I originally started writing this as a response to the "what's your project" thread, but I thought it might be better to spawn off a new thread about the topic of marketing.

Now that my project of the last 18 months has been wrapped up, my new project is much more difficult....marketing for Miko & Molly. It's quite a daunting task when you jump into it for the very first time. So much to do, no clue where to start from. Thankfully I've gotten enough information from Steve's posts and from the many other great posts in the ASP forums, so now I at least have a handle on where I'm going.

I've got a short term plan for following through, including submitting to download sites, sending out press releases, and making some upgrades to my web site. I need to come up with some longer term plans, but it is a little tough to plan too far ahead when I barely know what's ahead or what is to plan. Practically every site has some type of advertising program you can buy into. Trying to figure out which programs are worth buying into is tricky, especially since everything is coming out of pocket right now, so I have to spend my funds very wisely. However, I am having a good time with all of it, and I feel I'm learning some very valuable skills.

For anyone who has already achieved some level of success, did you have the same problems when you first started out, or did you have somebody to take you under their wing and show you all the right steps? For a developer with 1 product and no name recognition, what are the most important first steps that need to be taken to build that recognition. Are there particular download sites or magazine/newsletters that provided better results than other? Any preferred places to spend advertising dollars?

I realize that building a successful business isn't an overnight project, but a jump-start is always helpful.

I'm going to dig up an old post, since this is a topic I'm very interested in, but see little concrete discussion of.

I'd be interested in sharing specific experiences that people had with any Marketing related undertakings. What worked, what didn't work? Where did you advertise, announce, etc, etc.

Obviously I'll start with sharing some of my experiences, otherwise it just wouldn't be fair now, would it? ;)

- have done very little paid advertising listings in download sites, except for a Tucows featured listing, which only cost me $25, but really didn't bring any more downloads - probably because their game category pages are hidden behind some pretty obscure links. I will be trying out either the download.com silver or gold listing for Wonderland... we'll see how it affects downloads. I have a feeling that campaigns that are very successful in generating downloads might also depress your conversion rate, as more of those downloads will simply be "curiousity clicks".

- I've always found that you can get a lot of interest in your site by posting tech updates at programming sites, such as flipcode.com. My bandwidth always goes through the roof after posting an image-of-the-day at flipcode, but I don't think it actually affects sales much.

- as an experiment I programmed a little "advertising" game in one day (also partly to get a break from Wonderland). The game, "When Clones Attack!" turned out to be actually quite fun, and generated a good amount of downloads without any advertising (30,000 from download.com alone). It certainly bumbed up downloads/sales for my other games a little, but I'm not sure if it was enough to be worth the effort. Still, it did expose a lot of people to my site.

Cheers,
Patrick

For The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/), the most successful marketing moves I've ever made have been (in chronological order):

* Accepting credit cards
* Raising the price
* Re-designing the web page
* Raising the price
* Adding the newsletter
* Raising the price
* Raising the price

I've never raised the price of The Journal without seeing an increase in sales. Though I attribute that mostly to being too meek in my original pricing.

For the games...Artifact (http://www.samugames.com/artifact) and Paintball Net...longevity, just not going away, has proven to be one of the best marketing moves. Along with targeting the conversion of new players into longtime players, and supporting the community of players.

Well, at least somebody replied finally.

Right now, I think the most important thing is improving my site. I'm about to roll out a new ordering system. Something that looks a little more professional, doesn't require the user to register first, and allows a few other choices for payment besides online credit card. The new system will also be geared a little more toward selling addons to products (not that I have any right now, but I should before end of year). Besides that, I'm still not happy with my product page...still seems cluttered to me.

As for advertising, I did try a few things. I took out an ad at Tucows and did a featured listing at Software Seeker. So far, I don't think either has really generated much in the way of sales.

For the Tucows ad, I made a few mistakes. I think running the ad before getting a cows rating was probably a mistake. At least I have a cow rating now (*grumble grumble* only 4 *grumble grumble* :mad: ). The other mistake was...well kinda not my fault I guess. When I created the listing for my game at Tucows, they asked for a boxshot image. So I said what the heck, and made one up, not being really clear what they used it for. When I then ordered my ad, it said it would display the "screenshot" along with a description at the top of the category. Didn't think much of it. Imagine my surprise when my ad shows up and is not using the "screenshot" as they said, but my box shot. (*grumble grumble*). The box shot probably works well for apps, but I think probably not so for games. So, I updated the image to be used for promotions to something more appropriate, but it doesn't go into effect until next month. I have some other grumbles about my adventures in Tucow-land, but they did their best to try and resolve the problem, and I guess they made me mostly happy, so I won't mention it. But anyway, so thats how my Tucows stuff went. I'm gonna keep at it for a few months and see if I can't get something out of it.

