This guest post first appeared on the Unreal Engine blog. Thanks Jess for letting us share it here. If you want to contact Jess about working in Unreal, email her: jess.hider [at] epicgames [dot] com!
INTRODUCTION
Hi! Jess here, European Community Manager for Unreal Engine. I often get asked as a Community Manager, what do I do? I work with all the teams in Europe who use or want to use Unreal Engine. I’m often one of the first Epic points of contact for teams new to Unreal as I’m out and about at events, so I help with a wide variety of questions including areas such as licensing, tech support, biz dev opportunities, enterprise and marketing.
Because I cover quite a broad area, I’m in a lucky position that I get to see a huge amount of developers’ projects, from a one-man team to AAA studio, so I have this enormous pool of information to analyse and pull from. One thing I’ve consistently noticed is indie developers in particular seem to struggle with marketing. Not always, I’ve seen some fantastic examples of what to do, but also many, many examples of what not to do and it’s often the same mistakes over and over again.
It’s heartbreaking to see teams with amazing games completely sideline their marketing (normally due to lack of bandwidth, resources or planning), by leaving it until the last minute (or even until after release in somes cases!), putting out poor marketing materials that don’t do the title justice or completely ignoring offers of extra promotion.
Like with most things, to do it right, marketing requires you to invest some time into it – which I know on small teams, can be hard to come by. But, you’re releasing into a saturated market; On Steam in 2016, over 4200 games were released. That’s nearly 40% of the total games available! (In-case you were interested, it would cost you around $91,000 to buy all the games on Steam right now).
Which leads me to why I’m writing this blog. I want to take you through three steps of marketing:
- Finding what you want to say: looking at messaging and target demographics
- How to say it: practical takeaways on creating and publishing your content
- Getting others to say it: Approaching press and other potential marketing partners
FINDING WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY
Messaging
For all marketing you need a focus, what are you trying accomplish?
It could be a holistic goal, are you trying to establish yourself as a leader in a specific genre? Are you trying to blur the lines between what’s real or unreal with hyperrealism?
How do you want consumers to recognise your company? Approachable, engaging, friendly, or (bizarrely)… savage in the case of Wendys.
On the other end, it could be a very specific product orientated goal – are you trying to get more people to sign up to your newsletter, download your demo, take part in your alpha or early access?
What are you trying to achieve?
Identifying messaging could be a whole talk in itself, so I highly recommend you go and read It’s Showtime by Richard Butterfield. It’s around £7/$26 on Amazon for a digital copy and it takes you through step-by-step on identifying and building your messaging in way more detail than I can go into right now. But saying that, there’s a couple of things I want you to bear in mind.
Stay Positive
Once you’ve worked out the content of what you want to say, you need to consider its phrasing.
Every statement you make should be in a positive tone. One of the biggest mistakes I see, especially on places like Twitter, are teams appearing needy and desperate, normally asking for followers. Don’t beg, it looks incredibly unprofessional. If you’re wanting to grow your user base, give people a reason to come back! Encourage people to follow you, rather than directly asking them, For example:
‘Every Thursday we’ll be releasing a new clip of footage, so make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss out!’
‘As development ramps up, we’ll be releasing more screenshots of unseen areas. You won’t want to miss this, so make sure to follow!’
Actionable Messaging
Every statement you make should drive the consumer to do something – it should be a call to action. If you’ve caught their attention, you want to make sure you capitalise on that and bring them in to your ecosystem. Calls to action can range from getting them to follow or subscribe, to coming and playing your game at an expo, to getting them to back you on Kickstarter.
With a goal in mind, a positive way to say it and an action you want your audience to complete, it’s time for you to tailor that message to your target demographic.
Target Demographics
Hopefully you have an idea of who you are targeting, but it’s always worth doing some market research to keep on top of any emerging trends. The industry as seen massive growth over the last few years by regions, platforms, distributions methods and in the gamers themselves so keeping on top of changes and adapting to them is key.
I’m going to warn you now, brace yourself for the next five minutes as I’m going to be busting out the bar and pie charts to run through some breakdowns of the global games market from 2016.
Globally the video games market made between $90 to $100bn in 2016 depending on which report you read. If we first look at market share by region, we can see the Asia-Pacific market almost generated the same amount of revenue as the rest of the world combined. There’s been huge growth in the East!
