How much is it worth you making your indie game? If you’re extremely passionate about making games and want to make a living doing that, then why would even bother without having an indie game marketing plan?
This isn’t to call anyone out. It’s simply to provide some perspective that if you are willing to sacrifice so much then why not increase your chance for success. Creating a marketing plan is one way to do it.
So, how do you make an indie game marketing plan?
It can be a lot of work and time to create, but in this post we offer insight and provide a detailed marketing plan template you can use for your indie game!
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How to start an indie game marketing plan
The best way to start your indie game marketing plan is by setting your goals.
Goals are everything. Without a defined goal, you really don’t have any direction or know what your destination will be.
Starting the process really comes down to thinking big. Don’t worry about the details quite yet, just any vision or an idea of what you want to work towards will work.
Don’t worry about if you feel your idea seems unrealistic at first. You’ll soon learn how obtainable it can be and at the very least what is needed to reach it.
In addition to your goal, you also need to have a purpose. Wanting to make money is great and completely OK, but if that is your team’s sole purpose you should rely on doing something else.
Now that you have an idea of your goals and purpose, you also want to think about some high-level objectives or mechanisms that are needed to reach those goals.
For now, just come up with some rough ideas on what those objectives could be and how they can help you reach your goals.
For example, it could be using social media like Twitter, reaching out to YouTubers/Twitch Partners or releasing your game on a particular platform.
When tackling your indie game marketing plan, you really want to have a basic, high-level sense of what you are trying to achieve. This makes it easy to follow and provides a clear sense of what you’re trying to accomplish.
You can always build upon the plan more to further define your marketing plan.
Remember, nothing is set in stone. While you shouldn’t deviate from your plan, it should still be flexible and able to accommodate obstacles or opportunities that may arise.
How to define your indie game marketing strategy?
Once again, we’re still only looking at things from a high level. Now that you have a clearer sense of what your goals are and basic means to obtain them, you’re going to want to break what you have into a few buckets or phases.
These phases are just benchmarks which we’ll later flesh out with projects and tasks. Setting up your indie game marketing plan like this makes things easier to follow and helps reduce potentially overwhelming you and your team.
It also gives you a quick look at how your marketing plan will be executed as a whole.
Now before you start fleshing out some of your ideas and phases further, you need to know the audience you’re targeting.
What do you need to know about your game’s audience?
The more you know your audience, the better your campaign will perform. It will help you determine and refine your messaging, give you insight where to target them and provide clarity on things they like and don’t.
Now you may think that you know your audience but for your marketing to work, you need to learn about them as much as possible outside of the types of games they may play.
Is your core age demographic Millennials or Generation Zers? What other interests do they have? What social sites do they use?
This just scratches the surface, but it’s all valuable and helpful information which will slowly help you sculpt your indie game marketing plan.
Keep in mind that some of the information you come up with maybe educated guesses and that’s ok. You just need to be ready to shift down the road if your targeting is a little off.
Your audience defines your marketing plan. If you’re not able to clearly identify or at least with some certainty know who your audience is, it can derail everything.
Know your audience.
How well do you know your game?
How well do you know your game? Obviously, you know your game better than anyone else, but don’t let that blind you from really knowing your game.
This might come off as a little confusing, so let’s run a quick test to see how well you know your game. Ready…?
Describe your game in two sentences or less without any effort? GO!
If you struggled at all, it’s just an indicator that you don’t know your game as well as you need to. Being able to fully describe your game in a sentence or two is a lot more work than you think.
To get to that point, you need to take every aspect of your game and boil it down to key points and use messaging that resonates with your audience. That’s how well you need to know your game.
How to create your game’s messaging
Having a strong sense of what your game is about will make it easier to create your messaging. However, a sentence or two isn’t good enough.
Your messaging is going to be conveyed in a variety of ways throughout different channels of communication and it all needs to resonate with your targeted audience.
