by Game Marketing Genie, on 09-Feb-2021 14:18:47
As technology evolves and allows businesses to traverse the global marketplace, the importance of incredible digital marketing has become clear. If you want to make it in your market, whether you’re a bricks and mortar store or an online business, you need to have a solid digital marketing strategy so that you appear when your audience searches for you.
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- Why do you need digital marketing?
- What you need to know
- Getting started
- Taking your product to market
- A quick digital marketing guide
- Making modern marketing part of your game marketing strategy
- Digital marketing strategies and you
- Specific strategies to consider
- But why do you need a digital marketing strategy?
- Establishing yourself as your own brand
- Using Google Ads
- Mistakes to watch out for
- Common small business marketing problems
- Connecting with your audience
- Don’t have time to do it all yourself?
Why do you need digital marketing?
There are a variety of ways that you can get your latest video game to your audience. Social media, email marketing, SEO and more! Each marketing technique has its own tools and tactics that you must customize to your needs, otherwise they might not work for you.
Having a digital marketing strategy is your ticket to business success. If you don’t have a solid one in place for your game, you:
- Don’t know your customers
- Don’t have any direction
- Don’t have an online value proposition
- Could be wasting money and time
- Are missing out on new customers
- Leave yourself vulnerable to competitors
By establishing an online marketing strategy, you are statistically more likely to find your niche and get the results that you desire.
Still not convinced? Find out more in Online Marketing: Why Your Video Game Needs It!
What you need to know
Without proper marketing, a video game falls into the pit of unplayed games before it gets the chance to level up. The games we all know and love were backed by many good resources, but one of the most important is an incredible digital game marketing strategy.
With the industry as crowded as it is, you need to show players why your game is the one that they should pick over others. A good game marketing strategy allows you to communicate your why your game is special, different and worth playing using fresh and engaging methods.
While you need to know what to do for your game marketing strategy, you also need to understand how to make marketing work for you as a game developer.
Luckily, we’ve got 5 Digital Marketing Must Knows For Game Developers for you right here!
Getting started
Digital marketing is one of the most prevalent types of marketing available to global businesses today. Why? Because your audience exists somewhere online, and digital marketing gives you the tools to attract, delight, and convert them into valuable leads.
These days, it’s no longer good enough to rely on traditional marketing methods like television and print media. You need to use data to find out where your competitors are and what they’re doing, reach and engage specific audiences, and track your performance for optimization. The perfect way to do all this? Digital marketing.
But what is digital marketing? From sponsored posts on social media, to banner ads you see on web pages, digital marketing spans the majority of the Internet to provide targeted ads to the people that are most likely to convert.
If you’re new to the wide world of digital marketing, then we’ve got you covered. The Game Developer's Guide to Digital Game Marketing has the best insider tips on how to get started today.
Taking your product to market
If you've got a new game, product or business (or are launching to a new market), then you need a go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
A GTM strategy is an action plan that outlines the steps you need to take to succeed in a new market or with a new product. You can apply it to various business endeavors including:
- Launching a new product
- Moving an existing product into a new market
- Re-launching a brand
- Testing out new strategies
- And more!
To get all the GTM know-how, check out our blog that has Everything You Need to Know About a Video Game Go-to-Market Strategy.
Also, find out the The 10 Key Components of a Gaming Go-To-Market Strategy.
A quick digital marketing guide
It’s a hard world out there for businesses in the digital marketing industry. We’ve all heard the winning stories of big startups like Uber, but the truth is that most don’t make it and fall into the sea of failed businesses.
It’s said that nine out of ten startups fail, but don’t be afraid! With the right goals, strategies and passion, you can work smarter to make your business get the recognition you desire. One of the best ways to start out in your quest for success is to create a foolproof digital marketing strategy.
The best digital marketing strategies contain a full scope of what you plan to achieve in your marketing campaign, including goal and audience frameworks, content marketing plans, social media marketing strategies, SEO and more!
That’s why you need our blog, The Best Digital Marketing Guide for Video Game Startups, to kick-start your marketing strategy to success!