If we break this down further and look at the top twenty revenue generating countries in 2016, China sat at the top for the first time. As you can see there’s a pretty good spread of countries from around the world, but why is this information useful? Well, these are the countries that consumers spend the most money in, so it’s worth taking these areas into consideration when thinking about localisation of your product or dedicated marketing campaigns.
If we switch across and now look at the at the market by platform for 2016:
Although mobile gaming has seen considerable growth in the last few years and now holds the largest market share, all platforms are still growing. In the US, 45% of revenue came from consoles and VR, whilst here in the UK it’s just over half. So console gaming is far from dead!
And it’s worth looking at how consumers get hold of content. Don’t bother to make a boxed product for China, 97% of their content is digital downloads. But here in the Western markets and out in Japan, boxed content is still worth looking into especially for console releases. The majority of games bought boxed are given away as gifts. If you’re aiming your game towards the younger audience, who are more reliant on people buying for them, it’s well worth thinking about boxed products. Just make sure if you are going to make a boxed product using Unreal, to keep in contact with us.
When it comes to buying games, the ESA found the biggest influencer on consumers purchasing habits is still the quality of graphics, closely followed by the price. Although gameplay keeps people engaged, if your game isn’t visually appealing in some way they may never get that opportunity to become engaged in the first place.
Moving on, lets talk a bit about the gamers themselves.
The average gamer is 35 years old, a wee bit older than what most people think. Male to female ratios are getting closer with a 58 to 42 split in both the east and west. Purchasing habits differ a bit by gender; men buy nearly double the amount of titles woman do, but woman are a third more likely to make in-app purchases and are 40% less expensive to aquire.
Gaming is a social activity (who’d have guessed?), over half of the most frequent gamers play multiplayers games weekly, mainly with friends and family.
And for all the bad press we sometimes get as an industry for supposedly creating knife or gun wielding maniacs, over 70% of parents say video games have had a positive impact on their child, and 2/3rds of parents play games with their children weekly.
I’ll stop the charts here as there is so much information available online for you to dig into, but one last point on demographics: It’s worth bearing in mind that who you’re targeting and who’s actually playing might be two separate things! Be flexible and if a new audience emerges be willing to adapt your marketing to incorporate them.
HOW TO SAY IT
Once you’ve worked out what you want to say and who you are going to say it too – it’s time to work on how to say it! Here I’m going to focus on online marketing as it’s something that is accessible to everyone and you can instantly go away and work on.
Websites
Every game should have a website. You might be thinking, well that’s obvious, but a lot of indie games I’ve seen only have a Facebook page, which isn’t good enough. Your website is the central hub of your online presence – all other channels you choose to use will link back to it so it needs to be well maintained and presented.
It’s reasonably cheap to be able to purchase a custom domain name from sites like 1-2-3reg and GoDaddy. For a yearly fee you can pick up a .co.uk domain for as little as 7pounds or a .com from around 12pounds (at the time of writing).
Most of the time you’ll go with your project or company name for the domain, but it’s worth double checking the domain can’t be accidentally misinterpreted like the very well known penisland.net (for all of your pen needs).
You don’t have to build a full website from scratch, there are plenty of providers where you can get functional (and good-looking) templates to build from such as WordPress, Squarespace & Wix.
Most providers offer a free base, with the option to upgrade to monthly paid premium plan. Given how low cost some of the upgrades are and the features they provide, (analytics, further customisation and domain name binding) it is often worth upgrading. Remember, this is going to be one of the first places consumers will encounter your project/company, and where you’ll direct the majority of the audience to for more information. Make sure you give the best impression possible!
Personally, I’m a big fan of clean, simple websites. Some of my favourites are by the Siege and the Sandfox, Goblins of Elderstone, and Abzu teams. Their front pages all follow a similar and simple format:
- You are greeted by a large and beautiful graphic of the game
- Next is the latest video or trailer
- Followed by a short explanation of the game
- And more graphics
- Finishing up with a box to subscribe to the mailing list and social links
This format works well as it grabs the viewers attention straight away with the big graphic. Then leads them to find out more. It’s also neatly laid out, and there’s not a lot of clutter.
You may have heard of the KISS principle, or ‘Keep it Simple Stupid’ principle. There’s a few key reasons for keeping your website simple.
First, slow load times can lead to a loss of consumers. Amazon found for every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your website may be, if it isn’t streamlined enough to load quickly, some users will click away.
Second, one of the top reasons a user leaves a site is because they don’t know what to do or can’t find the information they are looking for, so a clean layout with clearly labelled sections is key.
