Marketing Fundamentals for New Developers

all right let's get started um hello my name is Michael or Mikey uh either one if you'd like um this is my presentation titled marketing fundamentals for new developers uh I am a marketing director for crows crows crows it's a new studio by William Pew you might know him from games like Stanley Parable um we just put out our recent game called Dr lus C the Tiger in the terribly cursed Emerald a world with Heist before doing that I did a whole bunch of kickstarters um I was doing around 10 a year uh I've been getting out of the game though I'm trying to kind of distance myself from that uh Kickstarter life uh but before doing that even I released catacomb kids on Steam so I've been doing uh the marketing director thing for about 3 or 4 years um I don't have Mastery yet that would take a ton of years probably like

10 probably a few decades because just like programming art and music marketing is insanely complex if you uh look further into it so what I do have instead instead of Mastery what I do have are fundamentals and that has been good enough for me to get through to talk on stage to get through everything I've been through so far um the reason why that's possible is because the industry as a whole for Indies is a little bit farther behind than the other Industries because people have a different kind of understanding of what marketing is uh what does it do and kind of how it functions with their games and where does it kind of fit into the funding aspect of everything so a few questions I hear all the time from people are things like I don't need marketing a great game will sell itself uh this is a great one because it kind of implies that there's this invisible Line in the Sand

that will tell you if the thing will work or not but that's not quite how marketing Works marketing is actually a multiplier it doesn't work as a thing that just passes or fails it kind of determines whether or not your thing gets really big or you know B barely makes this goal but it's kind of hard to tell without looking really far into the data um the next part about that is that that game was going to sell or going to make its G goal anyways how do you know it was actually marketing um this is thing that shows that kind of any developers have this problem where they are assuming that the game is going to make its goal anyways and they don't know how marketing affects things and this is something I hear hundreds of times actually every year and this is why this is a really good one luck is a major factor in game sales uh again kind of implying a a lack of understanding about value uh and then this is actually the best one I did everything right I had a great game I had good reviews good press and I went to all all of the

events if I failed it had to have been the macroeconomic state of the indie game industry uh for sure not me um this is something that I get all the time basically on Twitter you probably heard about it the Indie apocalypse you might have heard um it's kind of an odd thing to hear from people because they it shows that they don't have an experience about where funding is coming from we have a good gauge for when games do well because we have reviews we say okay this person who's an expert and whole bunch of experts all kind of came together and agreed that this game was very well made um but we don't really have that for marketing we don't really have a way to track whether or not things are working or if things are not working and if you don't know if things are working or not then you tend to make mistakes all over the place spend money incorrectly and eventually fail um so what can we learn from getting fun these fundamental this fundamental understanding about um the system of marketing and you can learn all kinds of things is actually like an

insane amount of things like should I get a booth will my Kickstarter succeed uh when should I launch my game these crazy systems you think that wouldn't be related but actually are like tied close knit um that brings me to what is called a conversion system a conversion system is just kind of a mindset that you have to be in to understand how everything fits together and if you think along what a a convergence system is then you'll be able to kind of map about if what you're doing is going to be successful or not if your Tinder profile is doing better than you thought it was whatever whatever you want to do it'll pretty much kind of solve it if you can if you can actually get the metrics to be correct um so the first part of it is cost uh cost could be anything it can be Labor uh it could be time it could be money it could be your community or it can even be your morale uh a lot of people get burnt out if they do too much of something uh so a lot of time I'll see Indies go from Booth to Booth to Booth to Booth to booth all across the

world going ACR to PX Australia and to the Netherlands to everywhere and they get burned out and eventually you figure out that the morality that they had uh the morale that they had uh has expired and then they will not be effective workers later uh the next part is views views can come in all different kinds of forms uh the most common ones are curated views those are things that you know of like press uh then there's other things like adverts which is which is views that you pay for and there's finally community community is caused by your community well talking about your game or sharing it with other people this is actually the hardest one to get and it's also the most expensive one um and it's actually the hardest one to control as well so if you have too much of a focus towards Community it tends to be a very bad idea unless you have some very good metrics telling you that you should uh the next part is called engagement rate this is just simply the number of people who have viewed the game that care about it in some way to get more information

