As a marketer who is a big fan of email marketing, I can get easily riled when I see people abusing emails as a marketing channel or using email marketing illegally.
Author: Megan Carriker
Gotta show some love for local NC developers this year as a ton of great titles have come out! If you’re low on time (or ideas), support some local game companies with games that have been released this year. And for the record: I am making zero money off of this post. I just want to see some love for some good NC games!
Customer care and service is one of your best marketing tools in the video game industry. The industry is known for its extremes – several companies, big and small, offer next to nothing in terms of support for their users and fans.
But the companies who go the extra mile and provide for their users tend to benefit from it.
So, say you spent money acquiring customers. Customer care and ensuring a great onboarding experience helps retain the users that you spent marketing money obtaining in the first freaking place.
Here’s how you can start thinking of customer support more seriously, even if you’re a small indie developer.
Here’s an example of word of mouth marketing in motion – in early August, a friend of mine messaged and asked, “Have you seen Deep Rock Galactic?”
A press kit, also known as a media kit, is a little sliver of your site dedicated to making journalists’ lives easier. If you’ve ever wanted coverage for a game or a notable company update, do yourself a favor and make it simple for media outlets to cover you with a kit.
Pretty much every company has a “sign-up for more information!” button on their site these days that leads to a Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms repository that nobody remembers to check or, even better, a free MailChimp account that nobody remembers to check.
And then pretty much every company neglects to actually email people who opt in for more information. People have come to the site, said “please give me more information!” and then never received any follow-up.
Then when the company actually needs to send out a message (maybe they’re ready to announce a new game or new product line), there’s no process in place. No emails have been sent before to replicate, lists haven’t been segmented so there’s no telling who you’re actually emailing, or the email is sent and everyone either ignores it or marks the message as spam because they’ve forgotten about signing up in the first place.
Here are a few tips to get your company to send emails on a regular basis, even if you’re on the fence about doing so, so that when you need to email people they’re a) used to getting messages from you and b) you’ve already got a system in place to get your message out to people who want to hear it.
Social media can pay off, folks. Once in a blue moon. If you have a nontraditional approach to announcing your game and the game actually looks good.
Last week, I got to have an overdue hangout session with my friend Amy. When she’s been gaming lately, Overwatch has been her game of choice.
My husband, brother-in-law and myself have been back on the World of Warcraft train for the past few months and switched servers to start over again. Horde just wasn’t doing it for us like it used to, y’know? And my brother-in-law happened to choose a high population server with a low number of Horde players on it (who would’ve thought Proudmoore… named after Jaina Proudmoore…one of the main members of the Alliance… would be an Alliance-heavy server…) so the end-game was non-existent.
I talked with her about how we’re playing again and she was interested in the developments that’ve taken place since she left around a year ago. The Broken Shore questline is finally realistic, Argus is neat, all that jazz.
By the end of the day, she ended up rebooting her subscription and making a new character on our new server of choice.
Word of mouth is a hell of a drug, my friends.
Webinars are one of the most effective one-off digital marketing channels for B2B brands in terms of your ROI and all of the assets you can harvest from them afterwards. Here’s a checklist for getting started hosting your own webinar.
Pick your tool
There are a lot of options out there for webinars – some free, most paid. If this is for a larger brand, err on the side of paid. The one I rely on most in 2017 is GoToWebinar because GoToMeeting has been solid for me for several years. WebEx is another one with a large portion of the marketshare but personally, the experiences I’ve had running and attending WebEx webinars haven’t been as reliable.
For a small to medium sized business to business (B2B) brands, webinars are one of the most effective marketing tools you have to utilize. They’re even useful for some business to consumer (B2C) brands.
The prep work involved
Webinars take some prepwork to get them off the ground. However, the prepwork involved helps you make sure you’ve got a good idea of what you want to get out of it but also brings a lot of your marketing alignment together.