Category: Marketing Basics

Tips for small to medium-sized businesses getting started with marketing.

Influencer marketing in video games

Post author By Aaron Ashlock
Post date 2020-01-22

What is Influencer Marketing?

I recently went on my Bachelor trip. When we stopped to get gas, one of my groomsmen (Grubbs) came out of the gas station holding a Coconut-Berry Red Bull. To everyone else, Grubbs was getting a random drink. However, I happen to know that Grubbs is a massive consumer of live-streams. The largest streamer is Ninja and Red Bull is a sponsor of Ninja. I also happen to know that Ninja’s “favorite” flavor of Red Bull is none other than Coconut-Berry. Coincidence, or something more? When I asked Grubbs about it he said: “I don’t even really like coconut but I started liking it probably just because he did.”

Video game marketing predictions for 2020

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2020-01-16

Here are a few things I see taking place in the murky marketing world supporting video games and companies near the video game industry in 2020.

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Customer support as an extension of marketing

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2018-01-18

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.

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Making a press kit on your site

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2017-11-30

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.

Email Marketing Marketing Basics

So you’ve got an email sign-up button on your site, now what?

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2017-11-22

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.

Marketing Basics Marketing We Love

Word of mouth marketing – what does that even mean?

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2017-11-03

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.

Marketing Basics Marketing We Love

How to host a webinar

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2017-09-19

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.

Marketing Basics Marketing We Love

You should consider hosting a webinar

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2017-09-12

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.

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Explaining metrics: website user vs website session?

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2017-06-27

In 2015, Google Analytics changed their naming conventions and added in stats for Sessions and for Users. It’s still a little tricky to decipher what this means so here’s a quick overview.

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Explaining metrics: what is a bounce rate?

Post author By Megan Carriker
Post date 2017-06-20

One of the most commonly referred to metrics for websites is the bounce rate.

It does not refer to how round your visitors are.

It does, however, give you some relatively helpful information in terms of their behavior within your website.