For an unpublished game, trying to unlock the potential of its audience, especially on a limited budget, is a difficult and uncharted journey. By blending strategic insights on audience identification and maybe with cost-effective advertising techniques, you can actually reach that “worldwide player engagement”.
Together, at this guide we will have a look at common myths, presents grounded realities, and outlines an actionable blueprint to make your game reach across borders.
Understanding Your Global Players
Start by learning about your own Game Genre and Market dynamics.
Market Research: Even without a name, you can gain preliminary insights about your audience with the right market research. Considering your budget is limited, even free reports can be very useful in this regard. You can also use sites like Newzoo or Statista for preliminary research, they can be a good guide for you with the specific data information they provide.
Trend Analysis: Take note of regional developments that may affect game design and marketing strategies. New genres may be trending, and shifting your game in this direction would be the biggest mistake. Remember that trending genres are always temporary. The important thing is to hold on to your core player base in your field.
Create culturally grounded player personas: In the beginning you can even create these personas according to your own instinct, over time they will gradually take shape and become more and more accurate. But keep in mind that creating a persona is a very careful and important task. These personas should always be one of your main helpers in your marketing strategies.
Psychographic Profiling: Don't forget to deepen your personas over time and make your marketing strategies even more specific.
Localized Preferences: Personas may vary from region to region. Don't give a persona several nationalities and be limited to just one. On the contrary, creating separate personas for nationalities is also a useful strategy.
Prototype Engagement and Feedback
Don't forget to showcase your early versions on social platforms and create short demo plays for events.
Community Building: Start developing your community as soon as possible by sharing these developments and posts on social platforms. Remember, one of the first steps to a successful game is to start building strong communities.
Iterative Feedback: These demos and the features you showcase will also help you get feedback (remember, if players can feel that they are involved in the making of the game, even in a small way, their engagement will be greatly increased).
Cost-Effective Global Advertising Tactics
The Power of Organic Reach and SEO
Content Marketing: You can achieve your goals by creating SEO-optimized content that showcases the unique aspects of your game and attracts the attention of players. Remember, even if it's not related to your game, the content you publish in your niche will be highly valuable! (for example, this blog 👀)
Social Engagement: Social communities are a great force for building expectations and creating hype. Apart from your own community, you can try your luck here by joining pre-existing communities on places like Reddit (even if we say luck, do it! There's always luck in the game business, but some people are “luckier” than others. The reason for this is that it is up to us to increase this luck).
Smart Geotargeted Advertising
Start Your Advertising Campaigns with Small Budgets: This will allow you to start campaigns earlier and will also ensure that you have enough data to create a proper campaign when your advertising budget increases in the future.
Don't get trapped in certain countries: Don't get stuck in these advertising campaigns in countries where you get good returns. Remember, these initial "small" marketing campaigns are there so that you can try as many places as you can and get as much as you can.
**Don't rely too much on the KPIs of small-scale marketing campaigns!
Debunking Myths with Grounded Realities
Myth: Global marketing demands a presence in every market.
Reality: Once you've found the regions of most interest to your game based on solid research, there will be no limits. The important thing is to take the right and broad first steps.
Myth: Only high-budget campaigns achieve global visibility.
Reality: If you've already started building your community, each of the steps I've outlined above will increase the return from even small advertising campaigns. And remember, it's not the budget that matters in the right campaign, it's the right strategy. You will learn this by experimenting.
Myth: Extensive localization is prohibitively expensive.
Reality: Don't underestimate the power of core content and ad localization. Localization should be top of mind every step of the way.
Myth: Paid advertising is the only way to gain international traction.
Reality: Really, a proper community is the key to everything. When organic campaigns are done right, nothing can beat their power. Remember, inbound strategies are always more powerful!
Myth: You need to fully launch to start marketing globally.
Reality: Don't even think about it. Big mistake.
Remember, nothing can stand in the way of a well-planned and well-strategized marketing campaign combined with a good game. Don't wait for your game to launch for marketing.
**While your game is still in its infant stages, you need to establish a community that will witness its first steps with it.
Your personas will settle into these strategies over time, and after a while, your marketing strategies will start to reveal themselves even before you plan them. The right access to player audiences will ensure that your players are involved in every step of your game, every post in your marketing, and will accelerate you on your way to success.
Who knows, maybe coming to this blog means you're a good fit for Pixeria's Persona?
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