10 Quick-and-Dirty Indie Game Marketing Tips, Part I
At the last Utah Indie Game Developer's meeting, I offered a short (but probably not short enough) presentation on marketing for indie game developers. It had a super-long (and silly) title: "Indie Game Marketing for Indie Game Developers Who Don’t Know Squat About Marketing: 10 Quick and Dirty Tips To Help You Make Money With Your Game!"

Since I am a lazy slob, I thought I'd re-use the presentation as blog-fodder. I'm breaking it up into two parts, for the sake of my own sanity, because I'm a little hurting for time (it's crunch mode time again, working the day job all weekend...)

Introduction
When I first started out as an indie game developer, I had no clue about marketing. I still don't know much about it - I don't have a degree in marketing or a ton of experience and success to impart. But I've picked up a bit from what I've studied, from successful indie game developers, from hard experience, and from a marketing consultant, Joseph Lieberman, who worked with me in the past. He also wrote a great book I'd recommend called "The Indie Guide to Selling Games," which I cribbed from for a couple of these tips. My tip #0 for this list would be to go to that link and buy at least the PDF of this book. You'll be hard pressed to find a better place to put that $30 of your marketing budget!

What little I know on this subject, I thought I'd share with you, to help you get a leg up on it if you've never done it before. May you learn from my mistakes. I completely misunderstood what it would take when I started out. I heard successful indies saying things like how they spent a quarter to half of their time working on business and marketing issues, and I thought, "NAAAAH!" How could that possibly be as big a job as writing a fully-functional, complex game?

I was surprised. And now I agree with them.

What Is Marketing?
When you think about "marketing," what do you think of?

I think most people think "advertising." I know that's what I used to think. However, that's only one small part of marketing. And it's an optional part - many successful businesses do little or no advertising in the traditional sense.

I believe it was Cliff Harris of Positech Games who once described marketing as a state of mind - sort of a sum total of all his efforts to sell his games. That stuck with me. There's no checklist of what you can do to "get your marketing done." It's more of a quest.

Marketing textbooks might talk about the "4 Ps" – Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion. The product is what you are selling - your game, and what it offers to the audience. Pricing is how it is priced in the market (often around $19.95 - or "free" - for indie games). Place is where it is being sold - often on websites, portals, or perhaps even on the shelf at Wal*Mart. Promotion is what is done to get the word out about your game. I'm mainly gonna talk about promotion, and a little on product.

Another misconception about marketing is that its something you do around the release of your game. Not at all! In fact, you should be doing some marketing work before you write your first line of code. It should be something mixed into the development process. Unless you are making the game for nobody but yourself, you will need to make a game that other people will want to play. Finding out what other people like and need and letting that act as a guide can help you make a better game.

All that said, I'm going to cover ten tips (four here, six in the next article) for marketing your game, and improving your chances of having it get noticed ... and selling.

Tip #1 - Take Responsibility
First of all, you need to understand that nobody cares about your game but you. Portals - as a business - only care AFTER it makes them money, even if their tech guys love playing it in the back room. Your poor game is unloved, un-promoted, and is going to languish in obscurity unless YOU, personally, do something about it. It is not the field of dreams.

This can be hard. You probably became an indie because you love making games, to the exclusion of all that business-y stuff. But, if you want your company to succeed even as a part-time business, you are going to have to dive in and work the full system. The game might be the heart of what you do, but the heart cannot survive without the other organs.

Now, you may end up with a publisher who is handling your marketing. In fact, they may have language in their contract preventing you from promoting the game yourself. If so - keep an eye on what they are doing. And spend the time instead promoting your own company. Because you want to be something more than a one-hit wonder.

Be in it for the long haul. Just because the retail sales model has evolved to have shelf-lives measurable in double-digit days doesn't mean this is how you should operate. Indie games tend to have longer legs and slower burn.

Finally - in all that you do - MEASURE, TRACK, and KEEP RECORDS. How will you know whether an advertising campaign is working or not if you aren't tracking daily sales, website hits, and downloads. (As an aside - check out Google Analytics for helping monitor online traffic).

Tip #2: Define Your Target Market
Who is your target market? If you answered, “Everybody,” You LOSE!

You need to have your target market defined as specifically as you can manage even before development starts. In particular, you need to answer three questions:

• WHO are they?
• WHERE are they?
• WHAT do they want?

In other words, who is going to be interested in your game, and where does this kind of person hang out. You'll need to know this in order to find out where you need to go to get them to know about your game. And finally - what is this sort of person looking for in a game? What can you do to make them happy?

You want love, not tolerance. In my opinion, it is far better (and more profitable) to make a game that a narrow niche of people will really love and be super-enthusiastic about than one which a much broader group of people are merely "okay" with.

Finally, don’t confuse market for genre. Just because you are making a game that appeals to RTS fans does not mean you need to adhere slavishly to conventions of the RTS genre. That is how uninspired corporate drone marketers think, and it leads to a world of easily packaged clones. You, on the other hand, need to be smarter and instead appeal to the common needs and wants of your target market. You could be writing an RPG-puzzle-hybrid for fans of RTS games, after all.

Tip #3: Have a USP (“Gimmick”)
USP stands for "Unique Selling Proposition." What this means is that your game must stand out from the competition. Whatever you do, do not be generic! You need to distinguish your game from the current AND past competition --- because you may be competing against older mainstream titles that are now in the bargain bin.

After all, who really needs another "fantasy adventure where you can play a bold warrior or clever wizard battling monsters in a magical world?" Sheesh, that described a million games!

Besides being important in its own right, you want to spell this out to the press so that they have something they can latch onto. Believe me - they are looking for something - anything - that stands out about your game. Give them something good and positive that they can use for this.

Tip #4: Create a Media Packet
Create a packet that contains screenshots, game logos, title screens, banner ad - style banners, lists of features, and lists of reviews / press comments / quotes. This can be in a zip file or something, easily accessible from your website.

This can be used by people reviewing / previewing your game, as well as affiliate sites, fan sites, or what have you. Making their job easier earns you some good will, makes it more likely that they are actually going to do it in the first place, and helps increase the quality and focus. After all, would you rather an affiliate site use some quick screen-grabs they made themselves from the first ten minutes of your game, or one of your top ten best-ever screenshots you've ever been able to make?

Click Here to go to "10 Quick-and-Dirty Indie Game Marketing Tips, Part II!"

In addition here is a forum thread for further discussion.

Please feel free to contribute even if you have no experience trying to market an indie game. As a player, how would you LIKE to find out about new indie games you might like?

Labels: Biz, productivity

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