Panel: Accessible Marketing: How to Promote Growth With any Budget

foreign [Music] [Applause] hi everybody seems like we're poised to get started thank you so much for uh coming um very briefly my name's Will Freeman I'm a journalist editor writer those kind of things in the games industry um but you certainly don't need to hear much more about me so we're here to talk about Marketing in the game Space that's obviously quite a broad spectrum but you know marketing your game your company your service you know I guess for one as somebody

that kind of I guess on the pr side of it I write about games it's definitely possible some of the most kind of striking distinct and engaging marketing I receive in the when I'm in journalist mode comes from kind of a low budget or zero budget um context but we're here you know hopefully with some practical stuff some encouraging realistic pragmatic stuff getting your game notice or exposed kind of retaining players that side of marketing growing your business Biz Dev and even towards kind of great getting your business out in front of investors or an audience or whatever it is we're going to try and cover that all which means I should stop talking quite so much because we've got about half an hour um so yeah um I'll tell you what I had some more notes but you've already heard enough of my voice I feel so I'll do some very brief introductions um I'll let them introduce theirself again hearing too much of this um but a warm welcome let's break the ice for the warm welcome to Matilda from reactor um death from demoso and Harris from

tencent yeah so let's start with that um I'll start with you Matilda was your closest to which is a quick intro to yourselves and your time enrolling games great so hi everybody my name is Matilda I work at rocktar but the creative side of so we're a tech company but we also have a small in-house creative team that serves all kinds of clients that we have uh so I work in brand strategy and I'm also a senior creative I've been doing lots of different kinds of campaigns and research for a variety of different clients from different Industries great thank you my name is staff I work as the managing director of a company called demoso and we are a marketing agency that basically has been working with apps and the mobile gaming industry since the birth of the App Store and what we do is help app companies grow their users or help them get awareness get more investment so on and so that's

what I do so I'm currently handling the regional publishing for tencent in Eastern Europe and my background is a little bit different so I'm coming from fmcg like Unilever and loyal in marketing so I spent half of my career in marketing roles there and then the last 12 years I'm in gaming basically publishing games such as pubg mobile honor of kings and games like that yeah so you know there's so many ways we could start this conversation I'm going to start with one that's fairly broad hopefully to set the context it may be that they now just talk and I don't say anything else I'll try not to let it play out like that but you know the most fundamental form of game marketing I guess is getting your game noticed played and in the context of Pocket Gamer connects keeping those players um you know in terms of just a starting point of the channels you think of marketing channels you think are particularly relevant

for kind of lower to zero budget that kind of space and I guess I'm thinking something you know there's audience size there's audience relevance you know sometimes the biggest audience isn't necessarily the ideal audience for a lower budget um I'll tell you what I started with matild the first hour so I'm going to Spring this on you um so yeah just some general starting points of reasonable channels you can start to think about with no budget or low budget yeah I mean I think like uh currently like my expertise coming on from mobile so another of course yeah I'm not really I mean relevant information about PCO console but lately we started to go into like cross-platforms but driven by mobile more which is I think like uh even it's much more accessible at the moment especially you know currently when you look at the marketing practices that we are having you know you don't have much time so you don't like announce your game like six months

before anything so it's like you know it's day to day you keep you know trying to iterate your game making it better like you know it's a development process in Mobile so you don't have much time actually when you really start to take it off to the communities so that's why like I think like the main tools that we use here I'm setting aside all the user Acquisitions and stuff yes yes yeah because that's obviously for scaling yeah necessary it's like necessary evil but for us it's like most important part of the community yeah to drive the community in a ways that you can like really go low budget uh you know this can be many different things which we can talk about but also like apart from the community the influencers and you know the opinion leaders it doesn't have to be influencers actually but it can be anyone that is like you know known by the that specific genre of the game which cannot be a big huge influencer at that

