How to Build Your Marketing System

Indie developers tend to treat marketing as a top-of-funnel exercise, and this 2018 column argues that a complete, maintained sales funnel is what actually turns attention into sales. It extends an earlier high-level introduction to the funnel concept by cataloging specific tactics and "triggers" (calls to action) for each of five tiers: Awareness, Consideration, Community, Customer, and True Fan. The guidance is aimed at small and first-time game developers across PC and mobile storefronts, and it is qualitative rather than data-driven, with no survey or benchmark dataset behind it.

Awareness tactics include press outreach, trailers, streamers, #screenshotsaturday, store featuring, bundles, and app store optimization, with triggers such as joining a mailing list or following on social media. Consideration relies on autoresponder emails, dev blogs, development streams, Reddit AMAs, and demos, and it moves people toward Discord, forums, or Steam groups. Community tactics lead to purchase, wishlisting, or crowdfunding triggers. Customer-tier tactics, such as review requests and cross-promotion, push toward soundtrack downloads, mods, merchandise, and the next game. True fans then produce mods, translations, fan art, and forum moderation largely on their own, and developers should amplify that activity.

The column identifies recurring mistakes: concentrating on awareness with no capture mechanism, building the funnel too late (a mailing list signup with a lead magnet should exist before the first trailer), vague or overcrowded calls to action, failing to track conversion at each stage, and letting contacts go cold. It positions the mailing list as the funnel's backbone because it permits segmented messaging by engagement level, unlike Twitter, which broadcasts to everyone and suits only the top of the funnel.

The recommended fix is to walk through plausible discovery scenarios as a newcomer, counting clicks and checking that each step has one clear action, and to treat funnel debugging like tracing a call stack. Developers short on time should cut poorly converting top-of-funnel activities. The conclusion is that even small early traffic should be captured, and that a funnel supplements rather than replaces a good game.