Third, you may have heard of the three click rule, where if a user can’t get to the information they are looking for in three clicks, then they won’t continue. Some tests have shown this may not be the case, but it’s still a good guide for keeping your website layout easy to navigate.
You also need to make sure your website is mobile friendly. For the first time in Q4 last year, mobile and tablet browsing overtook traditional web browsing. Not only are there now more people browsing via mobile, Google favours mobile-friendly sites on a mobile search.
Social Channels
With websites covered, lets look into Social Channels. I’d recommend you look into using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for sharing content, Twitch for streaming and YouTube for video hosting.
The main reasons I suggest you stick with the ‘mainstream’ social channels is how well integrated they are into other systems and how these tend to be the main channels larger companies cover. For us; we constantly repost content on Twitter and Instagram, we host ue4 developers on our Twitch channel when we aren’t streaming, and we add newly released trailers on YouTube to our trailer spotlight playlist. By all means go out and experiment with other channels too, but these ‘core’ channels are where we can help you more.
Lets start by looking more at the big three for content sharing: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
There’s no denying, Facebook has the largest user base; it has 2billion users world wide. Instagram follows with 700million whilst Twitter is nearing 330million.
For active daily users the order stays the same:
- 76% of adults use Facebook daily.
- 51% of adults use Instagram daily.
- 42% of adults use Twitter daily.
But here’s where things shift, even at an 11 month low in 2016, Instagram still had a higher engagement rate than the either Facebook or Twitter. Engagement is typically defined by the formula: ((likes + comments + shares) / followers) *100.
If we take a quick look at the user demographics for each channel, Under 29’s are the most engaged on all social channels, but are least active on Twitter. If you are wanting to reach the older generation, then Facebook has the highest useage. And women outnumber men on all the social channels (apart from LinkedIn) and looking up some research have done so since 2008.
From my experience, on Twitter people are more likely to share or retweet content they see to all their followers, so it has a wider reach. On Facebook users tend to tag people they know will find that post interesting, so you have a narrower audience but one more likely to engage. On Instagram reposting is less common, but likes and comments are higher, making it a good place to gather feedback and engage customers in a dialogue.
How each channel delivers content also considerably impacts how different posts perform. On Instagram, there’s no easy way of clicking on links in a post and long pieces of text are truncated off, so the image has to be the focus of the post.
On Twitter, with the character limit imposed it’s more common to give brief news and to link out elsewhere.
Facebook on the other hand is better for the fuller posts as it allows more space for text and it gives previews to where you are linking to. If we next look to YouTube, the opposite to social media is true where more men watch than women watch. But here’s the really interesting news:
Out of the Top 15 categories that have the highest percentages of male viewership on YouTube, 10 of them are focused on games. Plus two additional categories, virtual worlds and graphics/animation software, are gaming related. Only bodybuilding, basketball and football/soccer made it into the Top 15. It’s safe to say guys spend an incredible amount of time watching gaming videos.
Twitch is also similar, where 75% of its users are males. Twitch users are also incredibly engaged, with nearly half of users spending 20+ hours a week on the site.
This makes Twitch and YoutTube fantastic platforms for sharing out games-related video content. The user-bases there are already highly engaged in the games industry and are high consumers. All you have to do is get your content noticed! Which brings me nicely on to the next topic, creating content.
Creating Content
When it comes to content, always pick quality over quantity. You don’t know what will be picked up and go ‘viral’ so always make sure you are showing of your content in the best way possible. You have a split second before someone scrolls on so you need to grab their attention.
The best way to get someones attention it seems is through visuals. In a Digday and Chute survey, marketeers responded to how effective they found posts with visuals compared to posts with just text. Nearly 95% found adding visuals to be 2 or more times effective than just text. So it’s pretty clear that visuals are the way to go, but they still have to be good quality.
Lets start with images. Twitter and Facebook have horrible downsampling algorithms, and will crop you images to a specific preview size if it’s odd dimensions or if you’re uploading multiple photos at once, as you can see. To avoid any artefacting or weird framing issues make you create your images to the correct sizes for each channel. You can use SproutSocials ‘Always Up-To-Date Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet’ to find out the exact dimensions you need.
What you put out needs to look good. This doesn’t mean you always need to share out the final images, you can share out WIPs, just do so in the best way possible. I often see new characters introduced in a basic T-pose which is really boring. Pose them up, give them a little bit of personality and charm! A nicely lit and well composed image goes a long way.
