Don't Be a Copycat: Personalized Marketing for Your Game

[Music] thank you okay welcome to don't be a copycat personalized marketing for your game my name is Derek Lou and I'll be doing this talk with my friend Dana trebella um but let me tell first tell me if this sounds familiar uh you need to Market your game but you're really really overwhelmed because there's just so many tools and apps and talks and videos and articles saying do this and do this so uh you're thinking yourself okay I guess I'll just do all the things or maybe I'll do what that game did because it looked like they had success but really you don't really know how or why you should be doing any of these things so we're here to help you Market your game with goals and intentions so then that you can find what works best for you because there's so many ways that you can Market your game but first

a little bit about Dana hey I'm brand strategy for games um I've been running spoken meals strategy for the last six and a half years um but have been doing marketing for PRN games since 2012. I've worked on tons of different games all different sizes all different platforms and these are just a small sample of some of the games that I've worked on that you've heard of all right and as I said my name is Derek Lou I'm a video gaming trailer editor I've been doing it for full time about five years but I've been editing video for about 15 years and here's a small sample of some games that I've worked on I've worked on games with really small teams and games with much bigger teams and uh I I know and uh yeah all right so as I was saying there are so many ways to Market your games there's your steam store Page there's

imager newsletters mailing lists uh Discord Facebook Instagram YouTube Tick Tock Twitter and um the first step to really start marketing your game is to just know what are the tools that you have at your disposal potentially and the second is to understand what your marketing goals are and the third is to choose which tactics to use in order to fulfill those goals because especially if you're Indie you have to be really efficient with your time and your money you can't really afford to just try everything do everything at the same time and just sort of stretch yourself thin and potentially just not do any of it very well so next up Dana is going to talk about the goals you should be aiming for when it comes to marketing your game great so um as Derek mentioned we're going to talk about goals so ultimately everyone should have their own personalized goals for their game depending on team the size of the game and lots of

other external factors but one thing that I always hear over and over when I ask people about their goals is that they're always just hyper focused on sales and obviously sales is a part of it is really important but there's lots of other goals that you can have Beyond just how many copies you sell so things like do you want to find a publisher or build a community or just learn how marketing works here though we're going to walk through some goals that everyone should probably have for their marketing regardless of your own personalized goals so first you want to make your game stand out so you want to make it look and sound different from everything else out there and also remember to differentiate within your uh your own genre so if you're game marketing makes your game like look or sound the same as everything else you're probably wasting your time and your money and your efforts so it's really important to Showcase your game's strengths in a way that's digestible and accessible and also will resonate with your desired

target audience so next you want to provide a means to easily like find and share and follow your game so we all know that attention span is pretty short and you risk losing players or potential community members but they don't have an easy way to follow you or get some kind of regular reminder that your game exists so it's also important to remember that people want to tell others about the things that they've seen or they played or that they're really excited about and the easier that it is to share something the more likely and more often that it'll get shared um and then lastly your game should always end with a call to action or your marketing should always happen and with a call to action which ultimately removes friction for the player to do what you want so you want to make it as easy as possible so for example on the end plate of a trailer you should probably always have things like wish list now or um your Twitter handle or website or things like that

so next you want to provide the media so that's press YouTubers and streamers information that's easy to digest and find so that they can write stories and produce content um so media want to create stories and streams Etc on things that Their audience would be really interested in but in order to do that the information needs to be easy to find and tell a like clear and consistent message um so just like anyone else media and streamers love it when you make their job easy for them and uh like easily summarize the information and remove friction to make everything easy to find and access like screenshots trailers um your game description Etc so you also want to inform the customer so that they can make um a decision and be motivated to purchase it's really important to remember that marketing is not about tricking people it's about informing them so they can decide if it's of interest to them and they can make a decision for themselves so at a basic

level you want people to know things like what consoles or platforms what genre how much does it cost what's the playthrough time Etc and then we're going to be talking a lot about this today but you want to understand the intention of each marketing component to decide what makes sense for your game so kind of like Derek talked about early on um we both see people just doing things a lot of the time because they don't know what to do or they think they should do certain things or saw that it worked for somebody else um and are sort of just like aimlessly uh roaming around the marketing bubble but it's really important to know the why behind every marketing strategy tactic and choice that you make and that you're making choices based on all of the goals that we just talked about and also your personalized goals and the type of game that you're making the audience is for and the resources that you have so now that we've said uh repeatedly don't