uh no matter what percentage of your views are always going to turn into an engagement rate it's kind of just the the way of life is if you give enough views to something there will always be some person who just loves it for some reason even if your game is garbage uh the next part is called conversion rate which is the percent of the percent of Engagement rate that turned into some kind of value in the future this value could be all kinds of things it can be it can be things like sales it can be money it can be someone buying a t-shirt it can be someone going to your community or going to Twitter and tweeting you retweeting your stuff all the time sending you a little box of cookies it doesn't really matter uh but some way to measure it is really required uh but this only counts if it's captured so that means that if you do not do anything with it if you get a news article if you get a giant press release if you don't do anything with it and you don't put it somewhere in a way that keeps people together well it's going to Decay until it dies very quickly so what we're going to do is we're going to focus on mailing lists

mailing list is like the best way of capturing things because it doesn't require much at all to put it together and it doesn't require you to have a product made it doesn't require you to know what you're doing necessarily right away um you can even like kind of have a prototype not really for sure idea about the game and still start one of these um it doesn't take much to maintain it um you don't need to manage it with you don't need to manage physical production which would be things like creating figurines or or shirts or little little bobbleheads whatever um and it universally provides value when you cash out on it so mailing lists I love I use them for pretty much everything that I ever do because it allows me to gauge value right away even when we're not selling a game and that allows me to kind of map out if what we're doing is correct or not so this is how you kind of get started and this is going to be a lot of tools uh that I talk about but these are all kind of mandatory so go ahead and take your phones out if you need to to take a picture of them on each slide uh but I will have slides up

later on uh I'll go slowly so people can get that creeped out um the first one is how do you record cost this one's going to be easy I get a notebook go ahead and write down what you're actually spending and where and try to keep track of where you're um putting your money and who who you're putting your money with uh you can do things like have a checkbook you can do other things like kind of manage where your time is going but yeah the the general idea is that you should probably know your cost when you're very small uh later on it gets more and more complex when you need to learn about where your employees are and how the work is coming through and all that but for the meantime if you're just a few employees or a few people just trying to make a game uh just get a notebook the next part is views you're going to need Twitter Facebook YouTube analytics uh these ones are pretty easy they're pretty standard I'm sure a lot of people have Twitter analytics already enabled I assume right yeah a little hands good we have a few that's wonderful okay so Twitter analytics is just a simple thing you just Google Twitter analytics you just Google Facebook Analytics YouTube analytics and it'll pop up automatically

you just sign in and then it just permanently has a little tiny three bars next to all your tweets that tell you how many people touched it how many people viewed it how many people clicked on it all these kinds of things and you kind of get obsessed with it and it's a little you know path Into Darkness and all that but don't worry about it uh the next part is a little bit more complex this is called sem rush in Alexia uh you probably might not know these things these are just kind of metrics that gauge how much activity is going to a website this comes in really handy when you're trying to figure out whether or not that press release that you put together or that exclusive energ view was actually going to be something that pays off in the future because if you don't know how many views you're getting from a from a big media Place well you know you you don't really know what you got out of it and this system is all about determining if what you put in is worth more or less than what you get out uh the next is engagement raid you'll just need Google analytics Google webn tools they're different things and clicky I really like clicky it's actually just a free little program and

I'll list all the free programs I actually use I'm not going to rope you into some kind of thing that's really expensive or anything like that um but I I think clicky is a good extension to Google analytics and if you want to transition over it's kind of uh it helps you out there um this is going to help you measure when people land on your web page which will tell you how many people who viewed the thing actually went over and saw your stuff and that's really important and click is going to help you also get a little further analytics about where those people are directly coming from whether not you're advertising ment or it's Twitter or whatever it gets convoluted when you start getting like good at stuff and you bring a lot of people in uh the next part is called conversion rate uh this is going to be where we're bringing people this is going to be to the website uh and then to the mailing list so how do we set up a mailing list well we have four programs here um we have Sandy we have MailChimp aweber and infusion soft infusion soft is like the ultra darkness of marketing it's like hundreds of dollars every month but it provides fantastic Analytics

don't worry about it that much I just listed it so you know like a path of uh into the void I guess so sun is probably the best um for new developers because it is very very cheap um MailChimp is a close second very it's kind of in the same ballpark but a little less a little more expensive and then awe is in the same thing as MailChimp but just select any one of those and get started right away and set up a web page that just has a way to sign up to your melon list and finally um the value return so value return is such a tricky thing to measure when you're looking at a mailing list cuz how do you know that the person that's signing up is going to actually be someone that ends up caring about what you're doing and ends up seven months down the line buying what you want them to or retweeting your stuff or going to that Kotaku article that you just got and leaving a comment and showing support for the things that you're getting so how do you measure people right well let's talk about uh how humans love each other I guess so so there's a thing called cohort analysis