This process takes time and you won’t get it right the first time. In fact, you’ll probably see your messaging change constantly, as it might mean different things to different audience groups.
That doesn’t mean you can’t hone it down on the core aspects that will connect with your main audience, but it’s good to be aware that your message can be interpreted differently.
In order to get to this point, you need to do some research and a little testing. What and how you say something can have a huge impact on people…and sales.
Testing out what you come up with is necessary but can eat up a lot of time. To save time, why not research the messaging of successful games similar to yours?
There are going to be a lot of other games that have already gone through this process. Look at a few of those games and evaluate their messaging. You also want to make note of any games that weren’t successful too.
We’ll get back to the unsuccessful games in a moment.
After evaluating several successful titles, which ones had an impact on you? Make a list of anything that really stood out to you then see if you find any comment traits or trends. If you start seeing something similar in the messaging they use, then you’re onto something.
Now look back to the games that weren’t successful and see if you can determine where they may have missed the mark in their message.
Do this for a few unsuccessful games. This is a great exercise to get you in the right mindset to creating your messaging.
Just to be clear, you’re only looking for strategies and concepts to adapt for your game’s messaging.
Don’t copy anything outright. There is no sense in recreating the wheel but you never want to directly copy anyone.
How well do you know your game’s market?
Just when you think you know your market, there’s a good chance you probably don’t. You really need to be perceptive of how your game will stand out at launch.
This is where performing a SWOT analysis can help. That is, you need to fully assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats your game has when it goes out into the world.
This is important because it can provide insight to which strategies would be helpful to take advantage of opportunities or avoid obstacles.
Conducting a SWOT analysis will help structure your indie game marketing plan and guide you on which strategies to use when you’re ready for distribution.
If you are just started the development process of your game, it might be a little early before you start tackling your SWOT analysis, but keeping it in the back of your mind will help you be much more prepared down the road.
What type of distribution and platforms are right for your game?
There are a lot of distribution channels and platforms available and they can have a huge impact on your games’ sales performance.
Once again, goals are everything so you need to outline the goals you have for the platform and distribution method you choose.
Yes, we know it’s to sell your game but you need to think differently than just sales.
Do you choose Steam because of the large number of users it has or is your game a better fit for PS4 or XBOX? Could Humble Bundle help your new studio’s name get out to the masses so you can build stronger brand recognition and help fuel your next game’s launch?
Localization is another major thing you need to think about. If you know a particular country is a big fan of your style of game, you might want to cater somewhat to that country. These are just one of the many things you need to consider.
Really think about your reasons before committing to a platform. Between fees, licensing and dev kits among other things, really thinking about what you do is only going to help you in the long run.
How to price your indie game
Now the big question, “How do I price my game?
Pricing your game doesn’t have to be difficult, but there is a process you should follow so what you decide aligns with your goals while keeping consumers’ interests in mind.
The best ways to approach pricing is to know how much your game cost to make. Keeping track of all costs, especially development and in-kind costs (or the total monetary value of your time) is important.
Your costs will help you determine your pricing. They will also provide you with valuable information on how to better scale tasks and projects. Knowing how to do tasks faster and more efficiently will help increase your profit margins.
Once you have your total project cost, set some expectations in terms of how many games you think you’ll sell. Take the number of estimated copies sold and divide that into your total project cost and that number is the starting point of what your price should be.
Now, if you find that the price is too high or low, that can mean a few things. If the price is too high, you may need to sell more copies of the game so your price is more reasonable.
If the price is too low, your expectations of what you plan to sell might be too high or you have a good profit margin. Obviously, this is a very simplified approach to determining your game’s price and there are always going to be other variables to consider.
When you finally do come up with a number, you want to also keep in mind what similar styles games are selling for and what players are willing to pay for it.
At this point, you know approximately how many copies you need to sell. This is extremely helpful as the number will allow you to set goals for specific strategies or campaigns you plan to implement, allowing your indie game marketing plan to become more detailed.