specific time and difference by country so which is good for us because then we can go really low budget and we can really like do stuff like that so I think like the community and you know like the community is the key word here for us for going low budget I mean that's my point of view we can talk more about that and Community is something you'd love to come back to because I feel that's becoming it's combining so many things right Community you know I guess I feel as a writing for print like influences came along and suddenly I went oh my God it's not that important um and then but now there's this thing of community bringing so many things together but welcome to talk about Community or or any other kind of let's say and none of you are allowed to do this let's say someone's only going to say five minutes and leave like interest you know the most relevant marketing channels for us to think about or talk about daf I'm going to Spring that on you next I think the most I love Community as well the problem is when you launch an

app or a game you might not have a community yes yeah so then it's quite hard but if you do digital advertising right and you have a great product where you actually make money from you should see like okay what is my cost per use or I acquire you should make money and at all platforms I mean you can start with two pounds or five pounds and if you make a return on investment on that money then you can add more is it really you could go with that one I would say like the biggest platform is where is the most competition and that's why it's always going to be the most expensive so I would always say like okay know your audience say that's like women in 42.50 there are a lot of places where they hang out online that isn't necessarily Facebook it could be you know another community that you can you know it's like on that is like a community for people riding horses in order in England 4050 but that's like you know 100 000 people being active on the Forum uh so I

would like say number one you should make a return on investment on the money you spend so that's not really a problem so you should not be scared by any platform but also look for other platforms where your audience might be that it's not the natural like the top of Mind ones yeah that thing of kind of the audiences that might not aren't most obvious is really interesting I've seen it work with like promoting a game oh everyone wants to send it to the big gaming Publications you're making a history RTS for mobile contact the history Publications it might be a smaller audience but more relevant right so definitely would love to come back to that but before that matild or any kind of broad principle ones you feel are fitting or interesting these have been great points about channels go last but but I'd like to add is sometimes it's good to try something new for instance um I was working with a big name Cider Company and we're trying to basically their audiences primarily women right but what we did is we targeted these ads at men instead who then because they

never they're usually not targeted by you know like kind of uh female forward material they actually got really excited about that and it actually stood out from the competitions and all these like their brands and stuff because it was out of place in a way so sometimes uh going against the grain could really work for you too yeah and as that happens to be my next question I don't want to be too constrained by what I've got written in front of me I would love to you know the I guess leaning in to not having the budget what you can do you know it's tempting to think how can I copy or replicate what's done with a big budget I'd be interested either more good examples or general thoughts about like you know how you can really Embrace what can stand out or perhaps there's a real risk with that all right it's kind of sounds like there's an innate risk in kind of reversing advertising so yeah if anyone would chip in on how how worthwhile it is thinking about leaning into those kind of uh what you can only do with a lower budget I mean I have to say about the risk the risk was very low

in this case we tried out in some Instagram ads and actually poll ads where people could participate so the risk was relatively low and the payoff was relatively big so I think if you just choose your mediums well you can lower the risk but then increase the opportunity to actually profit from it I think when you are a startup you have the biggest advantage and that is that you can be fast paced and when we look online and how fast paced it is if you work with for example Coca-Cola and you do the digital ads for them you have to like get them approved and it takes ages and you cannot make a hundred different ones on a B test what actually works you need to like come up with an idea presented and you know two years later you see the results and that's not how you make efficient digital advertising so I would say like test everything you can and if you're starting out and you don't have any money you have nothing to lose we had a client once that basically due to like a up in their

product they need to spend a lot more money on development so what they did because they had no marketing about it all of a sudden is that they went naked to Piccadilly Circus but just a sign on them saying download our app and that worked you don't you don't have to replicate that exactly but there is a really interesting idea and principle there like Harris I'd love to hear yeah if you have any thoughts on I think players are quite fair in terms of like in in the way they what they expect from the gaming company so the bigger the game bigger the expectation obviously but you know they also understand that you know it depends on what you got yeah if you're like up and coming a new game with like you know not much background but like you need to cherish with the community of yours and people like I think like players like to you know experience like real stuff that you know