Making modern marketing part of your game marketing strategy
The marketing strategies of yesteryear won’t work for your video game. You need to keep up with marketing trends to ensure that you stay future focused and on top of your competitors.
If you want downloads, purchases, views or more, using the latest marketing techniques is your one way ticket to your game’s success. You have to think out-of-the-box to capitalize on consumer trends and come up with incredible campaigns that will get you the results you want.
So, what do you need to know to make sure that you stay up to date? There are a lot of things that you can do, but we’ve got five of the hottest tips for you here.
Learn more in our blog, 5 Ways to Make Modern Marketing Work for Your Game.
Digital marketing strategies
Understanding your strategies
Digital marketing is a broad field, filled with growth opportunities, marketing strategies, metrics for analysis, and chances to make your business matter. But the marketing strategies that others use won’t work for you. Any good business knows that they need to stay up-to-date to ensure that they stand out in their market.
Your strategy must include researching trends, rethinking your existing marketing strategies, seeing what your competitors are doing, and overall optimizing the way you run and present your brand to the world. But what strategies should you use to start with?
Building on from the previous topic, our guide runs you through the seven most important marketing strategies that you need to consider for your marketing campaign. Find out more here: The 7 Top Digital Marketing Strategies to Consider for Your Video Game.
Showing your audience what is special about your business
You’ve put in a lot of time, money and effort into making your video game incredible and ready to go to market. But unfortunately, so have a hundred other brands! You’ve got to make yourself stand out among the crowd, and prove that you are better than every one of your competitors.
Your ticket to success? Your game’s USP. What’s a USP you may ask? Short for “unique selling proposition”, your USP is a marketing strategy that informs your audience about what makes your product unique, special, different or better than your competitors’.
Gamers aren’t swayed just because your game is new. If your game doesn’t do something new, look incredible, meet their needs, or exceed their expectations, then they are going to turn a blind eye to it.
Making your USP a major focus of your marketing strategy is essential. Find out 12 Tips for Highlighting Your USP in Your Game Marketing Campaign in our guide!
More strategies for your game
To keep your edge in the competitive video game industry, you need an incredible game marketing strategy. Your overall marketing plan needs to be customized to your game's individuality. This includes the business model you’re following, your target audience, the platform your game will be released on, markets your game will be sold on, your budget and the desired results.
What we’re saying is that your marketing strategy cannot be a copy and paste of one you found online, or even one that you used for a different game. Each product or service (or in this case, game) must have its own unique plan. Without a tailored strategy, you won’t be able to successfully market your game and you’ll end up lost in a sea of games that have made the same mistake.
But fear not! The team at Game Marketing Genie can help. That’s why we’re giving you our 5 Useful Marketing Tips to Keep Your Video Game On Top.
Specific strategies to consider
Multi-armed bandit testing
We’ve already listed a number of incredible game marketing strategies that you should be thinking about to get your game out there. And while these strategies are great, sometimes you need something cutting edge to get you the results you want.
There are so many things you can try, but how will you know what will work? Games have an infinite number of variations and design choices, and you need to choose what content to use to get more downloads, purchases and players. There is no one option for all gaming companies since every player is different.
If we look to a successful company like Netflix, you might notice that their content is tailored to each individual user’s needs. This is because they use multi-armed bandit (MAB) testing. This allows them to systematically allocate more traffic to the best performing variations while allocating less to those that underperform.
Does this sound like something that can up your marketing game? It is! Check out our blog, Why You Need Multi-Armed Bandit Testing To Market Your Game, to learn more about it.
Gamification
Marketing is more than just telling your audience why they should buy. It's about making them feel a deeper, almost subconscious connection with your brand that establishes you as the primary choice in their minds.
One incredible way to do this is with gamification. You might be surprised to learn that gamification is for businesses in all industries - not just for gaming brands! However, adding gamification to your marketing strategy is not easy. It takes time to find the right methods that suit your brand.
Take your marketing to the next level with 5 Ways You Can Gamify Your Marketing.
Why you need a digital marketing strategy?
