Game marketing strategy: The marketing transformation in the game industry
game marketing is the key to survival in a widespread market that will explode. Not just the gam e’s technology, but also marketing the game products play a determinative role in pursuing the roads of success. If you aim to position your game product, just look at game marketing examples such as Call of Duty: Mobile and Candy Crushes as something more than a game: the most well-known brands you have ever seen! Thanks to mobile game marketing strategy as well as new game technology to put them in a high hierarchy. This article discusses the question of how mobile game marketing changes the game of game industry.
What is game marketing?
The game marketing term applies various marketing strategies to engage more potential gamers, catch them, and touch the game industry’s heart. Truly, game marketing strategies lead game companies to more income, but they are not limited to financial functions. In other words, even game marketing assists you to affect widely game community cultures as some classic video games like Super Mario did.
A game marketing point is to reach high-skillful gamers- those who are professional gamers and or gamers who have already lapsed- through all inbound and outbound marketing strategies such as cross-promotion and ASO and open new windows to diverse revenue. To clarify it, we need to take a look at some well-known game marketing examples.
Importance of game marketing strategy
Achievements always play a determinative role in showing why the game marketing strategy is highly important. Game marketing strategies are crucial bridges between developing and marketing your games. Look at the possibilities after a successful marketing campaign:
- Setting up brand
- Boosting income
- Establishing a community engagement
- Garuntting post-launch support
They are not only achievements but also some important goals that game developers could target through game marketing solutions.
Successful game marketing examples
To unbox the magic marketing box in the game industry, you should follow some important examples that have boosted famous games in the market. Let’s start with very small and disagreeable creatures called Angry birds.
Angry Birds: A marketing explosion in the game industry
The birds, who are not likely as real birds around the world, were born in Rovio Entertainment company. It just needed 5 years to conquer the game environment with 1 billion downloads on the IOS App Store. Although, as Rovio Entertainment’s co-founder claims- launching the iPhone worked as a turning point in the whole industry, their marketing strategy to gain App Store charts in just two countries including Greece and Finland in cooperation with a British company called Chillingo was so influential. After that, The Angry Birds caught the opportunity of being featured as “App of the Week”. Their YouTube trailers- which counted as unique at that time- were the other intelligent trick to absorb the targeted consumers. Some facts prove that the Angry Birds game trailers were seen around 100 times.
Nowadays, Angry Birds is not just a video game, but also is very famous brand in staff toys, board games, and movie industries.
Sims 2: How a digital marketing campaign influence the game market
Thanks to both Maxis and Electronic Art companies for designing and publishing the game Sims 2 in 2004. It is not just a very pleasing game but also a good sample to prove how a digital marketing campaign can change the game. After facing high demand from women aged 13 to 34, they opened many financial doors in front of them —branded content packs and expansions to special edition DVDs!
Sims 2 engaged around 1.5 billion users through a digital marketing campaign on the Yahoo platform and other channels. Seems reached a magic record by selling 2 billion copies in the game market.
The Witcher3: The Power of video marketing among the game marketing strategies
The Witcher 3 is an action game based on a fictional book written by Andrzej Sapkowski that was released in May 2015 by CD Projekt Red. The Witcher was a game like other ones in the action genre till when the company decided to make a cinematic-style trailer in collaboration with Digic Picture and the doors of happiness were opened to it.
In other words, The Witcher 3 began its adventure in the market game with this professional trailer and it reached more than 14 million views on various platforms. After just 6 weeks, CD Projekt Red gained a record of selling 6 million copies, and at the end of 2015 profit of $ 6.3 million.
These examples of Successful game marketing seem endless list. We can continue with so many other game marketing efforts that are completely successful. However, the most important window remains blocked: How do these game marketing achievements become true? Is creating a very professional trailer enough to get success in the game market? Not!
You should look for your game marketing strategy to promote your product. The following paragraphs probably help you to come up with your specific strategy.
Which strategy strengthens your game marketing?
