It is paramount that you develop your concept to the fullest possible, and even more important to create an audience before even thinking of launching your crowdfunding campaign. You have to be able to show the value of your idea, or game in our case, to your demographic, and show how it can improve their gaming experience or how much fun they can have. 

Go to conventions 

Our marketing plan was centered mostly in attending both well-known and small, local conventions, both having their advantages and disadvantages. However, a well-established and thought-out advertising plan, including social media ads, is also vital. 

It was important to us to show how fun the game can be, even though the nature of the game is competitive with a take-that mechanic, where you can control how easy or difficult another player’s turn can be. Nonetheless, even the people who lost the round were laughing and having a good time. Fun was the value we offered. 

Look for what makes your game unique, special or different from the rest and make that the central piece of your pitch or promotional blurb. This will help you get the people you need the most to be interested in trying out your game.  

The feedback you will receive from them is very important and you want to pay attention to what they do during the game, what they comment about, how they play the game, the strategies they tried to go for, etc. These kinds of players are more valuable to you for several reasons, but mainly because they’ve played many games that relate to yours, and can give you great suggestions. 

However, it is also important to note that great ideas can come from anyone and anywhere, like it happened to us with Gravity Warfare™. A he didn’t like dexterity games nor wanted to playtest the game gave us one of the best ideas we’ve had for the game. Be sure to value the feedback of interested players who enjoy your type of game, but don’t turn away advice from other kinds of players. 

Build your Social Presence and Website 

If you’re serious about your project, you have to set aside some funds for the building of a great website, or at the very least, a very nice-looking landing page, as well as for social media advertising. This is something we lacked and could have done better, but what we had did the trick: it was a decent looking site where people could find more information about us, our company and the game and could subscribe to our mailing list. This will be important, especially in this stage where you are promoting your game, going to conventions and spreading the word that your game exists.  

If you can do it yourself, go ahead and build your custom site or landing page. If you don’t know how, there are many avenues you can take to build it yourself still, such as video tutorials online, or programs with templates to choose from, and you just change the content.  

I personally recommend you check out Tyler Moore’s YouTube channel (link at the end of the article) especially the videos on creating your own website. I created this website in a very short period of time with the knowledge I learned from watching his videos. Cool right? If you go to his channel, make sure you let him know I sent you! =D 

But I digress. Create a website and social media accounts where interested people can go and get more information fast and easy, helping you grow your audience organically.  

So, now you have a much more polished game, you have established an audience, you have a website and people know who you are. What now?