just do something because um someone said that you should do this here we're going to walk through all the things that you should probably do um in order to Market your game uh so you've probably heard of all of these marketing components to some degree but we're going to walk through what the intention or purpose should be behind each of these as well as the workload the upkeep and the importance which we've you'll see we've denoted on each of the slides so you can keep those in mind while making your own marketing plans so first your message which is um a cohesive consistent and compelling way to talk about your game um in its most basic form it's your elevator pitch but it really should be based off of what makes your game special or different from everything else out there and inform all of your marketing um little self plug Derek and I actually did a talk um at QVC 2019 all about creating a message for your game and how

to enact that in your marketing and your trailers if you feel like checking them out so the intention behind your message should be ultimately you're going to use words to communicate what your game is um what makes it different and hopefully makes people interested in learning more about your game and want to follow it and share it and ultimately hopefully they buy it um what I also always say to people is like if you don't have a message what are you saying and it's really easy to tell when someone doesn't because that's when you often see things like the screenshots not actually reflecting what the game is or um like the trailer feeling really disjointed or things like that so you can see here um like I mentioned earlier we've denoted how much work and importance and upkeep everything requires so your message is a fair amount of work it's really important um and once you have it it's pretty much done like you should definitely make

sure that you're testing it and getting feedback on it but not something that you need to consistently Workshop throughout your marketing so here's a couple of quick examples of some clear and compelling messages so things like time moves when you move or it's a lovely morning in the village and you're a horrible so a couple quick tips um you'll make it clear concise and accessible you want to convey what the game is and the player experience really quickly um you want to leave people wanting more so you want to kind of tease it and not stay um or say everything all at once and then also you want to steer clear from um common traps overlying only on genre or comparing your game with others or doing things like my game is a mix of you know X and Y I had a baby so marketing timeline is exactly what it sounds like a clear framework of your games marketing timeline from your announcement to launch and it's also a thing that almost everybody skips

um so your intention if you do this correctly is that it uh provides you a framework and an understanding of what assets you'll need and when um throughout your entire public facing marketing process so that you can be more prepared and hopefully also be less stressed um it also is important to note this is internal nobody ever used to see this or know that it exists and then a few quick tips here most importantly is to start with your realistic launch time frame and work backwards so um for example you want to if you're going to launch in you know six months you want to announce your game uh like let me let me start that over uh okay so most importantly you want to start with your realistic launch time frame and work backwards to determine your marketing fees so what that means is it's really important to be honest with yourself about your time and your

resources and your launch timeline so if you plan an entire marketing campaign with a six month uh like launch time frame but it's actually going to be a year then you're only hurting yourself so it's really important to make sure that you're timing that as accurately as you can so um you want to work backwards from your uh launch date to your first time that you announce your game and that ultimately is the timeline that you have to uh fill with fun marketing things and then it's also really important to think about the spacing between your marketing beats again keeping in mind how long your overall timeline is and think through um to get through so that you're not putting too much into a condensed time frame or like taking too much space between them so press kit this is just an easy to download package of assets to help the media write about your game uh super straightforward it makes it easier for press to cover your game

um and uh you want to make sure that you're providing not an overwhelming amount of information because that can feel like daunting to people and prohibit them from covering so you want to do things like five to seven screenshots put your trailer your pricing information information about the game and it should all be in one very easy to download and um one concise place so your press list this is a list of journalists YouTubers dreamers Etc who are most likely to be interested in your game the intention is you want to keep track of this targeted media where more uh more likely to cover your game because they're specifically interested in the type of game that you're making so a couple of quick tips here um is that you want to research folks who have covered or streamed um games who are similar to yours so that might be similar games in your genre or competitors and you want to

look at those similar games or competitors within the last like year or two going too far back uh is often outdated information and you want to make sure your press list contains everybody's contact information so you can easily Outreach to them and you can often find the contact information through the media Outlet themselves and many of them have consistent formats that they use so it's actually really easy to to find all of them um you also want to make sure you update it consistently and that you keep thorough notes so um updated consistently because journalists in particular move around a lot and um you want to keep notes of like why someone might be interested in your game if someone responded previously or previously covered or made a comment to you about like the art or something in your game you want to make sure that you have that so that you can be really personalized in your approach which brings me to um your press emails so the intention

here is to get press or streaming coverage in accordance with your marketing B marketing being like is it um an announcement of your game is it your your launch trailer Etc so again you want to make sure that you've research the people that you're conducting Outreach to um so that it can be really personalized in your approach you do not want to just send a mass email nobody likes that doesn't feel good and um you want to include easy links to your trailer your press kit and your store Page because again we're removing friction to make things as easy as possible so now Derek is going to carry on with the rest of the essentials all right so next up is Twitter uh Twitter is unique in that it's just a really low commitment way for people to follow you which Counterpoint to that is that when you have links on Twitter they generally don't really convert very well but it's just a good way to just have uh it's a good way to communicate with