Now that we outlined how to price your indie game, let’s dive into the importance of discounts and how they can impact your sales.
Should you discount your indie game?
Having discounts is a great way to increase your user base and can help build momentum. However, how often and when discounts are used should always be considered. Depending on what your goals are, you may not want to rely on discounts too frequently.
If you offer discounts consistently people will likely wait for an offer to purchase your game, making it difficult to have sales on an ongoing basis.
You also want to consider how much you discount your game. If you are already offering a fair market value on your game and discount it heavily, you are potentially hurting the game’s perceived value.
Without going into too much detail about this, the larger the discount, the lower your game’s perceived value will be. Having a low perceived value could easily deter people from purchasing it, however, it could also be used as a strategy to increase the user base. In either case, it comes down to what your objectives are when using discounts.
At the end of the day, having infrequent discounts at reasonable prices is a simple pricing strategy that can help you steadily recoup your costs while increasing your player base.
Should you have a demo of your indie game?
Yes, you should definitely have a demo!
If there is one thing that will help you increase the chances of your game succeeding, it would be to have a demo.
Having a demo is one of the best ways possible to help increase the chances of your game succeeding. The main reason is because it gets your game out there and can open up a lot of doors.
Now, there are some caveats to this, the main one being just making a rough demo and putting it out to the world. While a demo isn’t supposed to be perfect, you don’t want to share something that will create a horrible experience for players.
Another thing to be aware of is whether or not you should make a vertical slice (stand alone demo) or a prototype build. To be honest, unless there is a compelling reason to do a vertical slice then it may be more practical to have a build in which iterations of it are released as a demo.
In terms of distristribution, there are numerous ways you can go about doing this. You can offer a free downloadable demo on your site, upload it to itch.io or put the game in early access.
In either case, each of these options can offer benefits. Regardless of what you decide, you need to have a demo as they can provide you with significant opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise.
Just do the work and make a good playable demo. You won’t regret it.
How to manage your indie game’s online prescence
Now that we covered a little about targeted platforms, pricing and a few other things, we’re going to shift gears a little and discuss how your online presence is going to be incorporated into all of this.
After all, you’re mostly relying on the internet to make all of this work for you, so it’s an essential part of your plan. Let’s get to it.
One of the most important aspects of your indie game marketing plan is to first identify which online assets you’ll be managing.
You may already have several assets in mind, just make sure you’re not managing a ton of them.
Sure you want your name out there but you never want to bite off more than you can chew.
Keeping things simple will keep you on the path to success.
Your most important asset is your website. This might seem like a no-brainer, but based on how some people have their websites set up, you would think their website comes as an afterthought.
Having a website that only provides basic information about the game, company and a press kit isn’t enough.
This doesn’t mean you need to go all out and build a site that is current with design trends.
All your website really needs to do is be able to provide and collect information.
In terms of providing information, you at least want to have a synopsis of your game, some info about the team, a press kit, a dev blog, an awesome trailer and a demo.
Don’t fret too much about the dev blog, just as long as you update it with a post occasionally, it shouldn’t require much effort.
As far as collecting information is concerned, you want your website to collect visitor or fan emails through forms on your site. Doing this can be extremely beneficial in a variety of ways.
At the very least, an email list allows you to keep better contact with your fans and increases your chances of getting pre-sales when they are available.
It can also help you with future campaigns by targeting people just like your fans by using your email list.
There are a lot of possibilities, but whatever they are having an email list puts you in a much better position than if you didn’t have one.
Collecting this information requires some work though and can’t be hacked with just a simple form or two. There is some thought and strategy that goes into creating a successful landing page.
In general, you want to make sure the form placement aligns with your user intent. Arbitrarily placing a form on your site or just hoping people will fill out your “contact us” page really won’t work as well as you want it to.