Without any specific marketing strategy, reaching the top seems impossible. However, The main struggle that game indie developers might face would be choosing the right strategy to take to stand in the first rank. The good news is you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. As you find earlier, some companies have done it before. In the following, I discuss some common strategies.
Rewarding system: Reaching a high engagement rate
Reward always works, doesn’t it?
Almost all games define a reward system to keep gamers engaged with their product. They gradually realized that a reward system could be used as a weapon to create a pleasant immersive experience in the game context.
In detail, rewarding motivates gamers to go further, level up, and submerge in the game. If you want to develop a rewarding system, you probably can think of in-game currency and or special content. Whatever, by building up your reward system, you achieve the goals like:
- Boosting user loyalty
- Strengthen new user engagement
- Developing a strong community
Depending on your creativity, you will able to target one and or all these goals properly.
Influencer marketing: Building up your game community
Influencer marketing has stood the test very well either- not just among the game marketing strategies, but in all strategies even those which are counted as B2B marketing. As well as the concept you aim to promote, the mouth you use to transfer is also important. In this case, influencers- mostly reliable social media accounts- can boost your game marketing strategy. Let’s have a look at just some benefits that influencers bring to the table:
- Gathering strong leads
- Enhancing the lead conversion process
- Building brand awareness
Using the profit of influencer marketing completely relies on the influencers you collaborate with and the relativity that exists among your brand identity, the message you’re gonna transfer, and also the commonalities between your targeted audiences and people who actively follow the influencers. To extend this discussion, we need to dive in, probably, in a separate specific article.
Cross-promotion: The affordable marketing strategy
The cross-promotion strategy refers to not just collaboration with influencers, but also with other brands to make a common marketing campaign on social media and or other platforms. By the process of cross-promotion, you might reach several game marketing benefits:
- Reaching a high amount of lead conversion rate
- Boosting Audience engagement rate
- Saving the marketing budget
To get deeper into the concept of cross-promotion, please read the article Cross-Promotion: Creative Ideas to Expand Your Game’s Reach that we have already uploaded on the blog.
Social media marketing campaigns: Killing several birds with one stone!
You have become familiar with the miracle of social media campaigns in the paragraphs above regarding the successful case of the Witcher 3 campaign. In general, social media platforms enhance to make a buzz around the brand and or product!
Develop related hashtags, design your videos and pictures, prepare your catchy written content, and collaborate with influencers and co-brands. Bomb! You will incredibly achieve your all possible marketing goals like
- Collecting relevant leads
- Making strong communities
- Building brand awareness
- Converting current leads to consumers
- Gaining high selling rates
All these dreams come true, but not just by preparing content material. They will occur also through a very specific social media strategy. It needs a huge other content to dive into social media strategies to market a game.
Online content marketing through Twitch and Discord: Thinking out of the box
All the strategies mentioned in the paragraphs above are directly and indirectly related to content marketing. However, we are going to highlight the benefits of content generation specifically in two Twitch and Discord platforms which host many million game communities here:
- Targeting relevant leads by lower costs
- Utilizing the current game communities to make buzz around the product and or brand
- Accomplishing a high brand awareness rate
They are just a few profits that you can take through content generation in Twitch and Discord. But primarily, you need to think of tricks that make your activity beneficial:
- Think out of the box
- Be more funny
- Schedule your content
- Engage with the communities
- Take online platform-base events
- Do not underestimate the benefits of visual content
- Collaborate with other game developers and publishers
Utilizing the benefits of working on Twitch and Discord is not possible unless you take a determinative content strategy. You can also go for other creative marketing strategies like VR technology attractiveness, taking omnichannel approaches, all various ads like social media ads, mobile phone ads, google ads, data-driven strategies, etc. The game marketing possibilities always hug the new creative strategies.
But as mentioned before, sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just need to find which strategies fit your game product and marketing goals. This means planning a game marketing strategy is a necessity.
How to Plan a Game Marketing Strategy?
What do I talk about, when talking about planning a game marketing strategy?