I love how the Lost Goblin team introduces their new characters for Goblins of Elderstone. There’s a little bit of background and a character that’s well posed with lighting, occasionally some effects and it’s so much more interesting!
When it comes to designing your banners for Social channels, make sure to take into account how it will be cropped across devices and to allow room for where the profile picture will be, so no important part is truncated off. You can find many templates online to help (YouTube helpfully provides one) or you can build your own.
It’s a good idea to keep your profile image the same across all of your channels, as this helps the user easily identify you. Banners, on the other-hand, can be channel specific to add variety.
For videos, please use video capturing software, don’t take a video of a screen! There’s plenty of free software out there (I personally like OBS) so there’s no excuse to take shaky, blurry screen captures. Always edit down any videos you take to get rid of any setup time. You’ve only got a few seconds to get peoples attention so get straight to the point.
Another thing I see a lot of, is that people don’t turn off their screen debugging output, so random numbers are showing up and ‘THE LIGHTING NEEDS TO BE REBUILT’ is persistently sitting in the top corner. I have genuinely seen this message in game announcement trailers (not going to name names), so please get into good habits and turn it off. It can easily be turned off by typing in ‘DISABLEALLSCREENMESSAGES’ in the console command.
Also always crop down your videos so they only show the part of the screen you want people to see. If people don’t need to see the editor, don’t show it to them. Remember a lot of content is viewed on a mobile screen so make your focal point as large as possible.
A final point on videos, if you’re explicitly showing off an environment or prop (not gameplay) please use a steadycam or flythrough. When controlled by a mouse, it’s very easy for the camera to become twitchy making the image slightly blurry and hard to focus on. It can also be nauseating for watchers if you’re quickly swinging it about so please make it nice and smooth. Something like the Tree VR teaser is far nicer to watch.
Posting Content
Hopefully that’ll help you tighten up your creation of content, so now lets chat about posting content.
Someone on the team has just made the coolest particle shader ever and you want to share it with the world straight away. Don’t. A post’s performance changes based on day, time and audience. Remember to take into account Timezones – if you are in the UK and aiming for Western Audiences, East Coast America isn’t really active until 2pm GMT. Think about your target market timezone, and post accordingly.
Check out co-shedules blog for optimum days and times to post on different Social Accounts. Use it as a base to experiment when works best for you, and fits in practically with your work schedule.
Once you’ve found a posting time that works for you, try to stick to it every week. If your followers know when you are going to post, they can keep an eye out for it. To help keep your posting times consistent, build up a bank of content which you can pull from. I like Trello as it gives you image previews and you can easily switch between the PC and mobile versions. There’ll be weeks where you make lots of content, and weeks when you produce none. Having a bank lets you have flexibility about what you post and when.
Also be aware, if you start building your following in a certain way, they will expect things to continue. On our Instagram channel, the followers are expecting to see beautiful in-engine shots and when we don’t post that, there’s at least a 50% drop in performance.
Next up, context. It’s really important that every piece of your marketing is stand-alone. You can’t guarantee someone has seen the first part of a two part message, or that someone has read the text accompanying your image, so make sure your post makes sense, or is neutral, when out of context. (Funny story about the above picture, that was a banner I found in the quaint countryside village of Hindhead. I almost crashed my car I was laughing so hard!)
For the sake of professionalism, no matter which channel you are using, don’t sacrifice your grammar or vocabulary otherwise you risk altering your intended meaning. It can be very tempting, especially on Twitter, to use slang, shorthand or incorrect grammar on posts to keep it short. But persist! You’ll find ways to structure sentences or substitute words to keep your posts informative yet concise.
Probably the biggest mistake I see developers constantly make, is not including links. From asking for votes on Greenlight, backing on Kickstarter or release announcements, so many times the accompanying links are missing. You’ve grabbed my attention but I’ve got nowhere to go from here. Yes, I could click on your profile, then go to your website, then find it from there, or I could close down the current app I’m on and go search on the store.
Will I go away and actually do that? No. I’m lazy, so make your audiences life as easy as possible and include the link in every post.
Hashtags are both your friends and enemies. They can help you gain traction, but if there are too many, people will ignore and carry on scrolling. In the games space I’d recommend you use #gamedev, #indiedev, #gameart, #animation, #vr, #mobile, #indiedevhour and #screenshotsaturday where appropriate. Many have bots that will help with retweets and others are closely followed by developers.
