Once you’ve created your marketing strategy (make sure you have a marketing plan in place before optimizing your workflow!), you should have a clearer picture of the amount of work you have ahead of you. From here, you have two options:

  1. Hire someone to handle marketing
  2. Take on the work yourself

Let’s assume you are a solo indie developer who would like to tackle the work on your own. With so many different roles to fulfill in developing a game and successfully selling it, you’re going to have to really optimize your time and efforts.

You should already have a timeline of dates filled with marketing and development goals. It will take some time to figure out how many hours a day you will need to dedicate to each role (marketing, coding, and sound effects, to name a few). However, once you get into the groove of things, it will become habit and second nature. Don’t feel bad if you need to alter your marketing/development timeline into something more reasonable for your work pace.

An easy way to build marketing into your routine is to break it up into small tasks you can fulfill throughout each day. For example, allocating a few 10-minute blocks, each dedicated to a different task (post on Facebook, reply to a TIGSource post, write a developer blog and so on) can help break up the workload and make it seem less intimidating. Some developers would rather allocate a big chunk of time per week solely to marketing. Find what works for you and go with that.

If you use a social media scheduling software like Hootsuite, you can optimize your workflow even more. What some developers like to do is at the beginning of every week, they schedule an entire week’s worth of content across their social media accounts. This can take a good amount of time, especially if you want to use many different social media platforms, but frees up your week so you don’t have to be as active.

If you would like to save even more time, go ahead and just link all of your social media accounts together using the third-party software. What this does is allow you to create only one message to post across all of your accounts. Keep in mind that each social media platform is unique and ideally, posts should be curated and written in different ways for each platform.

You can start with the same base message and fine-tune it for each platform. For example, if you have a long developer diary to share, pulling out a snippet for Twitter and identifying a key image for Instagram, while still posting the full post on Facebook, allows you to use the same content on different platforms and still tailor it for your fans.

There really are a lot of helpful tools out there that can help you streamline marketing activities to make your workflow easier. Just do your research and make sure to test out the outcome of each service. Do not forget that many times, “easy” does not equate to “effective”. Even though any post is better than no post, a post created for Facebook but posted on Twitter is not very useful. Posting a Twitter curated message on Facebook simply looks lazy and can have a detrimental effect on the reputation of your brand and studio.

Be careful not to get too carried away optimizing your time!