How to Make a Game Marketing Plan Work

Marketing a game is as essential as designing levels and polishing the user interface. The big development studios are spending millions on ads and celebrity endorsements. If you can't compete on these terms, your best bet for finding players for your game is a solid digital marketing strategy.

Making a game marketing strategy is easy, but creating a good game marketing strategy that works isn't. A whopping 36.9 percent of Steam games have never been played. The same fate awaits you when you fail to market your game.

To prevent this, we've got the best marketing techniques to help you lay the foundations of a successful promotional plan that will give your game the attention it deserves. Let's get started!

Why is marketing necessary for video games?

You have spent all that time making your game, but it won't succeed by itself. Gamers have many options regarding titles they can play, which could make it difficult for them to find your game when you don't promote it.

Figure 1: Video game market revenue. Source: Statista

The gaming industry will be worth over $500 billion in 2027, and the number of games competing for a share of this market is growing every day. The industry is also very ruthless, with the big companies investing considerable sums to push the small studios out of the way.

These factors make it difficult to penetrate the market, but you will make the most of your game and attract gamers to your side with the right marketing plan. Marketing places your game before the appropriate audience, making it easy to convince them of its worth and the entertainment value it adds to their lives.

When marketing your game, digital strategies are the best since the target consumers can be reached easily through digital mediums. It’s also more affordable than traditional advertising, allowing developers to target specific audiences with creative marketing campaigns.

Making it work – what you’ll need and need to do

The following are some of the essential things you need to do to maximize your brand's visibility in the competitive gaming industry.

Set goals

Goals define what you want to achieve with your game, but also what you want to achieve with your marketing. Start by setting a plan for your desired revenue. Continue adding goals for downloads, sales, and conversion rates for the game. Clearly defined goals will help you know the marketing tactics to deploy to achieve your targets.

When setting your goals, set the date you hope to achieve them. This measure will drive you to go after your dreams with everything you’ve got since you will have a strict schedule to adhere to. If your goals are massive, break them into smaller divisions for easy tracking. Monitor your progress and adjust your plans when need be.

But most importantly, set your goals reasonably. Don't write down some outlandish figure you have no hope of achieving. Start small, and adjust if you're progressing quickly towards your goal. The same works if your initial goal was too big. Marketing is about optimization, and being realistic.

Define your strategy

You will compete with other brands for the same audience and need a video game marketing strategy to set you apart from the rest. The marketing strategy should bring out what is unique about your game to entice players to choose it over other titles in the market.

Look at other developers to see what’s working and what to avoid when marketing to gamers. However, you should not copy their marketing plans, as gamers will immediately see through this and cancel you in their communities. Engage a gaming marketing agency to define and develop a strategy that will help you connect with many gamers.

Study your target audience

Developers should take the time to study the people who are likely to download their games. Understanding this group saves developers a lot of time and money and stops them from promoting their game to an audience with no interest in it.

Think about what your audience looks like. What are their interests, and what channels do they spend most of their time online? Clarifying these issues will help you know the best marketing methods to reach your audience.

Know your game

You cannot market your game properly if you don't know it inside out. Players want to feel like they are talking to an expert when they hear you talk about your game on different platforms. It would help to understand how the gameplay progresses from one scene to the next.

If your game has different characters, you should tell each character's story and how they contribute to the narrative. With this information, your passion for the game will be evident when discussing it on your social media pages and offline publications.

Study the market

Before you introduce your game to the world:

• Take the time to study the market.
• Check the market trends to see what other developers are doing to attract players to their games.
• Analyze different brands' performance at various times to determine the best time to launch your game.

With this information, you will know how to position yourself and impact the industry. You will know what to do and what to avoid to guarantee the success of your game. You will also learn the average earnings for games like yours and what needs to be done to improve the revenue.

Understand your distribution platforms

There are different options for distributing a game. Most indie and casual games tend to have these platforms as their primary distribution channels:

• Direct website store
• Portals
• Retail stores
• Content delivery systems
• Publisher channels

Depending on your marketing strategy, you might need more than one of these channels to distribute your game. An easy option for direct selling would be to set up a website and concentrate on optimizing it.

