Mary Carty

Tomorrow morning I am more than excited to be working with young minds. I will be spending the day talking about marketing and promoting your game with students from Dania University in Grenaa. Afterwards, I’ll be facilitating a more hands-on workshop. This is the work I love to do!

Going through my materials again this evening, a few things came to mind and I thought I’d share them with you before the lecture tomorrow.

When I was a kid we constantly played “round stories”, each person in the group added a line until the story ended. Or in our case, finished abruptly, because we couldn’t agree on the plot!  Often, my sister’s contributions were so good, we forgot our turn and let her finish the story, glued to the very end.

I think marketing your game works in the same way. Of course, you need to steer the ship; but sometimes it’s good to let go, try out new things and find a few cool new influencers in unexpected places.

Guys and girls

Some marketing and social media platforms have attracted certain perceptions or pigeon holes. For example, Pinterest, is for women or ladies of a certain age. Other platforms are dominated by other type of users. Take Machinema for example, they have  conquered the male 16 to 35 year old market.  And that is just fine. Job well done if these folks were the intended target market.

But I can’t help thinking that there is a good marketing lesson to be learned here. I wonder if games developers posted very early sketches of their games on Flickr to share. Tagged those vintage cartoon characters in albums marked inspiration and added a few drawings of their own for others to pick up and reshare?

The thing is, what is found initially on one platforms moves on very quickly to others, and the fire starts after the second or third share. But someone had to start the chain. Where was this person, who was it and why did this early adopter pick you?

So the person or type of audience that initially found your content, is never rewarded for their help and not considered part of your team. But these people are pivotal to your success.

Think about the influencers on every platform. In the early stages, don’t count any out until you’ve done your homework. One very active pinner or repinner could have a massive impact on your game’s visibility.

As well as this, the duration of a Pinterest pin, is much longer that the same content shared on Facebook or Twitter. That gorgeous long tail of the internet, keeps on finding, pining and repining these posts; giving your content a longer life. Another positive to be mindful of.

Image driven platforms like Pinterest could be used in so many smart, innovative ways by small indie games developers. The same with Instagram. It’s all about the sharing economy. What better way to get noticed.

Let the fans in

Fans have a huge place in driving the recognition of your brand and your game. Fan fiction, fan music, fan videos are all over the web. And when fan content mixes with your content, amazing things can happen. Why not let your fans co-create with you. Maybe a way forward, a new adventure or simple solutions could be found to things that were blocking your forward path.

I know it’s a futile exercise to spend your time and valuable resources online where your fans don’t reside.  Taking that as read, why not test content on different platforms? Write up a plan. Think of the craziest to the simplest campaigns you can run and get to it. Move outside your comfort zone a bit and see what takes off. Who knows maybe Pinterest could unlock that golden circle for you. Worth a try I  think.

I’ll let you know what the student think of these thoughts and others tomorrow. Feel free to add thoughts of your own, happy to have you as part of my team.

Mary

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Big thanks to Mikkel for the invitation to come over and present, I really appreciate it.