Don’t forget to also use software tags, many companies are always on the look out for content to repost. It should be obvious, but don’t use competing hashtags. For example, use whichever game engine tags you’re working in, not all of them. We won’t retweet stuff unless we explicitly see that its made in engine, so if you’re going mad on the hastags for bots, you may have cost yourself a retweet from us.
That covers general posting advice, there’s a few channel specifics I want to mention:
Facebook
- Facebook lets you create custom tabs (pages) so make use of them to create dedicated links to sign up to newsletters or find you on Kickstarter.
- Facebook’s sorting algorithm penalises you if you post too often, so spread content out over the day leaving a few hours inbetween posts.
- You can now use a video clip as you page banner, instead of just a static image
- You need to post gorgeous visuals – it’s all about the images!
- Make sure your images have high fidelity, interesting composition and (what I’ve found) beautiful lighting.
- Steer clear of heavily text based images, these tend to have lower performance.
- When uploading a video, make sure the first frames look as good as a picture – there’s a half second delay for a video starting, so if someone’s scrolling down their feed if you can’t get them to pause, they will never see the video.
- Instagram has also introduced other features alongside the main timeline:
- Stories, a series of images that disappear after one day
- Instagram Direct, where your followers can view an image only once
- Live Video streaming service, to record on the go
- Don’t start tweets with @personsName, the tweet will only appear on their timeline and not appear to the rest of your followers.
- If you use an image, you can tag up to 10 people in the image, saving on character count.
- When showing off video, always directly upload it to Twitter rather than linking out to YouTube, direct uploads play automatically when scrolled past.
YouTube
- Once you pick a ‘slug’ you cannot change it ever; something to keep in mind if you plan on releasing multiple games.
- There are several factors that affect the SEO of your videos with watch time being more valuable than like or follows.
- If you’re creating custom thumbnails, watch out for YouTube’s ‘watched bar’ and ‘timecode’ stamp, this covers valuable space in your design.
- Use your channel homepage to create sections, which among other things can contain playlists of playlists.
- These also appear on your playlist page and are another tool to organise content into a structured manner.
- These sections can be structured both horizontally and vertically for variety.
Twitch
- If you’d like to be hosted on our channel, make sure to include UE4 in your stream title.
- If we host you, please spend the majority of your time in the engine.
- We’ve noticed watchers prefer streamers who talk into the mics and give commentary, and are not silent and playing loud music in the background.
- Artists do the best for viewers, followed by programmers.
- Keep your content appropriate for under 18s, avoid swearing or working on anything explicit.
- Build informative UI to let your viewers know what’s coming up.
- Make yourself accessible: link out to your Twitter, website, blog, etc. so people can find you.
Promoting Others
One last piece of advice on publishing content, be mindful when promoting others.
In our industry it’s great that we help promote other’s achievements and raise exposure for each other, but when someone comes to your page, it’s because they are interested in finding out more about your company or game. Make sure there is a healthy mix of both original content and reposts on your site.
Feel free to ignore me, but I’d avoid reposting political, religious or any type of controversial matters. It’s best to keep these opinions to your personal accounts, rather than the companies. Your audience will have a wide range of views, so don’t isolate potential markets with content that’s not relevant to your game.
Finally, when it comes to reposting content in another language, make sure to at least run it though Google translate. One company I’ve had contact with was promoting some game jam games including one titled ‘Swaffelen Piraat’. I reached out to them to ask if they knew what it meant, but they had no idea – losely translated from Dutch it means ‘Dick-Slapping Pirate’. In this case it was funny, but it could easily have been something offensive. Alway make sure you understand what you are promoting before promoting it!
GETTINGS OTHERS TO SAY IT
You’ve now built up a message, produced great content to reflect it and are getting the word out there, but how can you get others to help you spread the word?
Press Packs (Press kits) – Mainly, you need to make your information as easily accessible as possible, so I would recommend you create a press pack. This way all of the information about your studio and game is in one easy to find and downloadable place. You can create your own presskit and host it on your website (like the Snake Pass team has) or use the wonderful Rami Ismail’s online presskit().
There’s lots of things you can include, but make sure to cover:
- Game Name
- Studio Name
- Studio Location (doesn’t have to be the full address but a city is helpful!)