You can also consider casual game portals like Big Fish Games, Gamehouse, and Yahoo Games if you have a casual game. Check the bestsellers on each portal to see the types of games that do well there and how you can improve your game to meet those guidelines.

Besides portals, you can also use content delivery systems to distribute your game. Steam is one of the most prominent examples of a content delivery system that appeals to indies.

Know your pricing

The pricing for your game depends on different variables. You can look at what others are doing and settle for a similar rate, say $19.95. Or you could go with a bargain price of $9.95. It all depends on what you think is appropriate and the industry standard for a game of your size, quality, and depth.

You may price your title differently depending on the game, target market, and company profile. Remember that you can adjust the price of your game later after reviewing the revenue performance. You may realize that $9.95 is very low and set the price at $14.95 and still generate comparable sales figures.

Remember that the ecommerce provider (like Steam or Epic) will take a portion of each sale, so factor this in when pricing your game. 

Have a strong social media presence

Social media is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to connect directly with your players. Nowadays, almost everyone is on social media, and if you are not promoting your game on these platforms, you are missing out on a lot. You can use different platforms to connect with your players, but the key is to find the channels where your target audience spends most of their time and concentrate on them.

Post engaging content to let your potential players know about your game. Share game updates on the pages and respond to any questions or concerns your followers may have about the game.

Use press releases

Getting press for your game is one of the best ways to get more people to know about it, and that's why you should prepare releases that you can share with members of the press. You can use press releases to announce your game or an upcoming event officially.

When creating these, ensure they have all the necessary information to make it easy for journalists to produce their own stories. Press releases may appear old school, but publications are still a hit in the gaming community, and your game could get a considerable boost when it appears in one of the top journals.

Work with influencers

Millennials are not only active gamers, but most of them also follow individual influencers. These could be different bloggers, Instagram celebrities, streamers, or other people who are famous online. Today, their aid is essential in video game promotion.

Brands are now piggybacking on these social media stars' influence and reputation to reach broad audiences on various platforms. All it takes is collaborating with a relevant influencer; your game could go viral. Work with an influencer marketing agency to identify the best influencers to market your game.

We have covered this topic in detail on our blog How to Pick the Best Game Influencer Marketing Strategy for Your Studio.

Use digital advertising

The gaming industry offers digital products, so it's easy to use digital advertising mediums to reach these audiences. Imagine an average gamer playing a game on his phone. If an exciting ad for another game appears when they are playing the game, there is a high chance they will download it.

Digital advertising targets specific audiences with promotional content by leveraging mediums like social media, search engines, mobile apps, email, and affiliate programs.

But how do you make all that work?

Making all of this work requires proper planning. Don't wait until you launch your game to start promoting it, as this could see you miss out on weeks' worth of marketing opportunities. Start your marketing at the pre-launch stage to create hype for your game and get players excited to try it out.

Set a release date to inform people when they can officially get the game. You must also decide on the marketing story that will help you connect. Is there something revolutionary about your game, or does it have some educational benefits for the players? What's so unique about your game that will make people interested in playing it? Create a narrative that'll make it easy for you to sell your game.

As a developer, doing all of this alone can be overwhelming. Marketing is such a strenuous activity that you could spend less time on other important issues, such as refining your game to meet market needs. That's why you should work with a reputed game marketing agency that understands the gaming scene and has what it takes to make your game a hit with the players.

Game marketing agencies know the best techniques to use to connect with gamers. They will also measure the success of the implemented methods to maximize your marketing campaigns' potential.

The ultimate guide to game marketing

Hope you enjoyed this article! For more insider game marketing information, check out The Ultimate Guide to Game Marketing: Everything You Need to Know.

Marketing to gamers can be challenging because they have a lot of options. Without a good video game marketing strategy, your game will be one of the many untouched titles that drift in nothingness and end up getting deleted. This isn’t the outcome you want. You want downloads and sales to gain favor with the gaming community.

The video game marketing professionals at Game Marketing Genie can help. We've got heaps of experience in the industry, and even better than that, we love gaming and what we do. We've helped poor-performing games boost their download and sales. We can do the same for you. Get in touch today and let us elevate your brand in the gaming community.

Get in touch with our game marketing agency to learn more. Contact us today!