With my new game Frostbite nearly ready to release into the wild I’ve been thinking a lot lately about marketing. It’s an area that I see a lot of Indie developers struggling in. It’s also crazy crucial to the success of indie games. So when I saw a tweet by Travis Taborek– a Digital Marketer & Writer who specializes in #indiegame marketing- about the benefits of influencer marketing for indie games I knew I needed to learn more. So I’ve asked Travis for a guest post on how to accomplish this. I hope you enjoy this look into a different side of game development than what we normally see and find it helpful.
Let’s be blunt, we all know that game development is a demanding and utterly thankless job.
The neverending days, weeks, months and years of ceaseless grind working for cents on the dollar would be enough to crush anyone’s spirit.
Even if you do get your game to a playable state and have it ready for launch, your game is far from guaranteed to succeed.
If you’re going to stand out in a market that’s already oversaturated with indie games and sees tens-of-thousands of new releases every year, you need a plan, you need to understand your audience, you need to know how to leverage the channels that are the best fit for your game, and you need to have luck on your side.
In other words, you need to do marketing for your game. Game development in itself, as previously stated, is a full-time job, but both making *and* marketing your game as a solo indie dev with no budget is a herculean task.
But not to worry. With a couple of straightforward, scalable strategies, you can take the game that represents your hopes and dreams and turn it into a profitable business.
Here’s how it works.
My First Case Study
Pitching your games to Youtube and Twitch influencers in the gaming space is your safest marketing bet. If your game is:
1) Decent
2) In a playable state, even an alpha
3) You want it to make money
That’s how it’s done.
A year ago, I enrolled in a digital marketing course at a fancy-pants tech bootcamp in San Francisco.
While studying there, I partnered with a two-man development team making a 2D space RPG on Steam. Influencer marketing was one of the first things we tried.
I did some research on influencer marketing for indie games. When I did, I came across this article by fellow indie game marketer @Tavrox: https://medium.com/@Tavrox/how-to-find-influencers-for-your-game-45b7e8fcb1a8.
In it, Tavrox outlines the process that he uses for influencer marketing campaigns for the games he works on. I read it and thought to myself “This seems worth trying. Let’s give it a shot.”
So here’s what I did.
1) I thought about the people who were most likely to play my client’s game. In this case, either hardcore gamers who enjoy space sims (EVE Online, Elite Dangerous etc.) or people who gravitate towards games with crafting elements (e.g. Terraria).
2) I made a list of ten games that were most similar to my client’s game
3) For each game, I came up with a list of 10 influencers who feature that game heavily on their channel until I had 50
4) I crafted a pitch explaining the game’s major selling points and why they would enjoy it
5) I sent them all Steam keys for the game asking them to review it
I sent out 50 emails to 50 YouTubers.
One of those 50 YouTubers did a review.
That review got 33,000 views.
The traffic from those 33,000 views made the game $10,000 in two days.
That’s a decent chunk of change. You could buy a car or put a down-payment on a house with that.
And that’s the basics. Here’s where it gets slightly more complicated.
How to Split-Test and Optimize your Outreach
I got a little lucky on my first outreach campaign. It isn’t usually that simple.
Here’s the thing. YouTubers get pitched by 100’s of indie developers just like yourself every single day. Their inboxes become inundated with review requests for games just as deserving as yours.
That means that they normally don’t respond to boiler-plate marketing emails sent en-masse.
The flip-side to that equation though is that you need to send your game to 100’s of influencers in order to turn your game into a profitable business, which means that sending each one personally hand-crafted emails signed in triplicate and scented with rose-perfume and delivered with a gift basket of iced champagne, cuban cigars and beluga caviar just isn’t feasible or realistic.
The trick is to find the middle ground. Personalize your emails just enough to make the recipient think that you delivered it to them personally, but make it just generic enough so that you can set an email automation tool to fill in the blanks for you so you can make your outreach scalable.
A typical pitch email has the following structure:
Hey there {{first name/online handle}}.
I came across your {{game title review}}.
{{Include a short sentence here about their channel that you like or that stood out to you, so they know you took the time to watch their videos}}.
{{A one-to-two-sentence description of your game goes here}}
{{A GIF or screenshot of your game goes here}}
Here’s a Steam key for a review: {{Steam key}}
That’s a pretty standard pitch. A few things to keep in mind:
– Keep it short and sweet. Generally speaking, the fewer words it takes to convey a message the better.
– It takes me about an hour to come up with a list of 10 potentially suitable influencers for a game
And how do you perfect the art of pitching to influencers? The same way you do any and all marketing: through continuous testing and experimentation!
Set up a new test with every iteration of 50 influencers. Here are a few split-tests you can try:
– Impact of including their first name in the subject line
– Times of day
– Influencers who specialize in different genre
– Long-form detailed pitch or a short-form pitch that cuts to the chase
– Does including visual elements and branding e.g. logos, GIFs, screenshots have any effect?
Here’s how I would do it:
– Come up with a list of 50 influencers. Have 10 of those be your VIP’s – the most popular YouTubers who would feasibly take an interest in your game. These 10 people get personalized emails specifically crafted for them
– Take the remaining 40 influencers, randomize the list and seperate them into Groups A and B.
– Test one of the elements mentioned above
– Use MixMax to send your emails: https://mixmax.com
– See which group has the highest open and response rate after about a week
– Find another 50 influencers, optimize off the winning result, and run a new test. Rinse and repeat!
What strategies have worked for you and your game’s outreach? Comment below with the processes and experiments you’ve tried!
The post How I Made a Struggling Indie Game $10,000, and How You Can Too appeared first on Gilded Octopus.