You also need to make sure you are offering something of value to people. This could be in the form of offering updates by signing up for your mailing list, receiving a link to download a demo or free digital gift.
You don’t want to stop there either.
Make sure you have an exit overlay or a pop-up window form too. This is huge because when people go to leave the page if they didn’t fill out a form, a reminder will pop-up about the email sign-up or demo.
Having these in place is a sure way that you can build your list more efficiently and faster.
Last but not least, as you start building your fan email list, make sure you follow up with them and keep them engaged.
The more personalized and engaged you can be with your fan base, the better.
Using your website to build fan lists is going to be huge for your game down the road. It gives you a small, loyal network to tap into when you need it most.
More importantly, it can provide you with leverage when considering working with a publisher. If you go the self-publishing route, you now have a list that you’ll continue to grow until you’re ready to promote your game for launch.
Regardless of what you decide to do down the road, having a fan list will keep you prepared and give you many options!
What social media should you use for your indie game?
Social media as a whole is going to play a big role in your online presence. Before diving into all the channels possible, you want to know which platforms provide you with the best value and are the best for you to maintain.
There are a lot of options to choose from, but at the end of the day you want to keep the number limited. Starting out with Facebook and Twitter is great as most likely they are where your audience already hangs out.
When it comes to choosing your platforms, you’ll want to be strategic and practical in your decision. It takes time to manage assets properly, so don’t spread yourself too thin by attempting to manage too much.
You also don’t want to manage an asset that has a very low chance of helping you build your community either.
In terms of strategy, you need to determine your social media asset’s purpose and how it will function as part of your campaign.
To properly figure this out, you want to know if your targeted audience prefers one channel over another and understanding why. Answering this will help formulate your strategy for each platform.
For example, you could have one channel be dedicated to providing just news while another channel is more engaging and fun. Whatever strategy you decide, just make sure it aligns with your goals.
After determining which assets your going to manage, track your results. Figure out what type of posts and updates work best. Tracking this information gives you data to make informed decisions later.
Trusting your gut is one thing, but having data to back your decisions will give you confidence and more clarity as you move along with your plan.
How should you promote your game to the greater gaming community?
While your assets will provide you with an opportunity to engage with fans and beyond, there are other areas which allow you to engage with the greater community. The only difference is these communities aren’t really assets, and managing them is a bit different.
Specifically, this is pertaining to websites with active blogs, forums or communities. Reddit is a great example of this.
On a side note, you can also create your own subreddit which would serve more like a managed asset depending on your strategy.
In terms of managing these forums and communities, you’re really just participating in them opposed to managing them. Your strategy or objective may not differ much from your social media strategy, but your approach will.
This doesn’t mean you should blast promo posts to everyone about your game. Being “spammy” is being sales focused. If you are always pushing your own game (regardless of how great it is) people will easily be turned off by it.
Let your fans promote your game for you, as their opinion of your game holds a lot more weight than yours.
Your main purpose within these communities is to add value. Being value focused allows you to have empathy for your fans and prospective players. Sure, some self-promotion is necessary but more than anything it boils down to a few simple concepts to follow.
These concepts consist of providing insight, offering information, constructive criticism, or just being yourself and actively participate in a group. Do that and you’ll be rewarded for it.
It’s really as simple as that. You see this type of activity happen a lot on the game dev subReddit, where people will ask questions and others will chime in to help.
The point is, if you focus on helping others and engage the communities you want to promote to, you’ll be adding value. All you have to do is make sure the communities you choose are ones you want to be involved with and can help reach your goals.
How do you monitor your game’s online reputation?
There was a lot covered about managing your assets, but as you start posting you want to make sure you monitor your game’s and brand’s online reputation.
While it may seem like extra work it’s necessary to conduct audits occasionally, especially after sharing major updates. This allows you to observe and learn what your fan base and the community is saying about your game or brand.
