Talk: marketing your indie game on a $0 budget

edg3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA

Emmy Jonassen of www.indiegamegirl.com gives a talk on marketing and its importance in the success of your game. The talk was given at Konsoll in Norway and focusses on delving into how to market your ideas successfully without needing to invest large amounts of your capital.

Thoughts? Have things to add?

The short and sweet is this:
- you dont need to spend money on marketing to have your marketing be successful
- Use "irresistable promotional material", i.e. Material that makes people feel it is amazing enough to share.
- 5 must-haves: trailer video (your most important promotional material), screenshots (high res, high quality, must be engaging), press release, landing pages (a web page dedicated to your game), development blog
- reach out to press
- build your fanbase (cat pictures!)

dammit

A really valuable talk, thanks for sharing the link. I hope a lot of developers here took the time out to watch it.

There was just one thing that stood out for me as extremely odd, and something that I don't think any digital marketing agency would advise for. She advised a single "landing page" for purchasing the indie game that is separate from the development blog (even though later she points out the blog can bring in 55% more traffic). She also suggests that this landing page should have no navigation at all and should link nowhere. As part of a marketing strategy this is very strange, especially online.

Ideally, you want a website for your game dev company (even if it's just you and just one game - it might grow, so be at least prepared for that) which would incorporate a page for purchasing (or downloading or whatever), a page for news (press releases etc), a page for development updates, an about us page for your company including contact details and so on. You definitely don't want to isolate or separate your BUY NOW page from the rest of it - particularly for SEO purposes.

Kobusvdwalt9

Great talk. Thanks for sharing. I wonder if there is people here that solely do marketing ?

dammit

Well, I studied marketing, worked in a digital agency for a while and now work in a company training other people on digital marketing strategies.

I don't know of any one person or one company devoted to indie game marketing, but I could be wrong there.

Karuji

@dammit Devolver Digital. Though they are also a publisher.

EvanGreenwood

Are we talking about this: http://devmag.org.za/2009/06/16/zero-budget-indie-marketing-guide/#topall

(Came to it through Pixel Prospector, but written by local talent obvs)

konman

@BlackShipsFilltheSky Thanks for that. Not only is she very easy on the eyes, but she speaks a lot of sense too ;) Very cool talk.

dislekcia

@Karuji: Devolver aren't part of the local scene, which is what I think @Dammit was talking about. Otherwise you could just list every publisher ever and it wouldn't help anyone talk to them anyway...

@Dammit: There was a group of guys keen on doing game marketing at the meet ups a while back, but they seem to have disappeared after offering their services to a few local games, in the end we didn't go with them for DD because we felt that their approach wasn't really personal enough for what we were trying to do. Plus we were already marketing our game on our own anyway, so it didn't make sense to switch. I think that may have demoralized them, which is a shame - if they'd stuck around and gotten some experience on games that weren't already marketed, they'd be a valuable resource for local developers.

dammit

I must admit, I have always assumed that indie developers either prefer to keep their marketing in house or simply do not have the budget to outsource.

konman

I remember the talk that the developer of "Fleet of One" did in Cape Town a few weeks back. He launched his game and he had done zero marketing beforehand. It would be interesting to have a follow-up to see how he is doing...