19 Tools for Better Game Marketing
Video game studios have an ever-increasing list of ways they can potentially talk to their audience – if they so choose to.
From classics like print advertising, or the big three social media platforms, to newer, more experimental options (should our brand start a BeReal?), the marketing landscape only gets more fragmented and confusing as time passes (what about a Fall Guys collab??).
I recently watched this GDC talk from Dana Trebella and Derek Lieu about personalising video game marketing, where they ran through a variety of ways that small/indie dev teams can navigate all this to create an effective and manageable marketing strategy. The talk was great, but I wanted to extend their recommendations a little based on my own observations and experience of working with dozens of larger game studios and publishers over the past decade. This post is based on that talk.
Let’s get some house-keeping out of the way:
You can’t effectively market your game if you don’t know what your goal is.
Selling copies is one thing, but there could be a handful of other reasons why you want to improve your marketing strategy.
You might also want to:
Find a Publisher
Attract investors, raise funding
Grow your community
Keep fans interested while you build
Sell spin-off products
Adjust workloads as your team scales
Better understand game marketing overall
All of these secondary motives should influence which marketing tools you choose to deploy.
Below are three key goals you need to keep in mind throughout all your marketing efforts.
A) STAND OUT
Your game needs to sound different to your competition.
Just because your competitors all use the same style to show certain features, or to talk to their communities, doesn’t mean you should too. There is no one right way to market a video game, but just copying what other people are doing is certainly the wrong way.
If your game is identical to some other product that already exists, why would someone buy yours?
B) MAKE LIFE EASY FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS
If you want your customer to do anything, you need to take all the friction away for them.
You want them to understand the main concept? Find a way you can explain it in 30 seconds.
You want them to wishlist your game, or follow your socials? Encourage them to at the end of your trailer. Keep the link above the fold in the description. Always have the link handy and accessible for people. Keep your handles, site name, game name easily spelled so people don’t typo it while entering into search.
Uncertainty in the customer’s mind will breed doubt, which will lead to bounces and missed sales. You want to streamline the thought process in their head so they don’t have to think about how they can stay updated with your project, or share your content with a friend. Simplify it for them.
C) MAKE LIFE EASY FOR PRESS
The same applies to the press as it does to customers.
You want coverage, reviews, reactions, articles, etc. To make those things, press and content creators need material, and they need it to be easily digestible.
Screenshots, trailers, a clear game description, GIFs, and more are all great to have, but if they aren’t in the hands of the media and creators who you want to cover your game, it’s going to make their life harder, and make them less likely to keep covering you in future.
With these key goals in mind, let’s now explore the different tools available.
Each tool has a different purpose and outcome, so you need to be selective about which are best for the game you are making, and your overall marketing needs. After the list we’ll dig further into how to choose the right tools for your own specific circumstances.
ESSENTIALS
1) MESSAGE
This is your elevator pitch: what makes your game special in a sentence or two.
What is your game and why is it different?
If you don’t have a message, all your marketing decisions are going to feel aimless and confused. You really need this to anchor you. Many of your other efforts are going to rely on you knowing why your thing is special. If you don’t know – figure it out.
My favourite message example given by Dana and Derek is:
It’s a lovely morning in the village… and you’re a horrible goose.
Straight away upon reading that, you want to know more. You don’t have all the answers, but your imagination is already firing with fun possibilities. Your message should have the same effect.
What your message should not do is rely on other products to do the heavy lifting for you.
For example,
It’s like Call of Duty and Battlefield had a baby; CoD arena combat, on BF sized maps
Has anything more generic and uninteresting ever been written?
Messaging like this betrays a misunderstanding of its own purpose. The message is not the genre. Nor is the message just the playercount – or just whether it’s first or third person – or TDM or Battle Royale. The message needs to justify why your game is different and exciting enough that it deserves to be compared to your competitors; but let your fans make that comparison for you, and let them champion your game over it themselves.
2) INTERNAL MARKETING TIMELINE
This should be a skeleton framework of your timeline from announcement to launch. Dana recommends you work backwards on this, to make it easier for you to assess how to time and space your marketing beats. You can plan which assets you need at what stages of your marketing cycle, and also familiarise your audience with what’s coming when, so there aren’t any nasty surprises they aren’t expecting.
It’s crucial to be realistic here: everything takes longer than you expect, so try to account for that in your planning. In recent years, it’s also become increasingly common to delay games which need more time in the oven, and that’s fine, but it might mean your marketing timeline suddenly changes and you need to fill more space in the year.
Plan to be surprised by things like this. Do you have any other beats you can keep in your back pocket to pull out on a rainy day when needed? Can you organise a day-to-do framework that isn’t entirely reliant on the big, heavy-hitting beats, like conventions (e.g. E3) and gameplay trailers?