which is a little it sounds a little technical but it's really not that big of a deal it's kind of just the idea that people in big groups can be separated into smaller groups that's all it is so um if you see at the top you'll see that there's a big big big peak up there to right left I don't know over there uh and it'll be dropping down rapidly right now uh that's because that's just normal it's very normal that people sign up to your mail list they don't even care about your first email they never do they just do it for some reason I'm not sure but yeah they sign up and they just leave so that's what happens at the very beginning then what will happen is that further on people will there'll be a progression of people who'll continue to open your meals over and over again until you hit this kind of like weird straight line that's not quite zero but not quite a lot either that is your core group of people these are the people who will always be with you forever they're permanently latched to you and the way that we know this is back to how humans interact with value

with each other well if you go through a lot of Hoops with somebody if you pass a lot of barriers if you're willing to go very far for something then it tends to be that you value them very much so you're going to see the people at the very bottom if it uh curving off straight now if you have if you see that when you have people signing up it just dives into the ground that means everything that you've been working towards is kind of a failure which is great I guess because it's a learning experience but um not so great for money but yeah so if you see it diving off into a cliff then you know fundamentally that you're either producing content that they don't care about or that you are you were given a chance and you failed them uh I guess that's terrible but yeah so going on to the next thing so this little area here is the people who care Zone um you can measure out how many people that care out of the ton of out of the thousands that are signing up so this is another ratio for you so you have a ratio of how many people engaged

with the view count or the the the thing that you're putting out then you have a a percentage of people who Enga who convert from the engagement and you have a percentage of people from the conversion who turn into people who actually care about you um for me myself the people who care about me has have represented about uh they tend to convert at a rate of 40 to 70% so basically that means that anyone in this range is almost a guarantee that they're going to purchase in the future for me um that could be different for everyone it's probably based on like things like how you engage with people and experience and managing a community but if you see a lot of people being built up here it's probably a good sign that you're doing something right um so this is the full conversion system it is a cost it is the views it is the engagements is the conversions and then finally what is the output that you're receiving and through cohort analysis you'll be able to find out how many people actually careed and our and what kind of a iffy percentage what they're going to do um you can call this dollar

sign VC dollar sign for short if you'd like I guess there you go uh should you get a booth so we can turn that information into actual questions that uh provide really good answers so how much is this going to cost a booth we're going to fly out to some foreign country somewhere and buy a booth a hotel room send another developer out so he mans the booth and we have to get the space and a few electronic stuff set up so it's going to cost us $110,000 all right this is terrible for Indies by the way um so how do we know how many views there's going to be at the event we kind of don't do we so what we do instead is we try to figure out and a prediction of how many views we could get and the way we do that is yep the way we do that is we run a press release prior to the event should pretty much never go to an event unless you've already put out something somewhere don't let your website kill you because hey you got all the press to write about you and they to your website and it crashed it sucked or

they don't they viewed your video and it had some really nasty things that you forgot to take down so yeah go ahead and check if everything is clear run a press release and that's going to give you something interesting that's going to tell you your conversion rate and that's going to tell you your engagement rate and that's going to tell you how many people of the people who converted actually care so you input in you input in the engagement rate the conversion rate and how many people care at that same rate and then you try to take the value and you do a little algebra to figure out how many people how many views would you have to get in order to make it valuable enough for you to go to the event right you just solve for V so how many presss would you need is a good question to start asking yourself to make this system complete and how can you be certain that those people will actually write uh and this kind of leads me to kind of like the magical thing about pressure uh the conversion system is that it's teaching you things that

you wouldn't normally think about uh so how could you possibly figure out a way to make sure that the Press are going to write write about you before you even go well I just talk to them that was my secret I guess is I just go ahead and I email hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people I guess before the event I look at who's going to attend I message them personally in a month and advance I try to sell them on the game and then before the event comes I schedule an interview if the interviews don't combined together to equal a reasonable amount of views I don't go to the event and I just cancel so when should you launch your game and where should you launch your Kickstarter or any of those uh this is the secret of my Kickstarter success I said I did about 10 a year uh back in the day uh when I was younger I guess uh and how did I end up making them all work and that's the kind of secret is that I just ran a conversion system system and until the range outputed that

