Effectively Market Your Indie Games with Zero Budget

While you are busy programming and developing your excellent and innovative indie game, you will like to sell it to someone when it is finished. However, with a large number of games available on mobiles, it becomes extremely difficult to highlight your game to people. Moreover, at any point in time, many games are being released together. This makes indie games non-profitable and even great games are difficult to sell now. Reaching out to people in the crowded game market, and showing them that your game is worth their time and attention, has now become more difficult than ever.

Steps for Effectively Market Your Indie Games with Zero Budget

If you hire a marketing firm or publisher, it will cost you a largest or almost all your revenue, and if you do it yourself, you may end up spending a lot of time on it – the time you could spend on polishing your game further. So, you need to device smart and innovative ways of communication to market your app strategically if you don’t want to share your revenue and want all the money to come to you, especially if you have zero budgets for it. However, with the amount of time and energy spent on marketing indie games, their marketing is never totally free. But the truth is, no marketing, no communication, means no sales. Your marketing strategy holds the key to making or breaking your communication with the community. So, you’ve got to do it, but strategically for best results.

• Post a dev blog at regular intervals: To engage your community, you need to post interesting information on your dev blog at regular intervals, say, daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or whatever suits you best. Creating a captivating dev blog demands serious dedication and adding videos or images enhances the quality to increase visibility and improves your reputation. You may also explain the technical obstacles you overcame during the project and how you are continuously polishing the game for better experience. This not only proves your expertise to fellow developers and players, but you may also receive better ideas and feedback on improving it further.
  Posting daily, but without any quality will not be able to engage users as much as posting biweekly or monthly, but after thorough research of ideas to attract feedbacks. Posting at least once a week can give you best results. At the end of the day, all that matters is the amount of online traffic that comes from a handful of these quality pieces you released.
  Give links for subscribing to your blog. This makes it more likely that they will follow up with your posts. Also provide links to your social networking accounts and social sharing icons, so that they can share and promote your game more and more. At the end of every post, it is a good idea to remind people how and from where to get your game and other information, they would like to know.
• Get a website to introduce people and to keep them updated: Initially, you can use a fundamental website, maybe only with the name of the game and the description of it. You can also establish a mailing list by providing the link of signing up for the emails. As you continue to progress in the game, the website can also be updated alongside. You should also add a link to your dev blog in the navigation bar of your website and from the homepage.
• Promote your game through social media: Of course, you can’t avoid this in the present age, especially Indies. The big three, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, along with other social websites and apps have their own benefits and drawbacks and demand a lot of dedication and time. Like the dev blog, you need to be regular in posting updates to keep your followers engaged. This content may include information on bugs you encountered, funny things about development, and links to your website and dev blog.
• Make a trailer to get people hooked: The trailer is the best asset to spark the interest of people in your game and combines sound and music effects to the images, fast-paced animation, and a strong call to action. You need to catch the viewer’s attention within the first 3 to 5 seconds so that they stay with you for the next 1 to 2 minutes to check the information you want to convey and share. Give a powerful intro with great music and sound effects and short footage from the game. Adding reviews and quotes from professionals and popular people also adds to the credibility and authenticity of your work. A call to action should be included at the end of the trailer.
• Engage people with screenshots and GIFs: An excellent image with high resolution and high quality can express more than what a thousand words can say. A balanced, well-lit visual composition having good contrast and quality, makes the screenshots appealing and the GIFs seem to tell a story. These screenshots can be used in blogs, trailers, and press releases as well as on social media and website to engage more and more people.
• Setup your press kit and prepare for a press release: Use minimum verbosity but provide everything that people need. The basic press release structure will involve a headline (short and catchy with information about the content), subheading or subtitle (adding extra information to the headline), basic info, lead paragraph (having answers to what, where, when, why, who, and how), quotes (by the founder or the game’s author), call to action, and contact info.
• Send emails in bulk: Send emails to Influencers, press, and mailing list in the pre-release and post-release phase as well as during release. Do not wait for a response; instead, send bulk emails to all of them as check out their feedbacks and the traffic generated by them. These emails instigate them to follow you, and you can keep them updated with these emails so that they don’t lose interest.
• Optimize your landing page: You can convert visitors into players by removing navigation from the top of the landing page. A catchy headline that talks to the target audience give them a reason to spend more time in checking the trailer, screenshots, and videos to learn more about your game. Try to talk directly to your visitors or target audience in the page title. Social sharing links and prominent call to action button should be included. Best screenshots, helpful reviews, and testimonials of influencers should be included along with links to press kit and contact info.

Wrapping

The above tips will hopefully help you market your indie game with zero budgets. Mobile game development company in India thus focuses primarily on the content of the dev blogs, website, social media, trailers, screenshots, GIFs, press kit, press releases, emails, and landing page. Though this content won’t sell the game directly, it pokes curiosity in people and builds a lively community and helps you manage your budget.