4 Least Expensive Ways to Market Your Indie Games

Maintaining return on investment is one of the crucial aspects of most Indie games. They cannot afford to make a significant investment in marketing, but the continuous player acquisition is crucial for making profits. This requires striking a balance between the choice of marketing avenues and the marketing budget.

In this, their most significant ally of Indie games are all those least expensive channels and zero-cost marketing tricks that deliver great output. Thanks to their effectiveness, even any conventional Game development company are after these low budget avenues.

Let us explain some of the avenues and channels that you can use to market your Indie games with zero budgets.

Social Media game promotion

There is no other marketing avenue so omnipresent and dominating today as the social media channels. They come almost free and zero-cost and only involves some negligible cost only when you use rigorous tools and scale up your reach to the target audience. To decide the most effective channel for your indie game you can either evaluate each one of them by trying one by one or learn from the examples of fellow indie games of similar gaming experience.

To make the job further easier and effortless you can also use some automation tools as well. As for contents, you should mostly share game video, screenshots, images and graphics description offering a look and feel of the game. Let us have a look at the three most popular social platforms that are used widely for social media game promotion.

• Facebook invariably comes as the top choice to drive traffic on the merit of content engagement and without spending a dime. The most trusted way to drive traction on this platform is to share game videos or YouTube links in niche groups of game-playing audience. As you get going, you can start with Facebook ads to reach a wider audience. Facebook ads start its pricing from just $1/day, and it allows you to grow your marketing budget as you continue getting results over time.
• Twitter can be used to reach out to the game development community and establish your brand. The best thing about this platform is, most of the activities on this platform can be automated with a tool.
• Instagram is one of the ideal platforms for game marketers as the platform offers a bounty of hashtag options. The visual media relating to your game enjoy better focus in niche Instagram groups than elsewhere.

Create a short trailer

Do you know passive game watching is one of the favourite pastimes for many kids than actually playing it? Well, this is why game videos on YouTube and other platforms go viral so often drawing millions of views in few days. This is why reaching your audience with a short and well-presented game trailer is more important than describing it in words and screenshots. The game trailer is the best way to create a quick first impression of your game.

Here are some useful tips on creating trailers for your game app.

• First of all, make it short and expressive to offer the look and feel of your game in an engaging manner.
• Secondly, always make use of real footage of the game app to deliver the true feel of the game-playing experience.
• Always avoid repetition of game scenes as this leads to loss of interest.
• An intriguing trailer always builds up the tempo slowly over time.
• Always present the game title and company name twice in the trailer, preferably once within three screens in the beginning and at last. This will help watchers remember the game and your brand.

Make a dashing press release

A press release is a well-known way to reach media and create buzz when you are releasing your game. But most press releases just do not make a mark simply because they are not enough optimised for grabbing the attention of the journalists and media person. Do you want to know how to make press releases that drive quick traction? Well, consider the following ways.

• Your press release needs a punchy headline that describes at a glance what it is about.
• Make use of subhead to explain the information in the title in brief.
• Use a line or two to deliver some basic information about your business, location, and the date.
• Start the lead paragraph of your press release article with an engaging sentence that can compel readers to read on further. Most press releases are not read beyond the first line, and people are always expert in making guesses and so, make your appeal clear in the first sentence itself.
• Just like any quality-written article always address five questions like what, where, when, why, who concerning your new app.
• In between the write-up use quotes of your developer, visionary company leader who gave birth to the game concept and quotes from industry specialists. Quotes are used to build credibility for your claims.
• Provide a clear call to action. Provide a link to the game app page of the App Store or Play Store or the press kit unleashed by the developer company.
• In the end, never forget to provide your contact information to build credibility and to open a chance of user interaction.

Create an engaging landing page for the indie game

Finally, just by creating a great looking landing page you can push player engagement further and boost the outcome. From writing an engaging copy like the descriptive and quickly attention-grabbing heading, a subhead explaining the title and lead text explaining the benefits, the ground principles of good marketing copy will be same.

But you can further boost traction with your landing page by incorporating interesting game video, game screenshots and variations in fonts to prioritise actions. In the end, offer a very clearly defined Call to Action button to allow users take positive actions like going to the app download page or just having a positive first impression of the game.