um they don't want like scripted things that are you know in their YouTube videos or whatever so we see that there's a balance between the expectations of you know having a really scripted thing that you will shoot for them in terms of like a YouTube video or whatever so practically like what we do right now is we are trying to find ways to show the real life examples of what's happening in the game like for example someone's like having a fun moment in in the game then you will try to put it on the like the physical world and shoot something with a low budget and people like that sort of you know different manifestation of things that actually happening happening in the game right that's a good example like you can do that easily and that speaks to authenticity right which I think really matters with a many many of the gaming audiences right and the example staff was talking about like that Lo-Fi is kind of more like like budget Lo-Fi is more authentic or trust words does that

make any kind of sense I'm not saying big budget stuff isn't but maybe it's the consumer no but that's I think that's absolutely true especially if we look at younger audiences who are quite suspicious of the material that big companies have been putting out so I think low far definitely gives us an opportunity to talk about things in a far more believable way yeah yeah sure and that thing that I you know as a journalist it's easy for me to talk about PR which isn't marketing but that thing of speed I felt that happen when I have to get something from a large organization that might take the week and a half and three levels of approval or email the human being that I need the quote from who can also send me the screenshots without watermarks like that speed thing really it yeah it can really give you a head start right um what about let's go back to community I think that's such an interesting one this idea you know a game is kind of community brings this Powers again that it's not just about when the game is on and being played hopefully with your mobile games that's 24 7 by millions of people but the fact that they saw all this other content being created for you

right almost by your evangelist what can what can a company or individual team do to kind of build community and staff pointed out and embrace the potential of that yeah I think like from your General social media management perspective like you know it's pretty straightforward like right right like you see the comments or you know the feedbacks that you're getting but they actually like what we try to do is that we try to create platforms that people can express about the game not just in the like General platforms but like your games platforms as well so for example like creating contests about you know what should I should we put in the game next or what's the best way to you know like see yourself in the game or whatever is necessary in terms of creativity because you'll be surprised how many people like actually wanna contribute because they think that they are the experts of the game and most of

the time they kind of like unlock stuff that you couldn't with your like limited capacity of you know developing new content so most of the time you just look at it and you'll see like your your next six months uh content written all over the uh your posts and you know comment sections so it's kind of important to create some platforms not just social media but some you know contests that sort of thing in my opinion like we do it and it works really well I think but it's difficult because then you create an expectation as well because they want to see those things in the game as well so which might be feasible or not feasible or other way around yeah I think when it comes to community it can be quite tricky if you're just a small game I mean if you have a big game like Halo Call of Duty yeah sort of a thousand things to do and follow something to discuss if you're just launching a game it's harder to have enough topics to keep people engaged so

what I would say is also they're like piggyback on other Trends where you can put your audience's interesting in like if we for example if we for a former Community we don't just have to talk about this panel it's gonna run out you know it's not going to be fun for that long but we for can speak about you know who get the drunkest in here tonight or like other things that we are as well would be interested in like piggyback on that and then I would say I mean the best thing is when you can community in your own product like farmwheel or whatever but uh go to other communities and make them your community if that makes sense great and if you had anything to happen to me I mean I thought that was a really great point because but then that requires you to really understand the community not come in there to evangelize about your product but to really try and listen to them and maybe participate in the conversation and and and try and learn the lingo and and help you behave in that community in a respectful way I was interested as well to hear you

know he talks about piggybacking are there other thing kind of ways you can kind of piggyback on existing momentum bit Trends or you know presence in the industry you know quite frankly one of the gains I get from being in the stage is somebody's work from home for years is people in the industry see me I have conversations like it's kind of that's kind of what it's my own one-person company marketing campaign but you know whether it's getting on stage is presence in the industry other events piggybacking on Trends what kind of existing things can people apply their limited budgets to well if you look at other platforms that would be relevant to you like another product or game that has managed to reached an audience that you would like to have a lot of them don't have enough content on their own in their own game or like if you launch a metaverse you don't have enough things there to keep people engaged so instead of like paying for exposure you could help them develop something that would engage them and