other people about your game whether that is press or curators investors Scouts a lot of professionals and developers are on Twitter I mean of course potential players but it's it's kind of more of a place for connecting with people within the industry who will then sort of broadcast your your game out even further um and also you can use it to show development share screenshots and gifs a really good GIF on Twitter can get a lot of retweets potentially so it just it is one place that you probably want to be and so the workload and the upkeep they're kind of on the high end because Twitter is one of those things where if you don't use it a lot it looks like the account is dead and it just you have to just be fairly active on there so then that people know that it's it's actually worth following um but as far as like Discovery and stuff is not the most important thing but you can use it to perform uh create a lot of professional relationships

all right next up is your announced trailer of course you have to let people know your game exists hopefully you do it with a really good uh announced trailer um to announce the game spark interest hopefully get a lot of wish lists and media coverage and also start building a following uh trailers are a lot of work and they're very very important but once it's done it's done so you don't really have to worry about any sort of upkeep and then next is your launch trailer so I only have in the essentials two trailers because at the bare minimum you have to announce the game exists and then announce when it came out everything else I think is pretty much extra but it depends on the game um but yeah launch trailer is there to announce that the game is out where you can buy it and motivate people to buy it and maybe tie up some lingering questions about gameplay or the story and get people really hyped hopefully again lots of work not a lot of upkeep but very important next up are screenshots which I mean

screenshots just another way to show what the game looks like but they're sort of more immediate than trailers because images you can just have on social media posts or maybe it from your press press kit um provide images that can be used in articles maybe use them to show what the game's UI looks like or sort of their genre space and you know just just to make the other things about your game look very pretty not as much work as a trailer and there is a little bit of upkeep because you want to make sure your screenshots are up to date you don't want to release your game and have all the Articles show really old screenshots which has definitely happened before and they're very important as well especially for your store Page because your store Page is there to provide sort of information about the genre space and the sort of the content and the features of the game and of course make it look very appealing hopefully with a really good trailer and good screenshots and it's there to just motivate people to buy maybe wish list it if they're not

quite committed yet or it's just not out yet and your store Page you know not a ton of work I mean it takes a fair amount of work to make it look good and you need to do a little bit of upkeep every now and then so that it looks kind of active but it is very very important uh for it to have a really good store page with all this stuff in one place and then related are the store metadata tags this is especially for steam because if you don't have really good tags for your game on Steam not only do people not quite know what genre it is but steam itself actually will have difficulty sorting your game into the store and what you want is to have really good tags according to your genre and like the vibe and tone of your game so then that other similar games might recommend yours like on the bottom of that page and because I mean a lot of your customers especially in a bigger genre will probably be more people who have played games very similar to yours

so you want to make sure steam knows how to categorize your game and you know on the grand scheme of things not a lot of work and I think pretty much you can set it and forget it uh once you've set those up but also very important okay so next are some nice to haves now a lot of these uh I would still say are pretty important but you know they're not like the super core part of the marketing um so you will not die if you don't have them but some of these can still be very effective if you have the time and resources to do them well first up is a mailing list or newsletter whatever you want to call it this is just a way to just communicate very consistently with the people who show the most interest in your game and you know they have the most interest because they gave you your their email address as obviously just following you on Twitter because people who give you their email address means that uh they really wanted the they're really interested and want to get all the nice juicy details and

really the other intention is just cultivate a long-term engaged audience either just for your game or your studio and then uh future games potentially if you release more than one and the workload can vary depending on how much you want to update or send out newsletter articles um so it can be more or less based off if you sent out a newsletter like once a month or once a week so it can be a decent amount of upkeep because people you want them to have a reason to actually be subscribed um you don't want just to use it as like a hey the game's out buy it you need to give something to them um so yeah and the long run mailing list can be very important and one good example of mailing this I've seen that's I think done very well is this one for Kit Fox games um game uh boyfriend dungeon what they did was each uh article that I send out is sent as if it's a letter from one of the love interests from the game so in this case it was a cat and sort of down