As more and more businesses take their companies online, you might be wondering what the reason for this is. Here’s a couple of quick statistics to help you understand:
- There are 7.8+ billion people in the world
- Some 5+ billion of them all have their own unique smartphone
- 4.54 billion of these people are Internet users
If this doesn’t tell you that your audience is online, then read those statistics again! There’s a reason that digital marketing is the favored marketing method, and without it, you’re missing out on opportunities to convert your audience into loyal, retained customers.
So, if you’ve been thinking about jumping into digital marketing, now is the best time to get started! And with the amount of time that people are now spending online, your audience will be more than likely to see your ads while browsing, researching or even wasting time trying to find things that interest them.
Still not convinced? Then you check out these 6 Good Reasons You Need a Digital Game Marketing Strategy to help understand why you need it for your business today.
Establishing yourself as your own brand
If you want your business to be distinguished - both legally and in the eyes of your audience - then you'll need to establish some documentation.
One of the best things to start with is a brand style guide. Also known as a brand bible, brand guide, brand book, or brand guidelines, this is a document that outlines your brand’s vision, core values, and mission through elements designed to make it unique and stand out in the market.
These contain important information about your business including:
- Brand story
- Logo and logo variations
- Color palette
- Typography
- Imagery
- Tone of voice
Find out more about the best way to separate yourself from the competition in How to Create a Brand Style Guide for Your Video Game.
You'll also need to consider trademarking. Trademarks influence customers' purchasing decisions, and registering yours will make consumers more likely to buy from you.
A trademark can be a name, symbol, logo, or slogan that serves to identify and distinguish your business or product from others in the market. There are many of these out there, some as well known as the Coca-Cola logo and its specific shade of red, some not so much.
If you have something that you want your brand to be the only one to use, you've got to trademark. Get the facts in Why Trademarking Is Important for Your Video Game and Brand.
Using Google Ads
Google requires your advertising to be at a certain standard to begin capturing qualified leads. It measures this standard by the Google Ads Quality Score, which rates the user experience of your landing pages, websites and ads when your target audience searches for your keywords.
The higher your Quality Score, the lower your cost per conversion will be and vice versa. Since Quality Score affects your ads ranking, price and overall positioning, you want to make sure that yours remains on the higher end of the scale for as long as possible.
Read more in 5 Tips to Help You Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score.
Google Ads keywords
You know what a keyword is, but do you know if you're using the right ones? Well-chosen keywords ensure that your ads hit the target and that your content can be found when your audience is searching for it.
The right keywords improve your campaign's click-through rate and reduce your advertising costs, and are a crucial to ensuring that your budget isn't wasted. The keywords you use are naturally determined by the products or services you sell, meaning that there's no one quick guide to know what will work best for you.
However, there is a guide that tells you how to manage your Google Ads keywords, which can be found here: Everything Game Developers Need To Know About Google Ads Keywords.
Mistakes to watch out for
Digital marketing is a wide world, filled with many different approaches, businesses, audiences and more. But all of these things have one thing in common - they’re often done wrong.
Businesses invest millions - if not billions - of dollars into elaborate digital marketing campaigns every year. Many of these still fall short, for a variety of reasons of which many are quite common and easily avoidable. It might be that their content isn’t visible to their audience, their engagement isn’t what they expected, or that their campaigns are just plain boring.
At Game Marketing Genie, we’ve heard all of these frustrations and seen these mistakes in action before. Fortunately, we know the cure to your marketing woes, and have collected them in an easy guide that’ll get you back on track.
Find out more here: 9 Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid When Marketing Your Video Game.
Common small business marketing problems
Smaller businesses tend to face a lot more difficulties than bigger, established brands. This is especially true when it comes to marketing, so if you're a small business professional, you need to be able to ensure you can identify problems before they arise.
There are five big issues that the majority of small businesses face. These are:
- Cash flow
- Lack of time
- Finding customers
- Keeping up with technology
- Staffing
Fortunately, there is a way to plan for these issues and solve them in advance. Learn how to keep your studio afloat in 5 Common Marketing Problems Faced by Small Gaming Studios.
Connecting with your audience
Targeting the right audience
Creating an incredible marketing campaign full of amazing strategies, gripping content and convincing ads is the best way to get your business the results that you desire.