also draw them to your own platform not your own product anyone else yeah I think like you know the the platforms that are more popular tend to be the more expensive ones because of the return on investment is clear then you can track everything and stuff like that so I think like it's our job to catch the you know like the next thing that is going on in the social media like you know the attention span for your Target own is getting shorter and shorter so you need to be able to like squeeze in stuff that are going to be interesting for them at first glance right so that they're going to see that oh what's this I'm going to click on watch that thing and I'm not talking about user accessory videos so I'm talking about content and that's why like in the games right now we need inside the game platforms to show that kind of you know interaction uh I think it's when you look at the top games right now they all have some sort

of platform in the game already you can watch stuff right like you can engage you know pubg mobile has an Instagram look like social media in the game for example why because like people tend to share more stuff inside the instead of like going into other platforms and do it because like the games are getting bigger and bigger and so on but for like a smaller budget of course you need some at least like some sort of you know committee engagement in the game itself uh it can be you know like anything but I think it's very important to start doing that from the development stage because if it gets popular if you're smaller you need more of in the game stuff instead of going on social media because it will be more expensive sure and then one thing actually that we haven't talked about yet is just the consistency I feel like a lot of people falter with their messaging I feel like we we tend to start trying to kind of Safeguard everything and push every kind of message to every kind of people that

we think might engage them whereas I think especially if you're on a lower budget it's really important to know what you stand for and what your main message is and then be consistent with that on a brand level otherwise people will never recognize you when they see your messages out in the wild right and that makes you think that consistency in getting your brand messaging in place you know some people here in the room I assume are going to be doing the game design and development and marketing part like when in that development process to start thinking about The Branding to start you know I I guess would agree if some might argue development and game design shouldn't be controlled or Guided by marketing but at the same time I guess maybe that the game design document stage you're also starting to think about the marketing message you're nodding the most Matilda so you get answer that one first well I actually really believe in cross-pollination from the very early stages I think if you have anybody in charge of brand or marketing they should be in there to see what happens when the game is being developed when the story

is being developed so they know to tack onto the right things and they know where everything started from so I really believe in Ultimate transparency even within teams so that not that the marketing meddles with the product itself but that they know what's going on yeah and I guess that's another opportunity if you're a smaller Studio you've got less layers of management absolutely it's easier to stand by the person's desk absolutely no titles no CMOS or nothing you can really share this information and you should share it it benefits your entire team uh yeah any other any other thoughts on kind of that yeah the melding of the design and development process I mean I might be slightly subjective in the area but I would say you develop your brand before you develop your product right because I mean so many times we see companies well great products but no one is playing them because they never thought about how to actually get people to use them and then if you look at the big guys unlike the Fortune 500 companies when they are developing a new product project or a new product the first thing they do is develop like The

Branding the marketing strategy then they actually develop the product and that is kind of like why do you need to start with because that's what is marketing is your way of making money so if you first develop rather than the marketing which 99 of all the games does they find out after the land said okay they didn't work now we do need to Pivot then now we need to Pivot and now we need to Pivot and that it just takes time and costs money stock Trader marketing then develop the product and I guess that can be a positive for you know again don't want to meddle with the game design but that can give you a game an identity it can help the game design process right identity and the feeling and the voice of the game and so on is that a reasonable thing to say I know you don't have to speak as a game designer deaf well absolutely but I mean it's it's the same thing when you when you work with a music artist they want and you know if you talk about oh you should do this one because this will sell really good they would be like no but it's not my creative Vibe and so on

and same thing comes to gaming so if you're a game developer I have the respect for that you want your creativity because you're an artist in that sort of way but still you need to make money so you need to start with the marketing in a way like the marketing department isn't the devil or branding but it's it's quite often people see it as something like extraneous that you need to put it on top of it but it could like you said it definitely should be created hand in hand and that's right yeah you know I haven't really thought of that but maybe one of the most important things with low budget marketing is thinking about it positively right not thinking of this negative you've got to embrace um yeah Iris if you wanted to pick up on that if not um no no I mean no it's okay I mean pretty much covered yeah if something else you said was interesting right at the beginning was that idea of you can still do things like the budget things advertising right you put in a very modest amount you make more than that I presume you could sync that into more like and yeah to all of you but maybe to you first off just to elaborate

