Leveraging Online Communities And Influencers To Market Your Indie Game
Reaching Players Through Online Communities
Forums: Finding relevant game forums to share updates and builds
Online forums dedicated to gaming are an effective way to directly engage with your target audience. Search for forums that specifically discuss indie games, game development, or genre-specific topics related to your game. When posting, use descriptive thread titles and summaries so members quickly understand your game’s concept and mechanics. Share download links to game builds and politely ask for feedback. Building relationships within forum communities leads to valuable word-of-mouth promotion.
Subreddits: Posting to subreddit communities related to your game genre
Reddit hosts thriving communities of passionate gamers. Seek out subreddits focused on relevant genres or game features. Share exclusive screenshots, gifs, and videos that highlight your game’s unique elements. Pose questions to spark discussions and gauge interest in particular game directions. Make sure to read subreddit rules before posting and avoid over-promoting. Offering the subreddit value and participating in conversations builds lasting connections with potential players.
Discord: Creating a Discord server for fans to join
Discord provides instant communication between game creators and communities. Set up a Discord server for your game early and promote the link across channels. Use categorial channels to organize discussions around development, feedback, announcements, off-topic chat, and more. Transparency into the creation process helps build hype. Take polls and conversations into account when shaping future game updates. Having a direct line with your most passionate fans leads to true evangelists.
Leveraging Influencers and Content Creators
Identifying Relevant Streamers and YouTubers
Influencers with engaged gaming audiences can expand awareness for indie games. Research streamers and YouTubers covering your genre. Evaluate subscribers, views, engagement rates, and production quality. Larger followings offer more reach, but smaller creators often provide better opportunities for personalized promotion. Make a list of influencers across audience sizes relevant to your game’s style and mechanics. Prioritize creators known for spotlighting indie games.
Reaching Out with Game Keys and Assets
Contact potential influencers professionally with a personalized pitch. Offer exclusive early access keys to build buzz pre-launch. Seek feedback to improve your game for wider audiences. Provide custom trailers and assets to assist with production. Appealing to creator needs increases incentive and ensures proper branding implementation. Even small influencers provide significant exposure, while bigger names can massively boost wishlists and purchases.
Encouraging User-Generated Content
User-generated content allows fans to creatively engage with your game. Contests drive submissions like custom character designs, fan art, videos, and more. These can be featured in community updates to spur sharing. UGC provides free marketing materials you can showcase. Leverage platforms like TikTok by promoting relevant hashtags. Showcasing fan creations makes them feel invested in the game???s success while spreading organic hype.
Promoting on Social Media
Creating Shareable Updates and Media
Social platforms thrive on eye-catching and informative content. Strategically compose updates to highlight development milestones, announcement trailers, or gameplay moments. Include emojis, gifs, and images to catch scrolling feeds. Pose intriguing questions to spark conversation and tags. Schedule releases so fans stay engaged without getting overwhelmed. Visual content performs best, especially video clips showing actual gameplay mechanics. Shareable moments gain major traction on social channels.
Using Effective Hashtags
Hashtags help attendees discover your game posts. Research commonly used tags around gaming and specific genres. Try emerging trending hashtags and regularly update relevance. Strategically include relevant hashtags in social copy and imagery without going overboard. Post on platforms where hashtags thrive like Twitter and TikTok. Use analytic tools to identify best performing tags then double down on those for future updates. Popular hashtags expand reach beyond existing followers.
Running Sweepstakes and Giveaways
Contests drive social engagement in exchange for awards like game keys, merch, or highlighting fan creations. Require followers to like, share, comment or otherwise interact to enter. Choose rewards that appeal to your target gamers like early access, limited edition swag or digital currency. Use contest services like Gleam to manage entry aggregation, selection, and delivery at scale. Incentivized promotions boost awareness while collecting marketing permissions from contest participants for future communications.
Analytics to Track Marketing Performance
Setting Up Tracking Links
URL builders like Bitly allow you to create tracked links directing to your game???s website and store pages. These provide click data like number of clicks and geographic source information. Use them in your social media profiles, influencer posts, email campaigns and more. Tracking performance quantifies marketing impact and identifies best channels for investing energy. Link data informs banner ad and social ad targeting for optimized spends.
Monitoring Mentions and Traffic
Google Alerts and Twitter/YouTube searches alert when your game is mentioned online. Monitoring brand references helps identify new influencer opportunities and fan-shared content to promote. Track website and store traffic sources to detect impact of specific promotions. Traffic spikes signal social communications or creator content driving audiences. Tie metrics tracking into Google Analytics for deep intelligence revealing conversions and ROI across marketing initiatives like email nurturing and social ad spends.
Assessing Campaign Reach
Evaluate campaign audiences against game and store wishlists and sales data. Lower-funnel conversion metrics expose actual buyers versus upper-funnel impressions. Assess email open and click-through rates, contest entries, social media followers gained, forum sign-ups and more to gauge initiative reach. Strong response rates and low-funnel conversions like wishlists indicate competitive positioning and messaging. Optimize based on top-tier performance across preparedness stages.
Optimizing Marketing Approach
Evaluating Top-Performing Platforms
Continuously analyze your highest traction channels – which social platforms, influencers, websites and creative asset types produce the strongest responses and conversions? Double down on those demonstrating efficient audience growth and fan engagement. Stay agile to capitalize on new platforms like TikTok or emerging influencers in your niche. Consistently producing compelling content that gets shared expands organic reach and lowers future marketing costs.
Improving Outreach and Messaging
Refine your influencer and cross-promotion outreach templates to optimize response rates. Personalize messages while nurturing existing relationships. Fine-tune value propositions and calls to action that move audiences down the conversion funnel – incorporate emotional hooks that really sell your game???s differentiating elements like art style, progression system or multiplayer dynamics. What makes fans truly fall in love?
Building Lasting Influencer Relationships
Promoting creators and their coverage generates goodwill for repeated partnerships. Amplify posts where influencers showcase your game. Give plenty of advance access to tools supporting production quality and provide newsworthy exclusives. Take feedback seriously to improve products benefiting their communities. Successful activations cement positions as preferred indie contacts receiving priority for future title promotions. Long-term connections drive steady exposure beyond individual launches.