Conducting audits will provide you with valuable insight and determine if shifts need to be made, in either your marketing strategy or game development. When reviewing what people are saying, take a pragmatic approach and don’t get emotional about criticisms.
Negative comments will always stand out among others, but they rarely convey the whole picture and should not be focused on.
What you really want to look for are trends that will help you decide if you should change your plans or not. Ultimately, you want to find out if there are any problems that need to be addressed or opportunities you should take advantage of.
In either case, online reputation audits can save you a lot of time and costly decisions in the long run.
How to build a community to promote my indie game?
Now you should have a good idea on what social media platforms you’ll utilize and a rough plan on your strategy and how to monitor activity. That alone isn’t enough, so you’re also going to need a fairly detailed plan on how you’re going build and maintain your community.
We’re not going to get too specific here, but we’ll cover some basics you need to consider to get the ball rolling.
Before you start any plan there are two main things you need for any strategy to work.
Plan and execute consitently.
Believe it or not, whatever you do all boils down to the statement above. To take things a bit further, that statement should be one of the foundations your entire team is built on, from marketing to development.
If you follow and practice that, there is no way you won’t be successful.
In terms of executing on your strategy, a good place to start is figuring out what type of posts you’re going to make and the frequency of those posts. For example, you could break your posts down into three types; informative, promotional or random/fun.
In terms of frequency, you’ll probably want to start with the following breakout:
Promotional: 15%
Informative/News: 35%
Random/Fun: 50%
This breakout is just a rough example, but it gives you a great starting point. In the end, it’s whatever you feel is right. Just make sure you don’t go crazy with self-promotional posts, especially when starting out.
Remember, you’re adding value to people’s lives and bombarding them with messages to buy your game doesn’t accomplish that.
In terms of informative posts, this can come in a variety of ways. It could be a screenshot, information about your process or a minor update you think is worth sharing. One reason for limiting these post types as you start out is you may not have a lot of stuff that is newsworthy or of interest to people.
It’s one of the reasons why screenshots are a perfect candidate for this category because they show progress but don’t require much more than that.
Believe it or not, the random/fun category is going to get you the most engagement. While a lot of the content might not be directly related to your game, it should somehow be related to your brand and target audience.
For example, if you’re making an RPG, you’re not going to start posting a ton of memes about Halo or Call of Duty, but you may post some about Final Fantasy.
The other great thing about this category is it doesn’t have to relate directly to games. If there is a funny picture that you think will resonate with your fan base, post it and make a comment. The possibilities are really endless.
The only thing you need to ask yourself when making these types of posts is “will my fans enjoy this?” If you are the least bit hesitant with posting something for whatever reason, don’t post it.
Getting post types categorized and determining their frequency is great, but you also need to address the daily/weekly frequency of your posts as well. In general, the more frequently you post the more exposure you’ll get.
However, it’s important to self regulate too as you don’t want your fans to suffer from content burnout.
There are all sorts of strategies in terms of how frequent you should post on one platform compared to another. As you start out, it’s best to focus on a small number of posts for a week. Make it your goal to hit that weekly number for a month or two.
If you feel it’s cake, then start increasing that number. If you get to a daily or bi-daily schedule, great. When you feel it’s getting to be too demanding, keep it at a level that is manageable.
Making a schedule in advance can help dramatically with this process too. At a minimum, you want to determine the post type, what the post will say and post date.
There is some free software that can help with this process (referenced in the template), so you can schedule all your posts in advance. Doing it bulk like this can save a ton of time.
Regardless of the frequency of your posts the key is consistency. If you don’t have that, then your community management strategy won’t really be effective. So figure out what works for you, stick with that and grow from there.
How to reach out to key influencers for my game?
Reaching out to key influencers is probably going to be one of the most time-consuming projects your team will undertake. Regardless of how daunting this may sound, it’s still a valuable experience which will benefit you significantly.
The good news is it’s not very complicated, especially when planned correctly and tasks are scaled.
