Zero Budget VIDEO GAME MARKETING // 5 Useful Tips for YouTube Marketing
151Getting YouTubers and streamers to play your game is the best way to market an indie game. At least that's what I think. And best of all, it's a form of video game marketing that can easily be done with a zero dollar budget. In this video I will share 5 useful tips to get the most out of working with creators.
How to find creators:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukw_vTFjSDo
How to approach creators:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e85UCTb3Fak
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0:00 Intro
1:12 Follow-up email
After you have sent your first batch of emails to creators and a week or two has passed, you should try sending a follow-up email to those that haven’t replied to you. Something like “hey, just a quick reminder that my game is coming out soon”. Most people haven’t replied to you because they are busy and not interested, but there can always be some who either forgot to reply to you or completely missed your first email.
But there is definitely a balancing act involved with follow-up emails. Afterall, you don’t want to needlessly spam people. Follow-up emails are a very familiar subject in the marketing world so if you don’t know how to approach the subject, you can find a lot of information by googling.
2:46 Reach out to international audiences
Did you know that only 39% of Steam’s audience has English set as their language? You should not forget the potential of international audiences, especially if your game is localized and supports other languages.
YouTube is popular in many non-English speaking countries also. You can try finding creators from other nationalities for example by translating your keywords into other languages and seeing if they bring up any results. Genre words are usually good keywords for this.
But YouTube is not popular in every country. For example ordinary Chinese people don’t use YouTube for various reasons. Instead they use sites like Bilibili or Douyu. If you are targeting a specific nationality, do a quick google search to see if they use YouTube or some other similar sites.
4:21 Get your game visible on Twitch
If you want your game to show up as a streaming category on twitch, you will need to add your game to IGDB.com, which is a public game database operated by Twitch.
For a long time Twitch used a site called Giantbomb to get game details, but it seems they have quite recently switched to using IGDB. So if you see someone telling you to add your game to Giantbomb for this purpose, know that that is old information.
While we are on the topic of Twitch, I also wanted to mention that in case you didn’t know, you can also build a twitch integration in your game to enable additional features for streamers and their fans - like viewer voting and loot drops.
5:50 Avoiding scammers
Once your game is out, you will start getting emails requesting review keys for your game. Sometimes it’s a big youtuber, sometimes it’s a big twitch streamer and sometimes it’s a big curator group on Steam. At least 90% of these are scams. So if PewDiePie sends you an email, pleading for a review copy, don’t get too excited just yet. Many times they will have an email address that is similar to an actual email address used by a creator or then they will just claim to be someone who doesn’t have a contact detail easily available on their channel.
7:02 Make it easy for the creator
This is a general tip that applies to many different things. I consider it to be one of the most important things that you should internalize. In general, when you are wondering how to approach a subject where you need to work with another person, think: how can you make it as easy as you can for the other person.
The creator shouldn’t have to spend time replying to you just to ask some basic question. Put yourself in the shoes of a busy creator. How would you want to be approached if you were busy and got tens or hundreds of emails every day? Are you able to modify your own approach somehow to make it easier for the creator?
All this applies to approaching journalists also by the way. Additionally with journalists you might also want to provide them with pre-written snippets about your game so they will have an easier time writing their own article if they choose to do so. If they have 5 other articles to write that day, they will welcome any viable shortcuts presented to them.
The general concept of this tip applies to many other things in life also. The easier you make things for others and the easier you are to work with, the likelier it is that others will want to work with you.