But there are a few things you need to do before you start developing your campaign. One of the most important is actually figuring out who it is that you want to target. Who were you thinking of when you planned and developed your game? What type of people did you expect to play it? Is your game only for a select audience? These are just a few of the questions you’ll need to ask yourself.
Knowing who your audience is will help you make key decisions throughout your marketing campaign development process, and can inform:
- Your budget
- Your advertising platforms
- What content forms you choose
- Who your competitors are
- What NOT to do
- And more!
Get the facts from the leading video game marketing agency and learn how to connect with the right people here: Targeting the Right Audience to Advertise Your Video Game.
Acquisition and engagement
With the tremendous growth in the popularity of video games, we have seen that the gaming industry and players themselves are flooded with a variety of options to choose from. Making your game stand out and getting the players you desire is more difficult than ever… unless you’ve got an incredible acquisition and engagement guide from a leading game marketing agency.
A common technique for user acquisition is paying for advertising across mobile ad networks. However, this can be a costly choice - especially if you’re a smaller game developer that needs to keep its budget safe.
You need an acquisition and engagement strategy that gets to the right players at the right time with the right message, all while meeting your goals and staying within your budget.
Fortunately, we’ve got that guide we mentioned earlier right here for you! Get our 7 Game Marketing Strategies for Customer Acquisition and Engagement today, and start getting those players you deserve!
Retaining your audience
Even if your metrics say that your audience saw your ads, does it mean that they truly engaged with them - or even noticed them at all? The truth is that marketing is a crowded field, filled with companies competing for space, short attention spans and other options. Your audience may have had your ads appear where they go online, but like we said, you’re trying to operate in an already noisy space.
So, how do you make yourself heard? What marketing channels and techniques do you need to focus on? It’s all about providing incredible value to the consumer, as they are now the ones that hold all the power. To do this, you need powerful content marketing.
Up your retention and give your audience the reminder that they need to stay with your brand from our guide, Marketing to Gamers: Boosting Retention Rate.
Retargeting
Your marketing efforts have reached far and wide, connecting with your audience and even converting some of them. So, why not retarget them? They’re already aware of your brand. Whether you’re looking to bring back loyal customers or reach out to those who chose not to purchase, retargeting is your solution to give them that little push to buy.
They say it takes seven touchpoints for a brand to convert a customer. Chances are that you won’t have trouble bringing back those who have bought from you before. This is why you’ve got to take every opportunity to plant the seed of your business into your unconverted audience’s subconscious to ensure that you stay top of mind when they are ready to buy.
According to Business Insider, a huge 97% of people that visit your website for the first time won’t buy, and you risk losing them forever. This means it is essential to reach out to them again. They had some interest in your business, so why not convince them that you’re the brand that they need?
Still not convinced of the conversion power of retargeting? Check out our blog that will tell you Why You Need Retargeting For Your Video Game Audience.
If you are convinced that retargeting needs to be a part of your marketing strategy but aren’t sure where to start, then you’re in luck! We’ve got the right tips here in How to Retarget Your Players: 4 Smart Video Game Marketing Strategies!
Don’t have time to do it all yourself?
Navigating the world of digital marketing is not as easy as it seems. Filled with strategies, platforms, approaches, audiences and thousands of competitors, if you want your business to make it out alive then you need to dedicate a lot of time and resources to your campaign.
Many businesses simply don’t have the assets to create amazing campaigns themselves. Luckily, there are creative digital marketing agencies to manage your company’s marketing efforts. A good digital marketing agency can analyze your performance, find opportunities for growth, create and distribute incredible campaigns, and optimize it all for results.
Choosing a digital marketing partner is something you need to take seriously. You need to work with one that can adapt to your business, understand your needs and goals, find areas for optimization and produce actionable results that you desire. Finding the right one can be difficult.
But fret not! We’ve got the best guide to tell you How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Agency right here!
Digital marketing is your key to unlocking an amazing range of opportunities to help your game succeed. If you're feeling overwhelmed and need a little bit more help to get you started on the right path, the experts at Game Marketing Genie can help. We've got a range of fantastic digital marketing strategies that can be customized to your needs and will help your business come out on top.
Feeling like you need a little more info? We're here to help!