To start the process, you really want to determine where your ideal key influencers reside. More specifically, are they found in press outlets, streaming on YouTube or Twitch?
Could it be an entity like an online community, blog, or review site?
Each of these key influencer categories is going to have their own strengths and weaknesses. You just need to determine how they can add value to your campaign.
At this point, it’s ok to be fairly broad and consider most of these channels. As you continue, you’re going to generate lists of websites under the categories mentioned above and then drill down further into what they cover to further qualify them.
This is part of your research and aggregating phase for your key influencer outreach project. When making your website lists, it’s really good to keep track of any additional helpful information about the influencer or entity.
Having notes about what they cover/do, the following count or any other KPIs (key performance indicators) will allow you to set criteria that will help you decide if those influencers are worth approaching or not.
Once your influencers have been qualified, you want to start rating them based on their clout or potential reach by assigning them a tier. Basically higher tiers are more influential and have a greater reach than lower tiers.
This is very helpful as it will help identify which entities may take more time and resources to potentially receive coverage from compared to others.
For example, with a higher-tiered influencer, you’re going to want to take a more personalized approach and have a different strategy than how you would reach a lower-tiered influencer.
For lower-tiered influencers, tasks for approaching these individuals can often be scaled with a templated email which you can slightly change to make it more personalized when reaching out to them.
Overall, you want to make sure you have an abundance of mid to lower-tiered influencers. This is mainly because mid to lower-tier influencers are more likely to respond which helps both on an awareness and motivational level. On top of that, their fan base tends to be more loyal too, which can translate to better fans.
Typically you want to have a tier range of 1-3 or 1-5. Depending on how many tiers you have, you want to have a particular strategy assigned to each tier. Having a separate plan for each influencer tier helps you better plan and prioritize your activities so you can effectively reach your goals.
How to use press releases for your game
Press releases can be helpful and should be a part of your indie game marketing plan, however, they shouldn’t be the crutch of your entire campaign. You really don’t want to rely on these too heavily for a few reasons.
Press releases need to be newsworthy. That’s the only way they are effective. More often than not, press releases aren’t that good because they showcase information that isn’t newsworthy.
The industry is inundated with them and over half aren’t even close to being considered newsworthy. For this reason alone, it makes it really difficult to stand out, even if you have a good press release.
This is why your press release needs to be great. What this boils down to is making sure you grab your audience’s attention and keep it. Be creative and take an approach you think will resonate with the press and while relating to your game.
When you describe your game, approach it as if you are telling someone a story that happens to incorporates a few core elements of your game.
This approach will likely make your press release more engaging and pique people’s interest, wanting them to learn more.
Last but not least, like any marketing material you put together, have a call to action. What do you ultimately want people to do when they read the press release?
It can be as easy as providing a link to download your demo or your press kit. Either way, make it clear what action you want your audience to take.
Taking these measures will help ensure that your press release is effective and produces results.
For anyone looking for a press release template, indiegamegirl has you covered.
How to use paid advertising for your indie game?
For some indie developers, paid advertising may not be in the budget or even a consideration. It’s absolutely fine if that’s the case, but you still need to understand the importance paid advertising can have and how it can help progress your marketing campaign.
Before you choose a paid advertising platform, you want to have a rough budget in mind. If you don’t know what that might be right now, that’s fine.
At this point it’s simply to help determine if it’s worth splitting a budget between two platforms or just using one.
There are a lot of platforms out there, but it’s best to stick with only a couple you feel are going to have the biggest impact and reach. In terms of getting your name out there, you’re going to want to focus on reach and awareness as your main objectives.
That’s why channels like Google Adwords Display Network and Facebook are likely going to be the best advertising platforms for your campaign. Depending on your strategy, you may also want to consider advertising on Twitter as well.
Each platform has its strengths, and leveraging them correctly will help you get in front of your audience.
To go into this a little deeper and sticking with the first two we mentioned, here are some of the strengths that both platforms provide.
