Our Marketing Strategy
A little over a month ago on June 6th W1 had its first marketing event and we wanted to talk about how that went. The marketing strategy we're using for W1 was created mainly from advice from indie game marketing expert Chris Zukowski. Chris is the owner of howtomarketagame.com, is a regular consultant for game publishers and indie teams, and he gives talks at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) about marketing almost every year. One of the big pieces of advice that Chris gives is to participate in as many gaming showcases and events as possible and so we did just that. Our first event so far was the #PitchYaGame event on Twitter/X and BlueSky. #PitchYaGame is a bi-annual event where indie companies have
12 hours to post about their game using the #PitchYaGame tag. The idea is that with everyone using the tag then the tag starts trending and gets a lot of people looking at all the games being marketed using the tag. We weren't far enough along to include any visuals in our post, but even so we had more engagement than we expected considering we're an unknown studio. Here are the numbers:
- On Twitter/X we had zero replies, four likes, two retweets, and three new followers from 647 views.
- On Bluesky we had zero replies, 18 likes, five reposts, and four new followers. Bluesky doesn't tell you how many views your post got so we don't know that number.
- Both of those posts had a link to our website to join our newsletter and 11 people clicked that link to sign up.
Takeaways
Was this marketing event a success for us? These numbers might look very tame to some of you who use social media regularly and seem like a failure, but at this early stage of development and marketing we consider this a success. Our goal for this marketing event was solely to get people to sign up for our newsletter. The newsletter allows for a direct line to talk to all of you and among other things it provide news that doesn't get drowned out by the endless stream of posts on social media. While having better numbers in the other metrics can lead to success those 11 new subscribers are incredibly valuable for us and are the true success. This event also gave us a good litmus test for which platform we should focus our efforts on more. Bluesky had more engagement and will likely be our primary platform that we build posts for and then repost to other platforms. After our next marketing event we'll compare our numbers from that to this one and see how things have changed. As we end this blog though we'd like to hear what you think? Do you think this event was a success? Do you think our expectations were set too low? Let us know in the comments or by sending an email. We'll see you in the next blog.