• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

First week of marketing. What did I learn?

Spent the whole month of November creating a press kit, gathering email contacts, setting up pages and preparing a trailer. This is what happened.


Websites

Made a Itch, Gamejolt, Indie DB and Steam page early on but didn't make them pubic right away. Got the URLs and linked them in all the emails, making sure to cut out /draft and /beta from the web addresses.


Emails

Typed up 80 email drafts addressed to various gaming sites. All consisting of one basic template, with links to social media at the bottom of the image along with a GIF. The first mistake I made was not linking the trailer right away but I'll come back to that point in a moment.



Quick tip. If you have time, set all the drafts to schedule to send on the day and at a certain time. Gives you a opportunity to concentrate on the next stage.

Before the scheduled time came around, I made sure to launch all the web pages at one hour beforehand. If I did it afterwards, journalists wouldn't be able to check out the links.


Social Media

Made a post on Facebook, RMN and Twitter. All of them were prewritten beforehand. Posted them once the emails and web pages were done.

Facebook
Shared the page with indie promo groups and genre related sites. Answered questions, had some nice conversations :D



Twitter
Shared on twitter, got a little nervous due to little interactions in the first 2 hours. Went out to dinner with my girlfriend feeling a little deflated, then my phone started buzzing due to a lucky retweet and ended up choking on my Pizza... Had to apologize to the table next to ours.


What is interesting to note, is how many people clicked on the steam page. Did manage to grab 50 wishlists from the tweet itself. At very least, there's a few thousand people out there that know about the game.


Email follow ups

Out of the 80 emails that were sent, I received 5 responses. Two asking for a demo that I couldn't provide right away, one article confirmation and one ongoing conversation. The last one said that they're too busy writing up Christmas content... Which I totally didn't thought about before sending them off.

Two days later, I sent another email to the 75 outstanding responses.



After that, I got five articles and two being published next week. More often than not, the press don't often say if they're going to do a write up or not.

Quick Tip! Set up a google alert of your games name to find them. Really useful!

All articles so far.
1. One Angry Gamer
2. Noisy Pixel
3. Gaminglyfe
4. Northern Gamer
5. HorrorBuzz
6. Bluenews
7. The Gamer
8. 2DRadar
9. 25YL
10. Indiegameplus
11. SipReadRepeat

YouTube Analytics



As you can see, most of the views came from Blues News, which I was surprised about. What was most shocking was how many people never reached the trailers second half... The fun part! But it did made sense though, with the first half being purely set up and story context. This is good info to modify the Steam video at the very least.


Reddit

Posted on Reddit and reached 100 plus extra views on Youtube.


Conclusion

Did feel a little bit of a waste of time to write out all those emails, which I could've easily spent on gamedev but I'm glad it's done, found out some fascinating data and received positive feedback. Marketing your game is a full time job but if you want quick fuss free results use Reddit.

Hope this all comes in handy for somebody.

Back to gammak for now B)

This post was sponsored by Reddit.

Posts

Pages: 1
Definitely need to checkout Reddit then. Thanks for sharing!

This post was also sponsored by Reddit.
Nice post! I found it very helpful, thank you very much!

I hope you have the best success ;)
Pages: 1