Target Your Audience
Target audience applies to a specific group of audiences who the game developed for. Any marketing campaigns should target them. To target the audiences, identity, age, gender, interest, motivation, demographic factors, etc. should be considered.
Anatomizing target audiences occurs through these steps:
- Analyzing customer base and carrying out client interviews
- Conducting market research
- Identifying industry trends
- Creating persona
- Revising persona
Set A Goal
Before laying the bricks, you need to what kind of building you are going to structure. It means, acknowledging your aim, is necessary. Also, during the planning of a marketing strategy, the goal must be defined. Here there are some achievable goals to pursue in marketing efforts:
- Brand awareness
According to the Oxford Dictionary, brand awareness applies to extending consumer awareness with quality and image which a specific brand tries to promote as itself. If you are going to make your game very familiar to targeted audiences, you have to expose the brand of your game.
- Download rates
Sometimes game publishers aim to increase the download rate. So, there is no way to take an appropriate strategy to gain a higher download rate.
- Engagement rate
Engagement rates refer to metrics that show how much customers interact with your game and brand. In the case of games, sometimes the download rates would be a reliable metric to estimate if your strategies to increase your engagement rate work or not!
- Retention rate
It is so necessary to ensure that the audiences you already absorbed before want to go back to the game and enjoy. So you have to take a strategy for keeping audiences engaged after the initial experience.
- Revenue
No matter what kind of revenue you desire to get, selling 2 billion copies like Sims 2 and or getting $ 6.3 million in just a few months like The Witcher 3. No one can take a specific revenue without taking an appropriate plan.
- Community building
Specifically, gaming publishers always dream of a vast and strong community due to guaranteeing almost a permanent marketing profit and reducing costs. One of the most considerable strategies to build up a community is online content marketing through Twitch and Discord as mentioned above.
This is an endless list. It is possible to even go deeper in miniaturizing the objects. What kind of goals do you want to reach in your marketing mission?
Analyze Your Competitors
The game market environment works as a race field. Reaching the top requires high competition. To compete in the field of game marketing, you should know deeply your competitors. The capability of understanding the weaknesses and strengths of your competitor is necessary.
Develop Unique Value Proposition (UPV)
As the same as analyzing the competitors, recognizing and setting up the unique value of your product, and the main message is initial. To define the UPV, take these steps:
- The UVP should meet the needs and desires of the targeted audience
- Focus on profits and results that fit the targeted audience.
- Simultaneously use clear language to express and promote the UPV
UVP distinguishes your brand and product from other competitors.
Explore Appropriate Strategies
Many marketing strategies assist you in reaching the goal successfully. Exploring appropriate strategies includes some serious steps:
- Choosing the appropriate marketing channel
- Creating content calendar
- Developing materials
- Making pre-release campaign
- Lunch your campaign
Evaluate the performance
After launching the campaign, you have to ensure that you meet the KPIs you set and achieve the goals in all aspects. The evaluation step informs you about the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign and enlightens you on the next steps that you should take in the next marketing efforts.
To sum up, a game marketing strategy is the only way to survive in an industry with high competition. While as important as the quality of the product, marketing plays the role of a very crucial weapon in the way of success.
Q&A
1. Why game marketing strategy is important?
A strong game marketing strategy is essential for reaching and engaging your target audience, building excitement and awareness before launch, and ultimately driving sales and retention. It helps differentiate your game in a competitive market and fosters a loyal community of players. Effective marketing also allows for ongoing feedback, enabling continuous improvement and long-term success.
2. Which elements should we consider when choosing a marketing strategy?
When choosing a marketing strategy, consider your target audience’s demographics and preferences, the competitive landscape, and your unique value proposition. Additionally, evaluate available marketing channels and budget constraints to ensure effective resource allocation. Finally, think about your goals and objectives to align your strategy with your overall business vision.
3. Why evaluating the marketing performance is necessary?
Evaluating marketing performance is crucial because it helps you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and strategies in achieving set objectives. It provides insights into what works and what doesn’t, enabling informed decisions for future marketing efforts. Regular assessment also optimizes resource allocation and improves return on investment (ROI).
