Marketing/Advertising

From IndieGuide

"If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying "Circus Coming to the Fairground Saturday," that's advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that's promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor's flower bed, that's publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that's public relations. If the town's citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they'll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that's sales." - Unknown

Stages of Business
1	Being Indie
2	Starting Your Own Business
3	Finding a Niche/Market
4	Online Community
5	Website Design
6	Marketing/Advertising
7	Portals
8	Affiliates
9	Press Release and Getting Reviewed

Even if you have created the best game ever, if nobody knows about it, you will never get people play it. Marketing can be relevant even if you are not selling the game but only to make your game known and have more and more people play it.

So this section is all about getting your game known. Your marketing efforts will make more sense if you direct them at groups that are more likely to be interested in what your game has to offer. There are many different ways you can use to market/advertise your game. The following sections list all of them. Some topics might be continued on other pages, but will at least be mentioned here. Some of the means are free, some involve a small (or big) investment.

Marketing in a nutshell

(brief explanations about marketing and the different activities, listing and explaining of the main keywords in this area)

Advertising

Your website

The Internet is the best and most cost-effective means to distribute and promote your game. Your website is your sales representative, your secretary and your own personal store front all rolled into one.

As all that rolled into one, your site needs to be able to do, and convey, several thing.

Image: You're website is likely the first contact your customers will have with you and as the case with most things in life: First impressions are important. You want your site to not only look polished, attractive and professional, but you also want your site to have a consistent image between your games and your ethos. If your company's design ideals is making games geared for children, it is important to convey this in the look of your site.

But the importance of your site design conveying your ideals doesn't just stop there. If your site is poorly built, is tough to navigate and has mismatched colors your customers are going to assume that your game is equally as messy, and unprofessional.

Remember, you're looking to convince someone to not only spend hard earned money on your game but to also be willing to enter their credit card information in order to do so. Using a secure, and well known, E-Commerce provider will help to ease any worries your customer may have, but the question still remains; would you feel good about buying an indie game from a site that looks like it was made by a five year old?

Navigation:

It's pretty obvious that you need a dedicated site for your game. There are a few things to get right though.

The website should look attractive and appropriately promote your game. That's quite hard to do well, but if you don't do it, it will turn people down before they even had a look at your game.
You must have the following available on the site.
- Screenshots
- Description of the game
- Downloadable demo - nobody will buy your game without having had a chance to play it first.
- Videos (ideally)
You should use an appropriate domain name for your website.
Consider keywording so you turn up in web searches. (We should dedicate a wiki page on this).
Make sure, if you provide emails on the website, that they are professional email addresses and not stuff like superman123@hotmail.com.

Publicity

Promotion

Demo

It should be obvious that you need to have a down loadable demo of your game. For that you don't even need your own website, you can also upload it to various file servers.

This is not obvious. Some games only have videos. World of Goo only had a video of their game and got a lot of sales. Later they released a demo.

Forums

There are quite a few ways how to use forums for promotion. It is important however to do so tactfully and respectful of the particular forum.

Have a link to your website as part of your signature when you post stuff on any forum.

Blogs

Interviews

Networking

You (hopefully) have friends, and people that are into games, or even other indies. Make sure they all know about your game and have a copy of it.

Community

Word of Mouth

Competitions/Events

Even if you don't win, besides the publicity as such, you will get a link to your site there that will increase your own web traffic.

Your Articles

Game Review

Press Releases

Links

From friends, blogs, other game websites.

Game featuers

Although game features as such don't (and shouldn't?) belong to the category of marketing, some of them nevertheless can have an impact on sales, and a few might be directly linked to marketing.

User-created content

Multi-User games

In-Game adverstisement

Measuring success

Before we get into any of the actual techniques used to sell your game, and company, there is something extremely important you must learn first: How to measure your success.

You're in the business to do one thing: create games for a living. In order to keep creating games for a living you must be able to make a living doing it. So what we want to measure is game sales.

Do not drop a single penny into marketing or advertising until you can reliably track what that penny is doing for you.

You can do this by measuring several key stats:

Conversion Rate: This is a simple stat to track. Your demo is downloaded 100 times and you make 2 sales from it, you have a conversion rate of 2%. In a crowded market your conversion rate can be as low as 0.5%, while if you target the core audience of your game style(One that isn't so crowded with other games and you have decent enough polish) the conversion rate could be as high as 2-4%. A good Conversion Rate is generally considered anything over 1%.

Hits on your website: As you can see from the Conversion Rate, even a great game with polish targeted directly at it's core market is going to need a large number of people downloading the demo in order to meet any goals the developers have set for game sales.

It's important to track how many people are visiting your site and how many are leaving or downloading the demo. With this information, you may able to spot any problems with people either having trouble locating your demo on the site or where people are entering, and exiting, your site may reveal other issues.

It is also extremely important to track, not just how many people are visiting your site, but also where people are coming from. When you have spent money advertising you need to be able to track how many visitors you're getting from the site you just put an ad up on. Are these new visitors enough to make a return on your investment? Are they downloading the demo or just taking a peek and leaving?

With that information in hand you can determine if you should continue with the ad or dump it.

There are a number of ways to track the visitors to your website, see the Website Tools & Techs page for a listing of some of them.

Unit Profits: You sell your game for $20 and have a Conversion Rate of 2%. So every 50 downloads you make one sale, or $20. However, your E-Commerce service takes 10%. You're now making $18 per 50 downloads. But how much did the bandwidth of the 50 downloads cost you? Let's say you pay 70 cents a gig and your demo is 10megs. So 100 downloads = 1 gig. You're now making $17.65 per 50 downloads. What if your demo is larger? Your profit is smaller.

Then there is your advertising. How much are you paying a month advertising? How does that cut into your profits? Thankfully you're able to track how many people are coming from the site you're advertising on, and how many downloads you're getting, so you know the exact number. Let's say you've gotten 4000 downloads and you're paying $1 dollars per 50 downloads(To be simple). The Profits from every 50 downloads is now $16.65.

Are you paying any royalties to an artist or composer per sale? What are your taxes like? Factor in all of these, and any others you may have, in order to find out what Profit you are actually making. Once you have an idea of your Profits you can more easily figure out what marketing and advertisement has worked out for you, which you need to dump and what you're actually making.

Your Games Profits: You know how much your game makes per 50 downloads but now it's important to figure out how many games you need to sell in order for your game to turn a profit. From the start of your project you should write down every single cent you spend on your game creation from hiring artists, to buying sound effects, graphic programs and everything in between. Keep track of every expense.

With that final developement cost number in hand, you can determine how many copies you'll need to sell. Let's say your game cost $5,000 to make and the profits of each sale is $17. So in order to make a profit you will need to sell 295 games(14,750 downloads at 1% conversion) to make $5,015, not taking into count whatever your taxes situation is.

This does not include how much you value your time. Keep a log of how many hours you put into the game and figure out what you're making per hour spent to help determine if it's worth the effort to you or not.