Show people something interesting and focus on honest engagement.
I just started hosting a monthly Q&A for self-publishers on the Break My Game Discord channel (check it out!), and the same question keeps coming up:
“How do I market my game?”
“How do I build an audience?”
It’s tough, and I’m living this struggle myself as I prep my Kickstarter so I’d love to share what I’ve learned as I’ve asked questions and found what works for others.
Quick qualifier: the answer to this question is many times longer than what I can fit in a Substack post, and better yet, it’s a different answer for every game/publisher. My goal here is to give you a map of the marketing landscape so you know what to research further and where to spend your limited energy. Let’s begin by separating marketing into two buckets:
Organic vs. Inorganic Marketing
Organic: Posting in Facebook groups, talking to people at conventions, running playtests.
Inorganic: Paid ads, sponsorships, basically giving money to get engagement.
Both require different skillsets to master, and you need both to succeed. It is generally best to start with organic marketing to see what resonates with people and gain people who are truly interested, and then scale up with inorganic marketing.
Organic Marketing
“Get used to shouting into the void and getting no response back,” is advice that I’ve heard and unfortunately relate to. There is a lot of noise out there as so cutting through with engaging content is hard. Even then, converting that engagement to followers is even harder. Here are what seem to be best practices in organic marketing:
Post interesting content. A seemingly obvious one, but if you’ve scrolled any board game Facebook or Reddit pages you’ll see most people don’t adhere to this simplest principle. Posting a link to your landing page and saying “Check out my new game” not only will not work, but it looks like lazy schilling that may actually turn people away from you as a creator. Instead solicit real feedback, show progress, and share engaging art from your game. Whenever you post anything just take a second to think how you’d experience this content as an outsider and if it feels genuine or not.
Don’t over-post. Your audience is likely a part of multiple groups and you spamming the same post in multiple groups is peak lazy marketing. Again, look around and you’ll find perpetrator of this usually accompanied by comments of “stop spamming your dumb game everywhere.” Remember that consumers are smart, you’re not trying to trick people or game the system, you’re trying to form connections.
3 comments for every 1 post. This goes back to the “shouting into the void” comment. If you establish yourself in a community by providing answers to questions and worthwhile comments, when you do post it will be more well received. Additionally, most social media platforms will favor showing content from users with a track record of engagement. Again, actually becoming part of a community rather than seeing it as an advertising opportunity is beneficial to all.
Provide help. What’s a better way to be a genuine active member of a community than by providing help. Do a little introspection, see what skills you have and what you like to do, and see how you can provide some help to others. Jamey Stegmaier’s blog is a great example of that. He enjoys writing, and as an industry powerhouse has a wealth of knowledge to share. He thinks of providing assistance first, and getting followers second. Personally, as a rulebook nerd I’ve found a spot editing others’ rulebooks on the Break My Game Discord has a channel. I don’t know if it’s gotten me any followers, but it’s helped establish me in the community and give back.
Convert playtesters. If your playtesters seem to have honestly enjoyed your game, don’t be afraid to link them to your landing page or ask for their emails. It doesn’t have to feel pushy, just an honest way to link people to a game they connected with.
Inorganic Marketing
I remember the first time I went on Facebook and started seeing ads tailored to me. It felt almost revelatory. I’m not going to see an ad for nerd subculture product while I’m watching the Bears lose on Sunday Night Football. But social media platforms can better target the right people for the right ads. Just like organic marketing, there is an art to inorganic marketing showing your ad to the right people and having them engage rather than scrolling past.
If your budget is <$2000, put it all in Facebook/Meta ads. This is advice I heard on the Crowdfunding Nerds Podcast. Personally I’m not a fan of Facebook, but at this time it appears Facebook/Meta is the best value in advertising especially for smaller budgets. I see Reddit starting to get in the mix, though I’ve heard mixed reviews on success rates. BGG is good for heavier games, and you can do interesting things with contests, but is more expensive per results.
