Game Marketing Methods
There once was a time when marketing your indie game was unthought of. Development of the game was the only thing on the mind and everything else just fell into place. Today, it’s a completely different game and the importance of marketing is here.
There are many ways to market and spread the word of your game and they are in this article!
When to Begin Marketing Your Indie Game
There is no specific time frame within the development life cycle on when to begin marketing your game. This all comes down to having content to show off to begin with. When it comes to content, anything visual will do. Once there is that first screenshot, first level, or first character for the game that’s when you begin your marketing. No need to wait until the very end get started with the methods below!
How to Market Your Indie Game
There are no shortcuts when it comes to marketing an indie video game. It takes time, patience and persistence to reap any of the benefits. The best part about it is, once all of the marketing outlets are set up maintaining it will be easy!
Here are a list of essentials for a marketing campaign:
- Website
- Social Media
- Blogging
- Trailer
The list is small, but when used correctly they all can be very powerful tools for marketing your game.
Website
A website is a great way to give back story on how you started developing games, the team, and an overall description of what the indie company is all about. This is the best place to showcase games with call to actions. The website won’t get much traffic until other methods in this article are used. No need to rush!
If you don’t have hosting I would recommend using one like Dreamhost because they are inexpensive and reliable.
Blogging
Everybody loves to blog, right? WRONG! Well, not everybody at least. Blogging is useful because it gives you the ability to directly communicate with your audience. Blogs are great for announcements, expressing how overcoming game development hurdles was fun, difficult or easy and upcoming events.
Social Media
Social media is very important for marketing your game. Not only can you directly communicate one-on-one or one-to-many with your audience, but it has the capability of making things go viral. One example is, trends on twitter. Everything that is trending is displayed in that section of twitter and everyone can see it! Okay, it might be far fetched thinking an indie game can trend, but if you use hashtags properly and people talk about your game a lot it can draw a lot of attention.
Trailers
Trailers are a great way of showing off your game don’t skip out on this! Not only will the trailer make your website more appealing if used properly your video can be found through youtube which will draw more attention.
Conclusion
There are other ways of advertising your game that have not been mentioned. What’s most important are the basic elements listed above because it allows to communicate with your audience directly, gives you a presence and an outlet for all of your content.