The other ad I tried at Software Seeker hasn't done much for me yet either. It was probably something to do with my descriptions, so I'm working on refining them, trying to make them more appealing and to sell better. I've also got my front page placement coming up on the Tues before Thanksgiving. I'll see if that generates anything. Even so, in retrospect I don't think their logic games section generates enough traffic to pay off.

tucows's site looks pretty bad...
i took the librety to see if i can make to your game
as a normal site visitor.

without knowing your game's name i was only able
to browse the featured games. no categorized browsing
as download.com, no browsing at all, actually.

to be more specific, the only way which i reached your game
was through the "search" action typing your game name.

i know that tucows is a well known site,
but from this experience,
it sucks.

Originally posted by gilzu
tucows's site looks pretty bad...no categorized browsing
as download.com, no browsing at all, actually.


Was this what you were looking for:

http://games.tucows.com/downloads.html

humphh....

I usually have problems finding my own games on Tucows.
But maybe that's just me. ;)

Has anyone had any experience with their more expensive (e.g. main games page) placements?

Steve, you mentioned once that you usually spend several thousand dollars on advertising when a new game is released. Any hints as to where some of that money goes? :)

(btw, Lord Kronos, I think the boxshot looks pretty good... it makes it stand out next to the other screenshot)

Most of our marketing budget goes to bribe reviewers (j/k). Actually we did try some features on the main Tucows games page about a year ago (for somewhere around $350 or $450 for a week), and they just broke even. I've found the category features more effective, but other people have experienced mixed results with those. It seems to do better if you feature a 5-cow game vs. a 4-cow or lower one though.

We're still experimenting quite a bit with our marketing in order to find out what's most effective. Traditionally we put much of our budget into pushing individual games on various web sites, such as buying features on download sites, but now that we have a lot more games, part of the budget is being shifted into marketing the site as a whole, such as advertising on pay-per-click search engines.

Paying for advertising is actually one of the least effective forms of marketing, and we haven't found any holy grails there. As there are 3 primary ways to increase business (attract new customers, motivate existing customers to buy more frequently, and increase the size of the average sale), much of our focus has been spent on the 2nd and 3rd methods. Thus, as we continue to attract new customers, we're now doing a better job of turning them into long-term repeat customers. As a result we can afford to spend more to attract each new customer because on average, we can expect each one to buy more than just one game from us.

Having just released Phraze Daze today, we've now released 9 games in the past 16 weeks, all of them launching right on schedule (none were even a day late). Our initial goal was to build up a substantial product line of over a dozen games, and that goal was achieved. So now we're shifting to a period of slightly less frequent releases, focusing more heavily on marketing and promoting those games and the web site as a whole. At the same time we'll be working to further optimize the site's ability to sell, especially in the area of helping games to cross-sell each other.

So in other words, one of the most effective ways we've found to increase sales lies in the area of optimization. Instead of just blindly paying to bring in more visitors to your site, find out what each visitor is worth to you now, and see if you can improve that. It may be more lucrative to find ways to improve your service to your existing traffic and customers than to try to bring in more new traffic (which may not be nearly as qualified). Then try to get additional referrals from your existing traffic. It's relatively cheap and easy to buy more traffic -- it's much harder to buy qualified traffic.

Promoting with other game companies has been good for us in general. I think many people are scared to promote someone elses game to their customers for fear that it will hurt their own sales, or to let someone else promote their game for fear that it will cannibalize their current full profit sales, but for us this extra exposure has only increased overall sales and our own customer base. I think it sort of makes sense. As small companies one of the hardest things is to get as much exposure as we need to increase sales, but from the exposure we do have only a small percentage will buy. If you have 1000 customers and typically 3% of them buy a game from your mailing list chances are it's not always the same 3%. As an example, we recently did a promotion to another company's mailing list with a discount coupon offer, which led to many sales. We split the profit with them using an online affiliate setup. It barely cost us any time or effort to set up and generated a reasonable amount of money. Then we also did the same for one of their games and our mailing list. I think these sorts of things are generally win/win when you have the right partner.