From the content creator perspective, the marketing timeline is essential to the health of the fanbase and their continued enjoyment of the game. It’s one thing to hit the main beats well and then ghost until the next one, but it’s infinitely more effective and enticing for a prospective customer if it feels like there is continuous room for them to engage. I call this lifestyle design, and it appears further on in this list too – by planning a marketing timeline full of tasty morsels for your fans to devour in different areas, you ensure that even if they can’t play your game yet, they still have plenty to chew on.
Media external to your actual game works fantastically for this. The Marvel Cinemative Universe is a great example of media that fills out and expands the possibile touchpoints for a fan to engage with an IP, without taking away from the value of the original, founding material: the comics. You can do this too on whatever scale you deem possible for your team, and it doesn’t have to involve any superhuman effort; you might simply find that you can keep nourishing your fanbase through regular dev diaries, or a sketch comic you put out every few months, or by releasing an extended version of your game’s score on spotify. The options are endless, and they all get wrapped up inside the framework of your internal marketing timeline: curated, precise, and highly engaging.
3) PRESS KIT
Nice and simple: this should be an easily accessed assets page or downloadable pack, containing screenshots, videos, text game descriptions, and anything else someone might want to use in order to make something related to your game.
This will improve the lives of hardcore fans, creators, and press alike, which means more likelihood for coverage across media pubs, YouTube, and social media.
You also don’t want to make your press kits too overwhelming, and you want to be sure that when there’s a new trailer release or new screenshots are taken, the press kit gets updated accordingly. You definitely don’t want people still using your old Alpha screenshots in their coverage when the full game comes out.
Be sure to add your new trailers into the press kits as downloadable files too! Just leaving them as YouTube video links means people have to rip low-quality versions, which will only serve to make ytour game look worse.
Any content in the press kit that isn’t owned by your studio (e.g. music you’ve licensed for a trailer) should also be mentioned so that creators know that someone else might own the rights if they want to use that footage in their own content.
4) PRESS LIST
A thoroughly detailed list you maintain of media, journalists, streamers etc. who are interested in your game.
This means you can alert them to any updates or announcements you want to share, and you can customise how you speak to them based on whether they’ve reviewed you in the past, or they’re a creator especially interested in a certain part of your game.
You’ll need to update this list regularly. Info can often be found through outlets directly, and journalists move around a lot, so keep that in mind!
As a creator, I can’t stress enough how valuable it when my point of contact at a game studio understands my content.
It doesn’t take much: maybe they’ve just skimmed over my channel’s videos page a few times that month, or they’ve taken a look at a recent review video I did on the game. Having some context as a backdrop for ongoing communication with creators makes a world of difference, and means I’m going to be much more receptive, no matter the reason for outreach.
5) PRESS EMAILS
You have a marketing beat coming up. It needs coverage. You need to let the press know.
It’s email time.
Remove any and all friction where you can, and provide assets for anything related to the beat.
These are fiddly, but essential so that whenever something new happens, those all-important press members (and creators, loop them in too please) are well informed.
6) TWITTER
Twitter is a multi-tool in many ways. You might go viral with a great GIF, or you might want to show in-dev screenshots to your existing community, or you might just want to (carefully) shitpost to get your name out there a bit more. Everyone is on Twitter, from customers to investors to your competitors, so it’s a good place to broadcast announcements and cultivate your community.
One note from me – for the love of all things holy, go easy on the hashtags. Seriously.
Derek is right to point out that link conversion isn’t great on Twitter. It seems like a great place for you to point people to trailers, or your website, or store page, but it’s actually a bit deceptive. As a creator, I’ve done dozens of Twitter ad campaigns with game studios, and in my opinion the ROI on them is really poor, even with thousands of engaged followers. Keep this in mind.
Twitter is also absolutely ruthless if you screw up. This is something you can lean into, establishing a more jokey tone with your audience, or you can shy away from, making everything very rigid and formal. The right balance for most is obviously somewhere in the middle, but if you’ve got the right social media managers, letting them take the reins can do wonders for your brand presence.
Call of Duty recently did this; for years, their social presence had been very stiff, but they started getting down in the weeds with their community a bit more in late 2021 and it has paid off spectacularly. Fans feel that the brand has become a bit more human, and they feel more listened to as a result.
7) ANNOUNCEMENT TRAILER
Making one of these is a lot of work, but it’s essential. Video is infinitely more likely to catch someone’s eye than text alone, so even if you have a fantastic message, if nobody can see what the game looks like, it’s over for you.
8) LAUNCH TRAILER
Your game is out! The people need to know!
It’s time to give people that final bit of motivation to make their purchase, and answer any final questions they might have. This is your biggest hype video for the game; it’s mission critical to get this one right.