Google Adwords – Display Network: Google has an extensive network of sites that your display ads can be featured on. This extends to YouTube and Gmail as well. The targeting can range from broad to fairly focused from interest groups to remarketing campaigns. For really trying to reach the masses and create brand awareness with a minimal budget, Adwords is a great consideration.
Facebook: Facebook advertising is probably one of the best platforms, simply because of how accurate it’s targeting is. One of its biggest strengths is in its Look-Alike audiences which can target new users that have similar characteristics of users who either signed up for your email or engaged with you before. Overall, the platform is very robust and campaigns can be run with as little as $5 a day.
The above descriptions really don’t do either platform any justice as their offerings can go far beyond what was mentioned.
What’s the best paid advertising strategy for indie games?
Now that you have determined which platform you want to use you’re going to need to come up with a strategy. By this point, you should know that before you develop your strategy, you need to define what your goals or KPIs are.
Are you looking just to create brand awareness or do you want people to purchase your game? What you want your target audience to do will help dictate what objective and strategy you should use.
There’s definitely a lot more that can be discussed on this subject, but the important thing to take away is to know your objective, understand its purpose and how you plan to measure its success.
Keep in mind that not all strategies will have the same objectives, but they will all help towards your overall campaign goals.
How to track and measure your game’s marketing campaign?
As you may realize, there is a lot of different moving parts to your marketing campaign. With so many things going on at once, it’s important to always keep a pulse on which campaigns are producing results and which ones aren’t.
That’s why it’s imperative to always be measuring your results consistently throughout your entire campaign.
We can’t stress enough how important it is to know your goals and KPI’s for all of your campaigns so you can measure their success and optimize their performance.
Depending on the campaign you’re running, you’ll need to determine how much time is needed to pass before you review and make changes.
Changing campaigns too quickly can be a recipe for disaster as it will be difficult to track what changed and how it affected your campaign’s overall performance.
For example, reviewing social media campaigns and your post engagement may be more appropriate to do so on a weekly basis, where reviewing your website performance may be better to review monthly.
The best way to determine when to review a campaign can be based on how much data you have in order to make a decision.
If you have thousands of daily visitors to your website and you just created a new landing page for people to sign up for pre-sales, then you can probably review the page’s performance pretty quickly and make changes based on that data.
If you don’t get many visitors, it might be a couple of months before you can consider making changes and optimizing the page’s performance.
Regardless of when you determine to review your campaigns, just make sure you are reviewing them.
There is nothing worse than changing something and hoping it will do well. You always need results and data to back your decisions.
Using tables and schedules for your indie game
So far we covered a ton. Even with a well-formatted plan, it can still be difficult to fully visualize everything that needs to be done.
For this reason, having tables and schedules is a great way to look at your entire marketing plan at a high level to fully visualize everything that needs to be implemented.
In addition to having a marketing plan schedule, having a table that shows marketing and development costs will help tremendously.
Knowing your costs and hours for projects will help you decide where projects can be scaled to save time and money or anything else you need to prepare for.
These tables and schedules can also be applied on a granular level too, but having a general idea of how everything should play out will help you and your team stay on task without getting overwhelmed.
Your indie game marketing plan and what success means for you.
With everything we covered, it should give you a path to success for your game and studio. Before you start tackling your indie game marketing plan head-on though, there is one final thought to consider and that’s how you ultimately define success.
We all know that the game plan is to sell lots of games so you can continue to do what you love.
However, the entire process should be viewed as a learning experience. Whether your plan helps you succeed or not, if you approach the process as a learning experience then you’ll always be successful.
Regardless of what your end goal is, you will experience failure at some point on your journey.
Learning from your failures is how you move forward and succeed. If you’re always learning, then you’re always improving and getting better at what you do.
If you let this concept define how you view success, then you can be assured you will always be successful.
Now, what are you waiting for?