Originally posted by Midnight
(btw, Lord Kronos, I think the boxshot looks pretty good... it makes it stand out next to the other screenshot)

You really think so? I guess it does, but I don't really think it is as effective as it could be. I made a few mockups here. Which do you like best?

http://www.kronos-software.com/test/tucows1.gif
http://www.kronos-software.com/test/tucows2.gif
http://www.kronos-software.com/test/tucows3.gif

I think 2 would do a better job than the others. That is the one I'm going to have Tucows use next month.

I think both #1 and #2 do a good job. #3 looks a little bland, I think.

Originally posted by LordKronos
You really think so? I guess it does, but I don't really think it is as effective as it could be. I made a few mockups here. Which do you like best?

http://www.kronos-software.com/test/tucows1.gif
http://www.kronos-software.com/test/tucows2.gif
http://www.kronos-software.com/test/tucows3.gif

I think 2 would do a better job than the others. That is the one I'm going to have Tucows use next month.

Yeah 2 is better. 3 does look bland and in 1 the boxart is not as distinct (as seen on a 19" monitor).

Anyway, goodluck and tell us how it goes.

Brian Azzopardi

Originally posted by Dexterity
Most of our marketing budget goes to bribe reviewers (j/k). Actually we did try some features on the main Tucows games page about a year ago (for somewhere around $350 or $450 for a week), and they just broke even. I've found the category features more effective, but other people have experienced mixed results with those. It seems to do better if you feature a 5-cow game vs. a 4-cow or lower one though.

We're still experimenting quite a bit with our marketing in order to find out what's most effective. Traditionally we put much of our budget into pushing individual games on various web sites, such as buying features on download sites, but now that we have a lot more games, part of the budget is being shifted into marketing the site as a whole, such as advertising on pay-per-click search engines.

Paying for advertising is actually one of the least effective forms of marketing, and we haven't found any holy grails there. As there are 3 primary ways to increase business (attract new customers, motivate existing customers to buy more frequently, and increase the size of the average sale), much of our focus has been spent on the 2nd and 3rd methods. Thus, as we continue to attract new customers, we're now doing a better job of turning them into long-term repeat customers. As a result we can afford to spend more to attract each new customer because on average, we can expect each one to buy more than just one game from us.

Having just released Phraze Daze today, we've now released 9 games in the past 16 weeks, all of them launching right on schedule (none were even a day late). Our initial goal was to build up a substantial product line of over a dozen games, and that goal was achieved. So now we're shifting to a period of slightly less frequent releases, focusing more heavily on marketing and promoting those games and the web site as a whole. At the same time we'll be working to further optimize the site's ability to sell, especially in the area of helping games to cross-sell each other.

So in other words, one of the most effective ways we've found to increase sales lies in the area of optimization. Instead of just blindly paying to bring in more visitors to your site, find out what each visitor is worth to you now, and see if you can improve that. It may be more lucrative to find ways to improve your service to your existing traffic and customers than to try to bring in more new traffic (which may not be nearly as qualified). Then try to get additional referrals from your existing traffic. It's relatively cheap and easy to buy more traffic -- it's much harder to buy qualified traffic.

Hi Steve (Dexterity),

"Our initial goal was to build up a substantial product line of over a dozen games, and that goal was achieved. So now we're shifting to a period of slightly less frequent releases, focusing more heavily on marketing and promoting those games and the web site as a whole. At the same time we'll be working to further optimize the site's ability to sell, especially in the area of helping games to cross-sell each other."

How much is "slightly less frequent releases"?
Each month one game or....every three months one game?

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards,
Johnson

We are probably going to be releasing a game every 3 to 4 weeks now, although things are always flexible, and nothing is set in stone.

And regarding marketing, the correct wording (especially in a headline, or when limited to just a few words) can make all the difference in whether someone downloads your game or not. I think the majority of potential customers will not take the time to do more than look at a screen shot (if one is there) and maybe one line of text...if you dont catch thier attention at that point, you probabaly never will...especially on sites with a lot of games on them.
Of course thats easy to say, and VERY hard to do...I have spent hours sometimes coming up with a single sentence (refining it) until i like the way it looks: putting the maximum amount of information(and hopefully intrigue) into the fewest words. And even than Steve will often tweak it (for the better).

Todd

Todd Chodorow
Producer
Dexterity Software