Jero Juujärvi is the founder of Acquire, Engage and Monetize and has worked as a game designer for Nitro Games.
Being a game developer is one of the riskiest jobs you can have. You can have superb execution and create a vast marketing campaign for your game only to realize that all the money spent on user-acquisition, promotion, PR and game launch campaigns did not create an effective enough user base to initiate the viral marketing that would yield those millions of free downloads we so vividly dream of. And we can see the successes happening all around us (Clash of Clans, Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga).
What would you say if you have been sold on this idea of free downloads after you have reached the success barrier? Commonly, the truth behind the lucky developers is that they are not so lucky as they seem from outside. I will take you on a tour and show you some of the things successful game marketers don’t tell you.
Most developers see marketing as a one-time deal. They see it as the transition from game launch marketing into community management, which frankly has never been true and never will be true. In this post, I will explain how marketing is not one-time deal but a continuous process from start of the development till the last customer is playing the game. We will go through setting up a game plan for marketing opportunities, ways to generate leads way before the game is launched, and how to create marketing campaigns that can be used on game launches, updates, or to just to stay visible to potential players. We will also take a look at the importance of the connection between the game design and a marketing system. Game design combined with marketing will offer a ton of opportunities for viral loops and customer-created promotions. Lastly, we look at how the successful marketers do it all at once.
Game Plan
Before we start designing marketing strategies, we must sit down and focus on finding the correct audience. We need to understand their needs and pains. If you are indie, I know developing games is a big passion, as it is for me, too, but you must also do the work required so that your labor of love can reach the people who really care for it.
“Our game is RTS. So, our audience is made of passionate RTS gamers who are looking for this type of game.”
Not even close! We need to take a lesson from growth hackers and truly immerse ourselves into thinking like our target audience. By immersing, I mean talking to them, asking questions and finding out their needs and desires. The goal is to understand your target audience so well that you can think of yourself as one of them and act on it. Capture the way they say things, understand them better than they understand themselves. It may sound complicated, but if you keep interviewing your audience more and more, you will reach this level.
“But, Jero, how do we find these people?”
Again, you must think as they do. If you were them, where would you go to seek solutions for your needs? Reddit? Facebook? G+? Forums? Enjin forums? Games? Real-life meetings? Chats? List all possible channels where your potential customers spend time. This is important when you are creating marketing campaigns, because you know where to focus your marketing effort. If your game is an RTS game, what type of players are they? What kind of games do they want to play? Thinking like them opens up unseen opportunities.
When you have found the correct channels, try to find the segment of users who are similar to your target audience. Verify that there is Need X and you have the best solution for that need. Gamers are excited to be able talk with developers, so don’t hesitate to engage them. If all goes well, you might already create new leads for your social promoters group (more on this later).
With all this data, you can build a game plan that specifies your golden audience. A golden audience is an audience that has money to spend and is very excited to play your game. You need to understand this audience’s mindset clearly and be able to think like they do. Based on all this data, you can make critical design decisions on art style, game design, pricing strategies and marketing positioning. This is very important because when you start building the game, you can provide a perfect solution for your target audience’s need. This will also generate a ton of visibility and revenue through word-of-mouth.
Lead Generation
Finally, we get into action! The goal of lead generation is to create some initial visibility and authority so when the time comes, you are able to create enough hype and viral marketing opportunities. This is critical to launch a successful game title. This step can include building an email list, selling alpha/beta opt-ins, setting up a game testing community, building strong authority at channels where your golden audience hangs out, etc.
“Why should we waste our precious time to generate potential customers if we will get them anyway when we launch the game?”
Your business is your market. If you cannot understand your market, you cannot understand your business. See, here is the problem that most startups and app/game developers face. Even if the need is defined and you have become immersed in the mindset of your golden audience, you still need to test the markets continuously and see what sells and what doesn’t. Many developers have a very short soft-launch period to test their game design and marketing. Usually, they focus mostly on testing the user experience, which leaves less room for marketing channels that need to be tested as well. Marketing can be tested long before this period, and so this mistake can become a very pricy one for developers.
In lead generation, your goal is to find things that sell. Not “I feel that this will sell,” but “This sells; look at the data.” When you are reaching out to your golden audience, your aim is to initiate interest and call for a certain action (subscribing to an email list, joining a game testing community, participating in a social promoters group etc.), and immersing yourself into the audience much more deeply. You can never truly be immersed enough into your audience.
When you are at the targeted channels, focus on staying an active voice in the community and building up your authority. When you become a recognized member of the community, people are more likely to approve of your opinions and writings more due to the trust built from months before. Of course, many of us do not have this kind of time to invest in forums. We can solve the issue by getting existing forum members with strong authority to become part of our social promoters group.
With that, you should also start building relationships between other developers of similar target markets. You can learn lot of valuable intel from them, as they have sold games in that market and know the challenges and needs much better than you do. You can even create deals with them to cooperate with you to build up your audience even more. Chatting with the writers of game news sites, review sites and blogs opens up possibilities for early promotions of the game and other opportunities for your marketing campaigns.
While you are testing markets and finding out what sells, you’ll start to find new audiences who are interested on your product, letting you expand and reach more potential buyers. Lead generation is an ideal phase in which to expand your market, test the segments, find all the potential channels and learn ways to initiate interest in your audience and call them to action.
