Four ways to build better indie marketing campaigns

26.02.2024 - 12:11 / gamesindustry.biz

Getting your game noticed isn't easy, and it's particularly tough for indie game developers right now. Players' gaming backlogs are bigger than ever, and with an abundance of AAA games constantly entering the market – not to mention over 75,000 listed titles on the Steam marketplace – it's no wonder we're all being more selective with what we play.

Of course, there's been a concerted effort by the industry to give indie games their time in the spotlight, and it's great to see major publishers such as PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox hosting their own indie showcases throughout the year.

But even then, indie games have a much harder time cutting through the noise. There are a few reasons for this, from AAA marketing budgets often dwarfing the size of indie marketing budgets, to publications prioritising coverage of bigger titles due to audience demand and the SEO benefits of covering bigger franchises.

One of the biggest strengths of indie game developers is their ability to develop games with a specific audience in mind. Unlike large game developers who must cater to a broad audience (often due to larger commercial targets and shareholders to answer to), indie game developers have the freedom to create games that are tailored to the interests and preferences of specific fandoms. This approach allows them to create games that resonate deeply with their target audience, resulting in a passionate and dedicated fan base.

But to do that effectively, you'll need to ask yourself:

That might sound like a lot to take in, but we've compiled five key lessons inspired by our work with Curve Games to help you build better indie game marketing campaigns that get people talking.

Whether you're working on your first video game release or the latest entry in a long-running indie sequel, social listening tools are a vital part of gathering audience feedback and using that to create better marketing campaigns. There are lots of ways to do this.

In our case, because we work with multiple games and publishers, we've set up a data strategy team called Levels to monitor fan engagement and reaction through keyword and sentiment analysis on platforms such as Discord. But there are lots of free tools out there that give a degree of insight into sentiment, engagement, and other key metrics if you don't have the luxury of building a bespoke tool.

In the moments following the release of a game announcement or new trailer, we set our team to work on analysing what the community is talking about, so we can reflect that in the marketing ideas we come up with. For example, this might mean monitoring the mentions and sentiment around specific characters in trailers and using this data to dictate what appears in the next trailer we work on.

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