promoting crowd funding campaigns it seems that crowd funding for games is so prevalent that unless you have a industry established team, get picked up by or already have established relationships with game journalists, or just an outstanding game and visuals, you just get lost in the crowd.
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Rick Davidson
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« Reply #10 on: October 19, 2014, 08:17:42 AM »

Great conversation.

I find that whoever is raising awareness for your game has to really understand your game, your target audience and what the buttons are to push. A fancy marketing agency wont do this well, unless of course they specialise in Indie games. AAA games, are a totally different beast (its more about big spend, big volume, big splash) so be wary about hiring someone who has worked generally in marketing or in AAA marketing.

When it comes to Indie games I think its better to think of it as community management. A viable road to success is hiring someone on a part-time basis (eg. half time) or teaming up with a friend, getting them totally immersed in your game and audience and then giving them the task of consistently connecting with your community. Key work here is CONSISTENCY! Think of it like exercising, you have to go to the gym 5 days a week to get results, you can't save it all up for one mega work out once a month. 

Ideally your community conversations should start many months before you launch. The absolutely critical part is to do "YOU" marketing, not "ME" marketing. Me marketing = "hey, I've made a game, please play it". You've got to give people value, connect with them, ask them questions, challenge them, entertain them, etc. If you can't / wont / don't want to do this then your options are:
1. Make a game that is so incredibly remarkable that it spreads incredibly through word of mouth.
2. Pay for traffic acquisition (Facebook or in-game ads are the most effective at this point in time).
3. Rely on ASO (app store optimization) - try to get ranked high in searches when people are searching for games like yours.

I advise people to not use external marketing companies / PR companies (too expensive and not immersed enough) but instead do it in-house with the best strategy (if you can manage it) is to pay someone or find a friend / partner or even a newbie marketer / student who will join your team for a share of future glory or small amount of money.

The best thing you can do, no matter your marketing strategy, is to aim for an incredibly remarkable product. Its got to stand out, be fresh, be distinct, be provocative. It can't just be "a fun game".

Good luck with the journey and if you ever need any help, just ask.

Rick
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #11 on: October 19, 2014, 09:30:12 AM »

marketing can take up enormous amounts of time, but it's also possible to pour enormous amounts of time into it with no or almost no results if you don't know what you are doing. so by paying for a marketing person, you are not only paying for the actual effort they put into it, but also for their knowledge about what to do: what works and what doesn't work

that type of knowledge you might think you can get yourself by reading books or online articles, but that's only partly true; because the marketer has done it so much, they've spent years building up that knowledge, and you can't really match that knowledge just by reading a few articles and books

basically i'd say if you can *afford* a marketer, or if you can find one who will market your game for 10% of the sales or something, then by all means go with that marketer if they have marketed games before. that will always be better than doing it yourself

but if you can't afford one or find one in your budget range, doing marketing yourself is the next best thing

also, even if you do have a marketer, you may still want to help that marketer do it, as like an assistant marketer, making the marketing a team effort, that way you can learn from what they did for your game, and then do it yourself the next game if you feel you are capable of it. that way the marketer also benefits from the knowledge you have of your game and its audience that they might lack

i'd say that about 90% of the time when an indie attempts to market their games themselves, they typically waste their efforts on things that don't work, and which if they were more experienced they'd know they wouldn't work. so just going through the process *once* with someone experienced at marketing games is often enough to teach them what works and what doesn't, after your first time marketing a game, it becomes much easier to market a second and third. but the first one will be the biggest hurdle

also keep in mind that what games succeed and fail has as much to do with luck as with the game's quality and the marketing. all 3 of those are important. you can have a great game, and a great marketer, and do *everything right*, and still the game might fail just due to some bad luck

for indie game marketing in particular, here's a list of skills any person marketing an indie game should have:

- knowing what trailers work and what doesn't, and the ability to make a good trailer
- having a website design that looks appealing/professional / the ability to create a nice website for the game
- knowing how to select screenshots that work and avoid those that don't
- knowing how to write about the game in a way that causes people to want to play it
- knowing how help a game succeed on kickstarter
- knowing how to get a game through greenlight (although this is changing, soon it will be knowing how to get a game into steam curators' lists)
- knowing which journalists, youtube let's players, streamers, etc., to send free copies of the game to for review, and how to word the emails that they send to those people
- how to price the game, and when to have sales, and how often
- maintaining social media accounts (tumblr, facebook, twitter, etc.) and getting people to like/follow them, and updating them frequently with interesting material, and interacting with fans
- maintaining a newsletter, and how to get people to sign up to the newsletter
- how to reply to the emails of players, how to answer their questions quickly and nicely
- knowing when and how early to release a game, when to update it, and what to focus on when updating/patching the game (this is more of the developer's job but also affects the game's marketing a lot)
- recognizing the game's particular niche, audience, and what makes that game special, and emphasizing that game's 'hook' to that audience so that it stands out from other games and doesn't seem like just another game in that genre
- how to build 'hype' by slowly meting out information rather than just unevenly revealing everything all at once and then having no new material to show anyone for months
- optionally, knowing how to run contests (e.g. fanart contests or something) to bring attention to a game, if a game's audience is responsive to that type of thing
- how to overall 'manage' all of the above, knowing what to emphasize at what times, and what to put the most focus on, when
« Last Edit: October 19, 2014, 09:40:02 AM by ஒழுக்கின்மை » Logged

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