on that point like why should people still consider those budget marketing things like ads yeah I mean there are of course like if you're accompanying you're launching a product there's of course what is your gold with getting users on board a lot of time startups it's because they want to raise more money and then you just need to show figures a lot of time so then you need to you know you can have quite crappy usage you just need to show a number for an investor but uh I mean the biggest change if you have as a startup is you know the ability to be fast-paced and test and you could test one million things and see what actually work and I mean we've done things where we have you know not even had a game tested one thousand well 100 different ideas see what has worked okay cool this is for birth now we developed The Branding then we developed the game um one more and then I've got loads more questions but I'll give you guys a chance to answer some so I should have given you a bit more fair warning to

start using the old brain and come up with some better questions than mine but last one we've kind of obviously we've definitely been talking about games and those will be transferable I presume to like Biz Dev Biz growth like marketing of your business but any particular considerations or advice particularly if you're not marketing your game you're marketing your game company bitter Studio service provider or is it as simple as the same rules apply hmm yeah well I think like there's the the rule set is slightly different if you think of a game you want it to become a phenomenon your company doesn't necessarily have to become a phenomenon but it needs to still have a consistent story because I think everything is storytelling at the end of the day so your company also needs to have a good story that you can tell that people can really in your investors or anybody you might encounter can can hold on to and understand um so slightly different but interlinked yeah no that makes me think right we are all in the end humans and stories of what engages right whether it's about a game or about a company um yeah anything else on that kind of if

there's anything distinct to the business marketing if not I'm going to throw it open to this lot so the next question I think also brilliant excellent right well does anybody look this is a great opportunity to ask three experts about how you might Market things if you're on a lower budget so I can't someone break the ice and throw a hand up otherwise I'm gonna have to look at mine again am I missing any hands now you're gonna have to carry on well oh god um it's all right we've got four minutes although I'm gonna have to open my pad again I was confident in you I'd closed it um you know I I guess yeah look we're talking about kind of what can be done and we're talking about practically obviously the key challenge here is budget other challenges people should be aware of you know we've already talked about some things like the timing you pick in terms of what else is going on any particular challenges Beyond not having much cash the time because I mean

Budget is really secondary but because there's always things you can do but the time it takes and you need it's just well when you start up you need to engage with people you need to get your brand out there and that takes a lot of time it's like once again when you developed your game and then you're going to launch and then you're like okay well this will take us six months to actually you know come up with ideas and figure out what is working for us stuff like that who will take a lot of time and that's the biggest biggest thing and maybe piggybacking on that just because it doesn't work right away it doesn't mean that doesn't work because when you're starting something new just putting that message out there and repeating it enough times that people remember it and recognize and understand it just because it doesn't work overnight it doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing something wrong it could just mean that you exactly what you said and you need more time and any other examples of just kind of well repeat examples interesting

examples you've seen of where you feel lower budget marketing stuff has gone gone well thank you well a lot of them and I guess that all companies started out on a low budget most of the times yeah and they're so basically I guess every company that is big today has done it well yeah but that is an interesting point right you can look to what's interesting big and small and consider how you can Embrace some of some of the learnings from a lower budget I mean one thing that Candy Crush they have done very traditional advertising but when they started out they understood one thing in their like gameplay view circumcision videos that I put out and it was not like so we what they showed in their gameplay because perks having gameplay videos are quite boring to watch but they really shows the show the benefits and they were focused on like the feeling you get

when you play rather than showing the functions of the game uh which was really smart yeah and when I do marketing copy it'll the feedback I often get is focused more on the benefits and less on the product right it's like why do you want this why is it worth having rather than simply showing the pro obviously to any potential clients I do perfect copy every time we have got uh just over 60 seconds one last chance if anyone wants to ask a question I feel like I'm in an auction the moment someone slightly moves I hope it's a hand going up but no okay um I guess to whip to the yeah um we've asked the questions about timing do you know what we've got less than 50 seconds now I can see the people involved uh probably don't want me to start asking another question and running over so thank you for your attention I hope that was useful for you and you've got some real practical stuff you can take home and or back to the team and turn into success and an Applause for yourself for your attention Applause for our lovely experts

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