Learn how to optimize Meta ads. Meta ads and all their metrics can seem intimidating, but it’s very worth your time to learn and there are plenty of good resources out there. I found this LaunchBoom video helpful, as well as this more detailed tutorial. To narrow the scope, focus on Cost Per Click (CPC) as your guiding beacon. It’s pretty simple, if you are spending $100 a day on ads and your CPC is $10, then you’re only getting 10 clicks. But if you’ve can get it down to $1, then it’s 100 clicks. I’ve heard that $1.50 – $2.00 CPC is a good target. Focus on bringing down your CPC and you can treat the other dashboard data as secondary.
Target the right audience. A key aspect of making efficient ads is figuring out your audience. Meta lets you specify interests and demographics to target so that your ad is being seen by the people most likely to convert. The videos I linked above have a good breakdown, but in general start by including Kickstarter, board games, and a more targeted audience that matches your game like card games or war games. Lookalike audiences can also be very powerful if you already have a decent email list. Meta will look at your email list and see what people on it have in common and then target other similar accounts. That’s a good reason to start with organic marketing before turning to ads.
Start small. With Meta you can choose your daily budget and turn your ads on and off as needed. When I started I just did a $5 budget as a test. Doing that I found I had a really good CPC but a really low rate of people actually signing up for my email list. I did a little investigation and realized that my landing page was not good for conversion. I paused my ads, redid my landing page, and then relaunched with much better success. That helped me quickly find issues with my process before wasting a bunch of money.
Marketing costs money, but should earn you more. Let’s do a little example. Let’s say you have a CPC of $2, with 50% of those clicks signing up for your email list. From the Crowdfunding Nerds again, you can expect ~10-16% conversion rate of your email list. Let’s assume 10%. So if you spent $100 on ads, you’d get 50 clicks, 25 email sign ups, and 2.5 eventual backers. Which means you’re spending $40 per backer. If you have a $100 game, you’re seeing all that ad money come back and then some. However, if you have a $10 game, its the opposite. It’s important to understand your statistics well enough to make the right decisions on where you put your game’s budge.
Outsource as needed. If you’re diving into inorganic advertising and realizing its just not in your wheelhouse, consider hiring a marketing firm. It’s not necessarily cheap, but again marketing is an upfront investment that should result in bringing in more than you spent. Just like the ads cost calculation above though, you need to consider what makes sense for your game. My game, Quickdraw, is going to have a price point around $15. I reached out to a handful of marketing firms (including the Crowdfunding Nerds) to ask if they had proof points for similarly priced games. To their credit, they were honest – for a low-cost game, the ROI on professional marketing probably wouldn’t make sense. Which is why I’m tackling advertising myself and focusing on the highest-impact, lowest-cost strategies.
End Goal – Funded On Day 1
The main goal of marketing is to get as many people to your crowdfunding page on day 1 as possible. That surge will boost you in the crowdfunding algorithms and bring you a much greater number or backers. So for both organic and inorganic methods you need to focus on that goal. Here are a couple ways to maximize that.
- Make sure your emails leading up to the campaign make the launch date clear.
- Significantly increase your ad budget on day 1 and maybe day 2 of your launch. I plan on setting my daily budget at launch to equal my monthly budget.
- Change over your ads to make it clear your product has launched, and point to your crowdfunding page not your email sign up.
- Do A/B split testing of various ads ahead of launch so you know which is most effective to use on your launch day.
- Tell your friends and family who want to support you that it would be the most helpful if they backed on a specific day.
Running a pre-crowdfunding marketing campaign will likely be the hardest part of bringing your game to market, but will also have the largest pay off. It’s going to be slow to start, but keep plugging away and it will be worth the effort.
Like I said, this just barely scratches the surface of how to market your game, but should give you some direction. If I can recommend your next step, listen to the two-part Board Game Design Lab podcast featuring Andrew Lowen from the Crowdfunding Nerds. Part 1 covers these principles but go deeper with more examples and stories. Part 2 then gets more into the weeds with implementation specifics. Then totally go check out the Crowdfunding Nerds podcast which I find to be an amazing source of info.
Have you had success with any other marketing strategies? Any campaigns make an impact on you? I’d love to hear any of your thoughts.