I was going to succeed exactly on day one so I just didn't launch until it said to that was the secret the whole time and that's kind of it it's that it doesn't seem like it would be something that would be all- encompassing but it kind of is and that's kind of the problem is that this seems a little bit back of the napkin kind of mathy right that how can a conversion system tell everything about what is going to happen in the future and the answer is that it can't um you we were playing a game with imperfect information but that's okay it's okay to not have perfect information we're going to have views that we don't understand and we're going to have views that could be broken down into a thousand different categories what it be oh this person makes $30,000 a year and it's a Friday and he got paid on Friday that's a its own conversion system on a separate note it could be infinitely complex we could figure out all the people who like basket weaving

web comics and your kind of Rog likee weird platform of video game with pixel art and then we can put them all together and then figure out what that a more accurate look on to what the actual output would be um but that takes a lot of time and that takes a lot of energy to actually understand you wouldn't really know by doing it uh just your first time or L listening to a few Dev logs about whether or not what you're doing is actually correct or whether or not the system that you're doing is actually providing a false false Pro positive or is it is it actually giving you the results that you need you're not going to figure that out right away but what it does provide even if from the day one is a mental math that can help lead you to solve problems or at least leads you in the right mindset to solve problems that you wouldn't otherwise kind of like saying how we know that for a fact if we don't get a bunch of writers to write about us before we even go to sign up with the interviews it's probably not worth the risk and we can tell that even if the data that we're

putting into the system is inaccurate that if we don't have a way to solve the the system or we don't have a way to have the system be reasonable then we know at least through our experience or what we can what we perceive as reasonable that it's wrong and we have to steer away from that so when your experiences are combined with larger view sample sizes and more accurate pulling methods the conversion system isn't the problem the problem is that you're not having the right experience and you're not having the right data to go into it of course it's a bottomless black hole but you know that's all right we are we're we don't necessarily need that the closer we can get to a range that's reasonable the better so this is kind of a probably an odd talk I guess is because I'm not really talking about how to do very basic marketing stuff but at its core every decision that I've ever made up to this point and all the way through my journey of becoming a marketing director and working with all these people and raising millions of dollars on Kickstarter is all at its core based on this system and so it's

imperfect and it's it's messy but I've only had 3 to four years and that's all right so congratulations you learned how to become me I guess and here's my Twitter and you can add me on Skype if you would like if you would like to ever tell me about your data or have me look at anything I will go ahead and chat with you about whatever uh don't share that though thank you [Applause] now if you have a question you can step up to the microphone uh when do you plan to uh release the slides when do I plan to release the slides uh as soon as possible actually whenever they will allow me yes uh so you mentioned that uh using mailing list is one of the tools but you have any suggestions or tips on how to get people to sign on to the mailing list um how to sign on to the mailing list um there's a different way there's a few different thanks so it depends on what you're going for so for

our for the game that we put out Dr langeskov we actually kind of offis skated the whole email list signing up things because we our goal was to make it as tough as possible for people that weren't that interested to sign on so the only way you would know about the mailing list is actually if you downloaded the game already and beat it all the way through and then at the very end it would output hey this is our mailing list so we were trying to put as many filters as place in place as possible to try to get the most like Optimal people so if you're looking for quantity just to sign up I don't think you should go after it because the cohort analysis will show that when you go for a mass Market it won't actually output something that you want but in terms of just naturally growing your views I suggest putting together things like press releases or trailers to try to get the word out about your game thank you thank you do you have any uh General tips for building a good press release and for building that list do you just try to troll for and collect as many different uh direct emails to press you know writer and all that as you can and just email them directly yeah I

email everyone directly I actually just say like hi on Mikey I don't really do like a huge release thing I just say hello and I tend to like DM them on Twitter I know that sounds like really kind of hacky and weird but it people tend to like personal things so what do you what do you using the content of the actual press release itself like um I tend to just tell them like hey here's this GIF thing do you think you're interested or like I'll just say hey this is the concept of the game and over time I for actual like personal relationships with people I tend to message them way before I even have stuff to show them so I'll be talking to someone and I'll I'll research every single writer on every single website that's in the top 100 or 200 of all sites and then I'll message each one of them personally and then try to form a personal relationship with them so I understand what games they want specifically and then if I find out hey this person likes Rogue likes and we're making one I send them a gift I tell them the pitch so it's like a much larger uh kind of convoluted system than just like hey we have the game there you go go yeah hi uh yes hello thank you for the talk that was very informative um so

when you were talking about the cohort analysis you had this graph and uh showing a decline of uh you know uh supporting users I guess I was wondering like what kind of tools you use to collect this data oh to collect information like this yeah oh s before in the previous two slides you showed some tools about like uh collecting the uh engagement and uh like this the what oh it's not oh oh I was hitting the button I think it was working okay so yeah there's uh on the on the mailing site uh conversion ones they're going to show you all that data action they'll actually graph it out for you A lot of the time so like sendy and Mel champ and aweber they're going to Output all the data for you and so yeah because on the graph is it shows that how many users open the email they can actually detect that yes they can oh wow they can detect so much more okay there's a okay so this is okay I didn't want to put this on the slide cuz it's kind of weird but like there's a thing called Mouse flow even and that will even let see everything that they click on and move and input on