9) GAMEPLAY AND STORY TRAILERS
These might expand on specific gameplay elements you think are snazzy enough to spotlight, or explain narrative beats for your game that your fans want to know more about. Derek and Dana don’t put a huge amount of stock into these, saying they’re high importance if your game specifically needs it, but definitely not essential. I take a different approach.
I think these are almost universally vital.
The way people learn about new products, understand them, and decide whether or not to purchase them, has changed a huge amount in the past decade. Back in 2009 when I started my current YouTube channel, plenty of people would pull up an IGN review, see a decent score, and feel confident that a game would give them the experience they were looking for.
Video has changed that. From short-form platforms like TikTok (see below) or YouTube Shorts, to long form making-of documentaries on YouTube, there are a vast number of ways you can present your game and its story in video format, and I think they all contribute to helping your fans decideto actually purchase.
Gameplay and narrative trailers take what’s already good about video content, and give you a chance on top of that to surprise your community with content that feels like it’s tailor made for them.
Let’s say there’s a big space demon called Steve in your game that nobody knows much about. You could just show Steve briefly in your gameplay trailer and leave it at that. People might think, cool, big bad, whatever.
Now let’s say you make a short narrative trailer for Steve. You don’t answer all the questions people have about him, but rather, you give them more things to think about; you pose new questions; expose new mysteries; and importantly, you give your fans a new thing to discuss as part of their fandom of the game. You’re directly contributing to the lifestyle design of your product here. It’s no longer just a video game that you play, enjoy, and then log off and stop thinking about. This is now something that they can connect with, as fans, in a totally separate way, which will bring you in new audiences, and keep your current customer base more engaged.
It’s an extra beat in your campaign. It’s extra flesh on your IP’s bones. It’s almost always worth it.
10) SCREENSHOTS
Screenshots are vital just as trailers are. Not everyone is going to give you the time of day to watch your trailer, and screenshots are also vital for static media like articles, YouTube thumbnails, and any and all other media coverage. They help people drink in what the game actually looks like, and are going to be shared constantly once your community gets engaged with your game, so put a lot of effort into these.
Bonus tip: if your game has characters you want people to cosplay, create cosplay guide screenshots that they can use as reference!
Also - remember to keep the screenshot list updated in your press kit. New updates and new announcements often need new screenshots. Nobody wants their articles to all look identical. Give them something to work with.
11) STORE PAGE
The place where people will actually buy the game! It needs to look appealing. It needs to answer any questions they have, potentially regarding genre, platforms, online playercounts, accessibility, etc. It crucially also needs to motivate them to wishlist the game.
It does not need to be something you update every day. This is more or less a set-and-forget (excluding significant beats in your timeline), but it’s absolutely essential your page is well made, so when it’s time to get this spun up, dedicate significant time and effort to it. Dana offers specific consulting services for store page copy which you can find here.
12) STORE METADATA/TAGS (STEAM ESPECIALLY)
Dana and Derek both stress that without accurate store page tags on Steam, the platform will struggle to understand what your game is, and won’t index it properly as a result. You want the platform to recommend you on the pages of your competitors, or when people search for games in your genre, so make Steam’s life easy and tag appropriately and carefully.
NICE TO HAVES
13) MAILING LIST
People on your mailing list have signed up to hear from you, so they’re engaged, interested, and hungry. Your outreach to them will cultivate them into an ongoing, long-term audience, so this can be very worthwhile. However, writing these sorts of emails can be a big timesink, and too much email spam can be annoying and cause unsubs, so be careful about what you commit to.
Maybe it’s just an email a month, or you just do email campaigns around medium or large beats in your calendar. You definitely don’t want to annoy people here, but it’s a great tactic to keep the most keen fans looped into your dev process and updates.
14) ANIMATED GIFS
These will make your social media and store page better, and have the chance to go viral if they look really good, getting you a stack of new eyeballs on your game. They’re a little fiddly to create, but I strongly believe they’re worth the effort.
The next level up is recreating famous memes, or common reactions, using characters from your game, and turning them into gifs. This is a fantastic example from the Cyberpunk team.
15) TIKTOK
TikTok discoverability is better than any other platform right now. You can speak to your customers about updates and announcements in one post, and then go wildly viral with a funny glitch from your game in another, and they’re only short-form so they take less editing effort to create.
That said – don’t underestimate TikTok’s editing time footprint. The end results are short videos, so you might think you can make one in 30 seconds and be done with it, but unless you are very strict with yourself, you can end up spending much more time on them to try and perfect them - just like you might do in the final stages of game development. Be wary of this, allocate set time, and do not exceed it.
TikTok is also a great place to engage with your community in comments sections; it’ll motivate people making content related to your game and is relatively low effort, high reward.
16) WEBSITE
Similar to your store page, right?
