Dwayne Waite Jr., former Marketing Manager at Schell Games and current Marketing Director Game Events at ReedPop talks marketing at the IndieGameBusiness podcast. When talking about a holistic or integrated marketing approach he really means the whole marketing process combined: “It’s a lot! From your public relations efforts to advertising and going to events. And all your activities to support the games from the time it releases to later in the life cycle. Working with influencers and co-branding opportunities. All these bits and pieces form your marketing strategy.”
SWOT analysis
When starting working on a marketing campaign it’s important to do research. “Ask questions like, what is this game? How can we describe it and most importantly, who are the people that are going to play this? So, basically a SWOT analysis, to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.”
From this information you can distill a marketing persona, the key demographic that you will focus your marketing on. You can narrow it down to specifics like age, gender, and income, but als behavioral traits that go into the reasons why people will play your games. Waite Jr.: “We like to come up with fun names for our personas, like Gary the Gamer. ‘Gary is our target persona, he’s between the ages of 25 and 34 and he’s a doctor. He doesn’t have much time, but when he does he likes to play online with his friends and he doesn’t mind if the experience is a bit pricey.’ With this information you can have intelligent conversations about your product.”
Game life cycle
Waite Jr. highlights four different areas that your marketing efforts have to touch upon to succeed. Those are awareness, consideration, acquisition and retention. “The two first ones are really important in the first phase of your game’s life cycle”, says Waite Jr. “Get people to know your game and have them talk about it. Your marketing spend is going to be very important here.”
If the game is released, the marketing moves to the next two phases, acquisition and retention. “Once they buy your game, you will give them reason to keep playing”, explains Waite Jr. “Maybe you are building a community or providing some supporting merch, whatever it is, you now tap into different channels for marketing.”
Marketing dollars
“You’re going to be able to spend your marketing dollars smarter when your target market is more defined”, Waite Jr. says. “So looking at those four different categories you could divide your budget to the ones that are most important to you right now. In a saturated market you’re going to spend a lot up front for your awareness and consideration.”