the email it's called Mouse flow yeah Mouse flow there so basically if you want to go crazy and find out everything everything people are clicking on or everything people are moving around on there's programs for even that so yes we can figure out who opened the email we can figure out how long it took them to click the links how much of the email they read everything pretty much from from like these systems infusion soft is going to be like the most crazy like stats you didn't even know existed kind of thing and uh s's going to be providing similar details so you can do all this with Sandy I do it with Sandy with a lot of uh people who don't have very large budgets okay yes yeah thank you thank you yes hey could you uh go over the um the timing of when to release your Kickstarter again that was a that kind of flew by pretty fast yes that was that was a little bit of part of it um so the way the kickstarter would work is it's the exact same system you put in how much money you would have right at the start and then you figure out how many views you would have to accomplish just like You' go like kind of like you were planning to go to like DC or packs whatever you try to figure

out how much views you would have to acquire before you launch or you can also figure out like uh how many users you can acquire through the mailing list those count as like those convert at a rate that's very high so you add those to the amount that you need from the press and you can find out how many people are reading each press thing at what time based on things like elixia and all the other things so you can say oh kitaku they're great at 2 p.m and then you try to get an article at that time and if you do then you subtract that amount and you kind of wing it is but the point is is that when I do Kickstarter I'm coming out kind of swinging on day one I'm getting 30k 50k and people say oh it's half hyperlife Drifter 2 and it's like nah it's not but um what I do from there is I I'm going to actually just go through the whole thing a little bit if you don't mind I I'll actually kind of explain for you yeah um is that I give those views I get the views I get everyone signed up and even if it doesn't hit the mark right away I still have 29 days now I then plann four other major press releases with like things like trailers and

anyone who's supported me that actually I enjoy a lot who have provide a lot of views I go ahead and I I bomb them with the mailing list I take the whole entire mailing list and I send them over I say hey this is hey uh we'll do an exclusive interview with PC Gamer and we'll do an inter and I'll say to all the fans that are on the mailing list that we've all signed up already I say hey we're doing a PC game interview you should check it out and then all these users come over to PC Gamer they really like that there's like a th000 comments 2,000 comments they love that a lot of Engagement people are sharing it and they go yeah we'll do the next trailer too and then that kind of like snowballs things for us yeah nightall thank you so much [Music] yes really great talk by the way um so I was wondering when you're first starting out with your mailing list like you have zero users uh where do you go first do you start sending stuff first to press or are you trying to go for more like uh social media in terms of like Reddit or Facebook or Twitter trying to get those kind of uh like gorilla in a way marketing type of

deals so Reddit and Twitter and Facebook they tend to be very bad for engagement because you're talking within a circle and the tweets expire very quickly so it takes a lot a huge amount of output in order to get a good input back uh so basically Twitter and Facebook and all those tend not to work very well until you already have a part of a following um so I would suggest that you can do Twitter if you just want to do it for fun a little bit here and there but don't take it like so seriously that you're devoting hours to to it uh that's one and then I would also focus on things like mailing uh if you know how to do adverts which are kind of like a little bit sketchy for a lot of people I suggest nobody does adverts right away until they like get this stuff down uh but adverts would be the the next solution up and then the one of course the best one is just get press interested which is form personal relationships I'm sure you'll find one of the 2,000 websites some are in Spanish some are in French you're going to have to talk to all of them and all the writers individually and figure out how they are but that's kind of what you have to do this is like a huge part of it and I think the the reason why it's

under like understated so much is because there is this thing where people are not funding it as much like they'll devote maybe 2 or 3% to the marketing budget as a thing and the rest will just go on to production like art music whatever um but in reality all the other places that are doing Indie stuff they tend to Value it like 50% 80% of the total budget which is massively higher right um so Indies have this weird thing where they're not really like devoting enough resources to it whether be their time to talk to all the press or things like that but it's not avoidable right it's literally a straight multiplier so do you want your multipli to be zero or do you want to be like 20 so yeah and 5 * 5 is 25 and 5 * 1 is five so it's always better to kind of like devote at least a reasonable amount to doing stuff like that cool than thank you any other questions wonderful thank you all for uh visiting I hope you had a good time