- Publisher Name (if applicable)
- Website + Social Links
- Contact Details
- Trailer (both a link to a YouTube version and a downloadable version)
- Key Art
- Screenshots (high resolution and no logo, it makes it easier for cropping and formatting for articles)
- Logo
- Description of the Game/Press Release
A note on game descriptions; press/marketers will often have different spaces to fill, from a full page to a paragraph to a tweet so make things as easy as possible for them and have different length versions of your description. After all you know your project best, so offer up the wording you want people to use:
- Say what it is in less than 116 characters (this allows a link in a tweet)
- Two sentences
- A paragraph
- A page
On a side note, it’s also worth learning these off by heart so you can draw on them at any point. You’ll often be in a stressful situation when you need this information (in most likely a random encounter) and it’s easier to say what you remember than what you think on the spot.
Contacting the Press
With a press pack created it’s time to start reaching out to press! I reached out to the lovely George Osborn (who’s written for The Guardian, Eurogamer and Games Industry Biz as a freelance journalist) and asked him what his major do’s and don’ts were, and he’s very kindly put a ‘top three’ advice list together.
Number 1, You need to think about which publications you want to be in and which are practical to be in. IGN, Polygon, Kotaku etc are great sites with real reach, but if you’re an indie or making a mobile game then your chances of getting in are slim.
Instead, work up a list of practical targets. Do this by identifying:
- Smaller sites with less traffic where a “here’s a code for my game” email will be warmly appreciated.
- Bigger sites with more traffic where they have sections devoted to the type of game you’re releasing e.g. Videogamer’s monthly indie game round up section.
- Specialist sites where your game makes sense to feature. PCGamesN for PC games, Pocket Gamer for mobile games, Official PlayStation Mag for PlayStation indies etc.
This will help you get a spectrum of coverage, even if it is just bread trails. It’s also worth noting sites like GI Biz and PG Biz often talk to game developers about the creation of their game, with stories picked up by consumer press if there is something in there. Can be an alternative way of getting leverage.
Number 2, Learn about the person you’re pitching to.
Every journalist is different. They have different job roles, different personalities and different tastes. The way you pitch to one person successfully could be a complete turn off for someone else. Take time to learn about the person you’re likely to pitch to. Read their pieces, check their Twitter to find out what sort of games they like and go to events to try to meet them face to face. This will help build a respectful personal relationship that helps to lay the foundations for a professional one.
Related to that, consider hand emailing as many pitches as possible. Whilst spamming a big list of journalists might seem tempting, having the bravery to hand select people and craft to their needs is often rewarded.
And number 3, Don’t forget context.
If you want to get your news in the press, you need to understand when your opportunites are. Whilst news or game from a major publisher will almost certainly be pursued actively, a story or game from a studio a publication doesn’t know that well is a harder sell.
So give yourself the best possible platform to succeed by understanding that. Journalists are absolute rammed during major trade shows (e.g. E3), in the build up to major holidays (e.g. Christmas release schedule) and when other big announcements are happening (e.g. a new console release). If you’re starting from a smaller base, adapt around that. Look for lulls in the calendar where news is lighter on the ground and pitch then. Or magnify your presence by piggy backing on one of the major stories of the year. Think about how much coverage Snipperclips got for the Switch launch – it’s a small game dev studio but had the right game to cover some of Nintendo’s launch day weaknesses.
Online Etiquette
There’s a couple of points I’d like to add; when reaching out to people, make sure you have an actionable point. Have something you want to say or ask that cannot be solved with a Google search. Be polite, as I said before use proper English, and respect people’s time. For me, a week passes crazily fast especially when I’m travelling. I have had moments where I haven’t forgotten about responding to something, but it has taken me up to a month to be able to sit down and give the response I want to give.
My advice, contact someone, wait a week, bump the conversation once and if they don’t respond, leave it at that. Do not, message them every day asking why they haven’t responded, don’t get angry and rude with them as this does not incline us to respond!
Other Marketeers
Apart from traditional press, there are other avenues to help you get the word out there. For starters, make sure to tag software companies when sharing out content. We, Allegorithmic, Maya, Quixel, Marmoset to name a few all share out community work!
If you’re using Unreal Engine, our support ranges from reposting content online (with our Instagram dedicated to sharing out community artwork), putting up blogs and showcases, adding you to community reels to inviting you to showcase with us at events like GDC.
To be involved we just need to know you are there. Come show us what you are working on at events, tag us when you share your work online or reach out to us!
CONCLUSION
On that note, I’m going to wrap up this blog here. I’ve covered off on messaging and target demographics, creating and publishing content over different channels and reaching out to other potential marketers.
Hopefully you’ve found this useful and it’s given you some points to explore. If you have any questions please pop them in the comments below, I’ll be keeping an eye out and will try my best to answer them.
Until next time!
-Jess