below this section they had Parts uh like updates about the game and some cases uh about the studio themselves so there are ways you can personalize it and make it more fun animated gifs anime gifts can be really really effective at marketing your game especially if your game is the store that can be summed up in a gif which that's not all games but if it can then you really should be making animated gifs to make your social media posts a lot prettier and potentially getting a lot of attention like I said if it goes like viral because this one GIF from your game uh really took off and it you know it could just be something that like a glitch that happened your game that was really funny but um animated gifs can be uh really good and they're kind of uh more work to to make just because it's there's a whole process to like take videos and then capture it and turn it into a gif um and just like screenshots you want to sort of keep them up to date um but they they can be very important

also for your store Page next up gameplay and story trailers um yeah these are just to sort of flesh out either the gameplay or The Narrative of the game depending on what sort of game that you're making because you know some games it's all about the gameplay of some it's mostly about the story and the game plays not really worth expanding upon in like one full trailer again lots of work pretty darn importance if your game really needs that sort of extra little bit of video to help people understand what it is but once it's done it's done and we'll serve you for uh Discovery purposes and then next is Tick Tock as of this talk kind of the new hotness Tick Tock is just a good way to show quick looks at quick looks at your game or um sort of like small Snippets about your game and you can use it to broadcast announcements and potentially gather lots and lots of uh eyeballs from players and also get wish lists that way

um it's a decent amount of work because it is video and editing and you want to be decently active so then that Tick Tock will want to promote your videos more but Tick Tock is just really good because each video the way the algorithm Works has the potential to be seen by lots and lots of people so the first we put out one video gets shown to a bunch of random people if it does well get shown to even more random people and then it goes on and on as opposed to some places like you know YouTube or Twitter which it's more dependent on who is actually following you there's it's a lower chance of getting discovered sort of randomly on a lot of other platforms as opposed to tick tock and then there's your website your website is just one place to house all the games information and make it look really pretty um it's specially good if you're launching on multiple platforms um but really it's kind of more to present the game to like investors Publishers and press not as much for players because really you want the

players to get to the store Page after they see like an article or their trailer you don't really want them to go to the website because uh it's kind of adding extra clicks between the discovery of the game and wish listing or buying it so um I'd say we're saying it's not really for every sort of game um a huge priority it really depends again on your goals and if your goals are to like get it seen by uh like a publisher or people who might uh help fund your game but again website can be a lot of work and it also can be upkeep because it has things that can go out of date like screenshots uh and trailers okay and then next up is Discord the intention of Discord is to build a community it's like a long-term long-term goal and to just communicate with like really the most dedicated fans um this one we're saying it's really not as important especially if you're new um especially because it's also just a lot of work and a lot of upkeep because just the real-time nature of it you want

to be pretty active in there so then that people have a reason to follow it whereas if you know everyone joins your Discord but then finds out you never use it then why would they stay but again it can be so much work so we're putting this on the lower end of importance and then next are online events um you know E3 as I was talking E3 just happened pretty recently said a lot of online events and showcases where people could see games this is a way to potentially get a lot of eyeballs on your game and gather wish lists maybe like during the steam Festival you share a demo for your game and it can be a lot of work because you have to get like a trailer ready or maybe a demo version of the game ready um but it can be uh quite effective at getting your game out there which similar to conventions which currently there aren't any conventions going on but conventions are similar but actually you know you can't actually show as many people your game uh at a convention because just the physical space and the

number of people who show up at a convention but you can use it to connect with like media maybe build up your mailing list do some in-person user testing but conventions are just a lot of work and a lot of money um so on the grand scheme of things we're saying this is not quite as important as some of the other Essentials we cited so now Dana's going to help us figure out how to choose the different strategies for your particular game just some some tips here we've now gone through a ton of time you can do and probably overwhelmed you uh with all of the options but um this is called personalized marketing so how do you choose what actually makes sense for your game so the best case scenario is to use um multiple tactics and strategies so to mix and match some of the essential items and also some of the nice to have items um but it doesn't mean that you have to

do everything it's better to do some things really well than to try and do all of the things um kind of like half-assed to them so um we're going to talk through some potential ways that you can figure out what makes sense for you so first um here's one way to break it down so look at the following factors um for you so resources what does your team realistically have time and money to do well skills what do you guys have the ability to do well in-house and what does your team lack the ability to do that you might need to Outsource and do you have the budget for that um and also where do you think you could get the most impact for the least effort because that is great um and then your community so what tends to resonate with your community if you already have one um I think it's also really important to think through like you know maybe your studio had the community already built in from other games that you have or