Not quite. Dana and Derek feel that websites are usually better for investors, publishers, and press, but not so much for players. I agree with this; I can’t remember the last time I visited most game websites, but can definitely recall being on their store pages. The few times I do find myself on game sites is when I’m making content; looking for assets, or digesting blog posts to relay to my viewers, etc.
As such, you don’t want people to have to find your store page via your website, and your site shouldn’t be designed to try and drive store page clicks. Instead, focus on accommodating the needs of press or investors – keeping in mind the prospective publisher that you might be looking to attract as you go.
17) DISCORD
You can build community incredibly effectively on Discord, talking with your customers at any and all hours of the day. It’s a huge amount of work to keep up with though, and in most cases, I strongly recommend against bothering.
Much of the conversation you want to foster in your Discord can be had just as effectively elsewhere – either in people’s personal group chats, or on social media like Twitter. If your fans are invested in the dev process and you want to communicate with them more closely, that’s great, but by creating a server for that, you open a rabbithole that most will not be able to keep up with. Consider limited activations on either a superfan email list, or a social media campaign, to achieve the same goal.
This is one area where web3 and crypto gaming communities go completely against the grain. Every single web3 gaming project has a Discord. If they don’t have one, they’re assumed to be shady, or hiding something. It’s a totally different set of expectations, and I think as the crypto gaming and traditional (web2) gaming communities converge, reliance on Discord will fade into the background there once more.
18) ONLINE EVENTS
The benefit of events being increasingly held online rather than in-person since the pandemic began, is that they simply let you get more eyeballs on your game. Events like E3 are limited and rely on press being able to attend a limited time play-session or panel, extract the footage and info that your customers might want to know, and then present it to them through their own lens. Some fans might be able to attend, but it’s limited, and a lot of work.
When events are entirely online, you are the one presenting to the audience, rather than the press. You have more control, and less operating costs to be involved. They’re worth a try.
19) CONVENTIONS
Derek and Dana recommend using conventions for in-person goals you might not be able to achieve through an online event. For example, if you want players to get hands-on so you can get direct player feedback outside of your normal environment, they are perfect for this. Conventions also mean that a large number of creators and press are physically in one place at a given time, so you can network in a way that you simply cannot do online. They’re fantastic for this, but it’s a costly price to pay for that access.
From the creator perspective, the events and conventions circuit used to be massively motivating for me. Meeting the devs behind the games I loved was really important for my understanding of the industry and where my content sat amongst it, and it was also a vital opportunity to meet friends from other parts of the world who I rarely saw in real life. Conventions are definitely expensive, and a lot of work and stress goes into them, but when things work out, it can lead to memories which last a lifetime.
My favourite example of this is the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 community reveal event which happened about 6 months before the game came out in 2018. Content creators, press, and a handful of superfans were all invited in-person to a COD-specific conference and the energy in the room was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced elsewhere. It made me more excited for the game than I thought was possible, and that excitement carried over through my content into the minds of my viewers too. An incredibly effective execution of an in-person event.
WHICH TOOLS SHOULD I CHOOSE?
To decide how to select from the list of options above, consider the following factors:
Resources
What does your team have time and money for?
Skills
What can you do in-house? Can you outsource? Budget constraints?
Your community
What do they respond best to? Does a specific tweet format work well? Double down!
Secondary Goals
Trying to get publishers? A storepage feature?
Then, consider what’s worth fighting for even if it takes a lot of work, and what you feel won’t actually impact the goals for your campaign. For example…
If you want to prioritise discoverability and impressions, you might make some TikTok content, but if you just want to keep press as informed as possible, you could safely avoid using it.
If you want to make your game look cool, you should double down on screenshots, gifs, and videos, and potentially lighten up bandwidth elsewhere (fewer emails?) so you can focus on making things look pretty.
If you want to build community but don’t have much time, streamline: ditch Discord, but dedicate some time each day to replying to people on Twitter and showing behind-the-scenes of what’s going on at the studio so people feel more familiar with the people behind the brand.
It’s generally a good idea to start with fewer responsibilities and then expand if you have time and resources to, rather than overcommitting and spreading yourself too thin. Staying nimble is vital too; you want to be able to pivot if something doesn’t work, and it’s much easier to do that if you aren’t spinning a dozen other plates at the same time.
To further help determine which tools to drop and which to keep, Dana provided the following graphic in her talk which illustrates their varying upkeep requirements:
- Dana Trebella, http://spokeandwheelstrategy.com/
If you’ve found value in this expanded look at these various game marketing tools, drop your email below and you’ll get infrequent posts like this sent directly to your inbox. I also highly recommend checking out the GDC talk that inspired this post, from Dana Trebella and Derek Lieu.
Thanks for reading – talk soon.
