Making a Multichannel Marketing Plan for Your Game Launch

When preparing to launch your game, you might be tempted to only use one or two marketing channels instead of managing multiple.

Unfortunately, this isn’t one of the cases where your gut feeling is right. This is because your customers’ needs and preferences are changing every day. With advancements in technology, they are using more channels to research and purchase the products they are interested in than ever before. The players you’re targeting with your game are harder to reach than ever, and without a multi-faceted marketing approach, you will struggle to acquire users for your product.

73 percent of consumers use multiple channels to engage with the brands they are interested in. This means that developers looking to get more people to play their games should adopt a multichannel marketing approach as part of their game launch strategy, and this blog post shares useful tips on how to get started.

What is a multichannel marketing plan, and why do you need one?

A multichannel marketing plan refers to the process where a company interacts with its client base through many channels. These channels could be email, social media, website, mobile and more. This marketing tactic hinges on the fact that businesses need to be where the customers are. With the number of customer channels increasing, companies need to adapt to this form of marketing to be able to remain accessible to their clients.

Marketing products on different platforms gives consumers a greater degree of choice. It allows them to interact and purchase from brands on their preferred channels, and this goes a long way to enhance the customer experience. Poor customer experience is one of the main reasons for high business churn rates, and to avoid missing out on new prospects, it’s time you adopt a multichannel game marketing strategy.

With this type of approach, you can increase your online presence and help potential customers see your products online more often. The era for single-channel marketing is long gone, and the consumers who use only one channel to interact with brands tend to be older. Younger customers consistently use multiple channels to find out more about a brand before making a purchase. Most gamers fall into this demographic, and as such, your title launch will only be successful if you span your marketing efforts across multiple platforms.

To position your game for success, we advise you to use at least two marketing channels. This will give you a stronger presence and make your game more popular online. Your marketing plan should incorporate all of your smaller plans, such as your strategies for your business, marketing, retention, brand awareness and sales improvement. With your goals well defined, you will be able to create a seamless customer experience across different touchpoints, and this will help you build a positive brand reputation.

Understand your customers and revolve your plan around them

To create a seamless multichannel experience, you first need to have a proper understanding of your customers. This entails observing your customers keenly to understand the platforms they frequently use to interact with brands when shopping for products. This information will help you identify the right digital touchpoints to focus on to ensure you’re connecting with prospects in the best possible manner.

Your search will reveal about 5 channels worth pursuing. For gaming developers, Twitch and Discord can be some of the best platforms for interacting with players. Twitch can be used to stream your title to other enthusiasts, and work with influencers to promote your game to wider audiences. This will make the onboarding process easier as interested parties will get an insider look into how your game plays out. Discord is also perfect for chatting with gamers, and you can use the platform to popularize your game and create a community for it.

As far as traditional social media platforms go, Facebook’s popularity and targeting capabilities make it perfect for connecting with prospects. Instagram can also be used to share enticing visual media. At the same time, YouTube is ideal for sharing video content such as tutorials and demos to help people learn how to play your game and get a taste of what it would be like to play themselves. The messaging across these platforms needs to be consistent for your multichannel marketing plan to succeed. Otherwise, prospects will be confused when moving across channels, and this will make it difficult for you to attract more users and close more sales.

You’ll want to post great content on these platforms and monitor user engagement. Social listening is also another key consideration, as it will help you understand the mood of the prospects as you prepare for your big launch. Respond to any concerns the prospects may have and capture valuable feedback that you will make final improvements to your product.

Marketing automation makes life simple

One of the major problems that people experience with multichannel marketing is its complexity and the fact that it requires teams to devote a lot of time and resources to maintaining the process. Businesses can work around this challenge by automating simple tasks like posting times, data collection, and content reformatting. This will lighten the load and make your marketing efforts more sustainable.

Automated campaigns are generally run from a centralized hub, and this makes it easy to monitor your performance on different platforms. Platforms like HubSpot offer automation, with integrated services to help you set up your campaigns. 

Personalization is another crucial attribute of automation, and this is easily set up with automation. Using data collected from prospects’ interactions with your site, marketing automation tools are able to insert details including their first name and email address into your campaigns, setting it up without any manual input. This can help you connect with the prospects at a more intimate level, and significantly enhance your lead nurturing process.

It is also likely that you have different customer segments for your game. In this case, it is not a sustainable tactic to send similar marketing communication to gamers since each of these groups has different needs and preferences. Marketing automation will allow you to segment your audience smartly and enable you to send them personalized and appropriate marketing communication. None of your target customers will feel left out or like you’re sending them spam, and this will help you attract more people to try your game.

Figure 1. Audience engagement. Source: experian.com

A study by Experian showed that 59 percent of consumers stopped engaging with four or more brands because of poor communication tactics. This is why it is essential to segment audiences to ensure you are sending them targeted, relevant and attractive messages.

Automated marketing campaigns are also designed to understand the buyer’s journey at every stage. Marketers can create automated workflows that are triggered by specific client actions. The prospects will then receive relevant communication at that stage of their buyer’s journey, and this will help bring them further down the sales funnel. All this happens without your involvement, allowing you to concentrate on the activities that will benefit more from your manual intervention.

Analytics helps you manage each channel effectively

Multichannel marketing campaigns provide multiple touchpoints for collecting valuable customer information. When managing such a campaign for your product, you should be data-centric to analyze the performance of your marketing efforts. A focus on data analysis will help you become more efficient as you will be able to identify the best performing channels and those that are consuming marketing funds without giving tangible results to optimize accordingly. You will also know why specific channels are performing better than others. These insights allow for further campaign optimization to ensure each channel is performing as desired, and provide insights for future releases.

When analyzing the performance of your campaign, it is essential to review the performance of each channel independently. Gather and analyze the data from each channel campaign to understand what worked and what didn’t for that platform alone. Determine what needs to be done to boost the performance of that channel, and implement it immediately. Also, identify what marketing aspects are working for a particular channel and focus on them to ensure continued success. Ensure that you only make changes for each platform depending on that platform’s individual analytics.

The data from your campaigns will also reveal details about the people who have interacted with your marketing material. Use this information to create more cohesive customer segments and buyer personas to ensure you are targeting the right people with your communication going forward. Consumer trends are changing rapidly, and it is only by regularly analyzing the data you have collected from the campaigns that you will be able to keep up with the trends and stay informed of your users’ expectations.

Find out more about the importance of data analytics on our blog Why Do Gaming Businesses Need Analytics for Their Games to Succeed?

Get your game on with our game launch guide!

Enjoyed this article? Want to know more about launching a game? We've got much more to share with you in The Game Dev’s Guide to the Best Game Launch!

You need a multichannel marketing plan for your game launch strategy. But creating and managing this type of project can be difficult. There are a lot of things you need to do to ensure each channel is optimized correctly, and without the right skills and expertise, your launch will fail. Game Marketing Genie is here to help. Our expert team of strategists, analysts, and marketers has what it takes to make your game launch a success. Learn more about what our game marketing agency do to help businesses succeed in the highly-competitive gaming market.

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