maybe you're starting from ground zero and that makes a difference too um the great thing about social media though is that you can get analytics um which will help uh help you figure out what works well and what tends to resonate um maybe your community responds really well to animated gifts um or something like that and so you know that you should be making more of those and then again going back to the goals that we talked about earlier earlier so some of your personalized goals here so things like are you trying to get a publisher or get featured by a store Page or build that community all of those change and impact the types of strategies and tactics that make sense for your game so here's another way to potentially break it down um so you can look at like just list out all of the different um tactics that we talked through and then rank them so we have them ranked by the impact so what do you expect the impact of doing the thing to be and also how doable is it for you and your

um so you know for example we've got Discord here which probably relatively low impact um if you've got a community manager or something it might be more doable or less doable um but it requires a lot of upkeep um and we you can do that for every single thing add up all the totals and then kind of see like what has uh the highest score and that's like a very non-scientific but potential way to figure out what would work for you um another way to do it is to look at upkeeps so we've gone through all the previous slides and given everything an upkeep rating um so we've divided all of the things that we talked through or at least most of the things that we've talked through into upkeep categories um meaning that they require uh like the amount of work that they require on an ongoing basis so um looking at these you might want to choose more things from the low to medium category and maybe one thing from

the high category and only choose something from the highest category if you guys have the resources to do it um like we talked about earlier um because you don't want to end up getting stuck doing all of the things and highest category only because that will feel very overwhelming so another way to potentially do this we've divided um all of the tactics into four various categories of like marketing goals we'll say so one being discoverability one being make your game look cool another being talk to people about your game and build community so we've taken all of that and thrown them into which category we think that they best fit into um and so like if you're struggling with what to do one thing you could do is just pick one or two from each category and then at least you know that you've got your bases covered um at least somewhat

so it's also important to note that on the last Slide the categorize categorize everything into just one bucket but a lot of things overlap or accomplish multiple goals um and so this is a list of the tactics but also you can look at like how many of the different goals those tactics help you accomplish so you can see something like messaging reaches across all four um something like you Facebook might only do one or two um and so looking at how many different touch points you're getting there could be another way to decide what makes for your game um now Derek is going to kind of wrap up and summarize what we've talked about all right so to sum things up a little bit uh first remove the word should from your marketing vocabulary I know we've we threw some some shoulds in this talk here but really before you you just

follow up on hearing someone say you should do something think about like okay how will that work for your game what is the intention behind that thing try not to think okay someone else did that so I should do that just just stop yourself there when you have that sort of thought think about okay why and will that help your game particular and then you'll uh hopefully be more successful and then as we were saying start with just one thing and Branch out when you're able this especially goes for like social media platforms like if you decide you want to YouTube or twitch or Tick Tock start with just one thing and try to uh get good at that and find success there because if you try three things especially if they're very labor intensive then if it doesn't get as much attention and you probably will not have as much success and if you're finding that it's working then at that point it might be good to start adding on different uh social media accounts or something like that so then that you can potentially get that audience and then also just experiment and pivot

as much as you can because I mean failure during the process is much better than failing at launch and a good thing about being Indie especially is that if you do some sort of marketing thing it doesn't really land it's okay you can just you can just delete it and then try something new or if you find out you did something that got a success and you didn't expect it then you could just pursue that angle um and also remember some games do better on different platforms and you might know not know what uh platform is best for your game when you start out so experiment and pivot and then also while you're doing this just think about like what would give your audience Joy because especially with games they take a long time to come out so you really need to give people a reason to follow you on these different places and one way to think about how you can you know entertain them in the meantime is to think about okay what would this audience enjoy either because they like a similar genre or there's a certain part of my arts or some other

part of your game that they would enjoy seeing um so think about that and try to learn from your audience based off of what gets success or what they're just saying to you and try to make it fun before they the game even comes out and again you're not trying to trick people into buying your game you're trying to inform people help them make a decision show how unique you're unique and also find the audience that will resonate most with your game and being transparent is really a good way of doing this people respect transparency and you know they don't feel good when they then they get something that it wasn't what they expected so just be transparent be honest and help people figure out what your game is and also if you help them figure out that their game that your game isn't for them that's still fine because there's no such thing as one game that works for every single person and you just need to find the the right people who will enjoy your game and this is all again to personalize the marketing you know show who you are and who what your game is through your

marketing don't copy other people because even if the game's similar to yours it's still not your game um you know make it personal don't make it stale and corporate just try to find the voice of your game and its marketing and thank you for listening uh again my name is Derek Lou and uh my partner is Dana here so these are the places that you can follow us and either work with us or learn more about what we do and thank you for watching [Music]