Most of the developers start to make games even without thinking of the marketing phase, which by the way is the most important phase of the development cycle. Here you’ll find what you need to know before marketing your game. Let’s start with the basics:
When should I start marketing your game?
The answer is: “As soon as you have something to show”. Even if you think that your game is not yet complete, you should start to publish a few things that you think are worth to be shown.
It is very important to have feedback about your game as soon as possible which will also help to start building your community from the day one of your development process.
A good technique to know if your game is worth the effort to make is to:
- Create a game prototype as soon as possible.
- Create a video along with a landing page.
- Add a newsletter.
- Share your website.
If your game reaches 100 subscribers to the newsletter, then it means that it has a good potential and so, is worth spending your time to make it.
Where do I publish my game.
The obvious answer is: anywhere you can. Here is a good list of social networking sites:
- Google plus
- Reddit.
- Indie DB
- Various forums
But it is worth to say that managing all of these social networking sites is a really time consuming activity, so my suggestion is to start at least with facebook and twitter and then slowly start to cover the other socials. If you don’t think you have enough material/time to cover all the socials, then remain with the few that you’re sure to have time to post and be sure to get in touch with the community.
What to publish?
There are a lot of things that you can post, here is a list:
- Screen shot
- Videos
- Gif
- Audio
- Dev blog
Video and gift are the most used materials on socials, but making them require a lot of time and effort. So if you have a lot of time to spend on content creations for social media, then go ahead with gift and videos, otherwise screenshot images are always better than nothing. A lot of developers also have a dev blog where they publish updates about their game development status, but this is really a time consuming activity, so before getting into that be sure to have the necessary time to write the posts.
Create a marketing plan?
A good idea before you start marketing your game is to create a marketing plan. It’s very useful to plan all your future posts in order to have an idea of the materials that you have to create in the next couple of months.
Your marketing plan should contain a list of things to post in the next months along with the content to post. This is very helpful to give you an idea of the time and effort that you need to invest to market your game.
Know your audience?
What kind of game are you making? This is a very important question because you need to know the answer before you start to market your game. Knowing your audience is important because it allows you to know what they want from your games and how to communicate better with them. For example if you’re making a horror game, it is good to study the community of some other horror games like “Resident Evil” or “Silent Hill”. By doing so, you’ll be able to understand what they like more, determining what content has the most potential to be appreciated on your future posts.