Marketing Campaigns
When the game plan and lead-generation phase are complete and the game is ready to launch, it is good to start planning marketing campaigns with all the data you have gathered so far. Even if you stay up in the news through lead generation, a marketing campaign’s goal is to break barriers to reach worldwide visibility.
There are thousands of marketing strategies, and focusing on all of them would be a gigantic waste of time. In marketing campaigns, seek out the most effective strategies to get your target audiences. Do your target audiences play games similar to yours? Reach out to App Store crews and ask a favor to be featured. Use paid ads, YouTubers, bloggers, App Store optimization, discounts, competitions, freebies, UA/burst campaigns, social media, forums, etc.
In the lead generation phase, you should have tested these and now you have enough knowledge of what strategies work best for the game. Focus only on two or three channels in the beginning and expand from there if possible. Otherwise iterating the marketing approaches may get very overwhelming.
Also, focusing on creating share-worthy content by means of competitions, lotteries, or other activities can be very rewarding. When planned correctly, it will result a ton of visibility, shares and installs. On your major updates and game launches, you should do at least one monthlong campaign to get your game on people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.
If you are interested in learning more about game business and marketing, check out my game business group on Facebook.
Game Design
Well-executed marketing campaigns give a nice boost to a user base by yielding more new users, but marketing does not stop here. We are developing interactive media — which is like unrefined gold for marketing purposes. In games, you’re able to implement viral designs, which can help start building a community and retarget inactive users while also gaining greater knowledge of your whole variety of user segments.
Viral design is a game design in which the goal is to get new users into your game and retarget churned/inactive users to get back to playing your game. In viral design, the most essential part is to create a need for players to have their friends playing the same game. This need can be created by offering benefits, content expansions or other concrete value. Viral design is a very vast topic to discover, as it is a combination of viral marketing, game design and social design. The main driver in viral design is that your players will promote your game advertisements in their social media, where it can be picked up by others.
The main focus on the marketing aspect in game design is building a community, creating a player funnel that teaches users to communicate with each other, seek out social rewards, and become more engaged with other players. Community building is a very important aspect, as friendship is a strong bond to keep players playing the same game. And if you can create a friendship between developers and players, they will become attached to your games. Create non-time-consuming ways to bond with your players and push players to find friends in the game. Bonding is a very strong attractor, as it is part of a human need to have a sense of belonging. If you can manage to create a community that empowers other users and makes everyone feel the importance of being part of it, you may hold a very powerful user base for your future titles as well.
Designing gameplay systems that need more than one person to complete is a very powerful technique, as it will push users to talk to each others to solve the puzzle. When you are building the social design, take the social difficulty curve and other elements into consideration, as the system should be user-powered and as such free up as much time as possible for developers to focus on other aspects of the game.
Marketing System
Does all this sound too overwhelming?
“Jero, uh… This all takes so much time to do and confuses me a lot…”
Don’t worry. Every profession has a ton of information, strategies and tactics, and the thing that separates success from failure is a good comprehensive marketing system. To do it all, you need to have a marketing system where you start to add these bits and pieces of data. Compare the data with the other results you have gathered and iterate your marketing campaigns through insights gained from the system.
To remind you, successful marketing is not just a single successful marketing campaign. Successful marketing is a continuous process of updating the game plan, staying visible and active for your audience, creating marketing campaigns to get new users and keeping your marketing system up-to-date.
To build a working marketing system, create sections for each element of your market intel. Your audience and their burning desires. Audience channels and promotion lists. Promotion hit lists and PR opportunities. Marketing campaign successes and metrics. When you are inspecting the data, you’ll start to see the missed opportunities that could have yielded a ton of new users. You will have deeper insights when you’re able to see the data collectively. You will continue to build better relationships with the game news sites and be able to update them with your new stories. Continue reaching out to different people, sending freebies, manage your growing community and engage it from time to time so that it grows into a great marketing resource. Create ad campaigns and viral competitions to get new users and create higher user LTV tweaks.
I can understand that it can feel very, very complicated at the moment, but that’s why you need to build the system. You will find the best user acquisition channels that yield the most users and focus your effort there. Iterate, iterate and iterate while communicating with your target audience to get the newest insights and trends in that niche market.
Making it Worth Your While
“Dude! You just blurted, do this, this, and have a system… Can you share a clear list of things to track?”
You know, today, I feel great. Let me give you something better than a list. I have never done this ever before, but today, I am giving away my personal marketing system for you, for free.
Look, I don’t appreciate lurkers. So I will make you an offer. I will send you my personal marketing system if you reply on this post and tell me what is the most effective out-of-the-box marketing strategy that you know or have used personally.
Let’s spice things up even more. For those who share the most creative out-of-the-box marketing strategy, especially when backed up with the data, will get access to the Acquire, Engage, & Monetize closed mastermind group. Acquire, Engage, & Monetize has a mastermind group where game development professionals share their knowledge and tactics for better marketing, player engagement and monetization.
If you leave your best marketing strategy soon after this article is posted, I will send out my marketing system on July 27, 2015.
Best Regards,
Jero Juujärvi
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