How to Plan a Last-Minute Marketing Campaign for Your Game

After blood, sweat, tears, lost weekends, sleepless nights, and lots of Red Bull have gone into the making of your game, it’s time to launch your game. Except with all the development, marketing has gone to the wayside and you barely have any wishlists for your game. So what do you do now?

If you are not close to 10k wishlists, stop! Move your hand away from the big red button and step back from the control panel.

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is you should have been marketing your game over a year ago while you were in development. The good news is there is still time to salvage the situation because you haven’t launched. Unless there is an absolute pressing need for you to launch now, strategize first.

At Glitch, we focus entirely on game marketing with our clients typically seeing between 30 to 200 organic wishlist additions a day. In this article, we are going to discuss how you can do last-minute marketing of your game if you have neglected it during the development process. This will start with organic strategies and work into paid strategies; do not start with paid promotion first.

Set Your Launch Back At Least 3 Months

First, change your launch date back by at least 3 months, maybe more. Be warned! On platforms like Steam, if you’ve crossed certain thresholds like the 2 weeks until launch and you change your launch date, you will not be promoted again on Steam's upcoming games page.

The process of establishing a brand and building momentum for a launch should take about 3 months. We need to figure out your audience, what kind of content they like to engage with, and create a cadence. “Warming up” your socials will help you reach more people when you announce your launch.

The reason why we are targeting close to 10k wishlists is because that is typically when network effects start to take place, meaning enough users are converting, which triggers certain algorithms to organically promote your game.

Stage 1 - Brand Development

First, you are going to build cohesive brands, and you are going to need all your marketing assets. This will include an avatar that represents your game, a banner image, an outro video of your game, and a watermark. Then create a series of descriptions about your game: 80 characters, 300 characters, and a full paragraph description. And finally, a tagline. Basically, build a mediakit for your game.

Now create the social media accounts that you want to use: YouTube, TikTok (if it’s not banned – at the time of writing), X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even Reddit. Make sure that each account utilizes the branding content you create above to establish consistency in visuals and messaging. And then link each of them together with a linking website like LinkTree.

Now you have a consistent brand together where people who research your game will have a recognizable experience across all your media assets. Next, you need to think about posting to all your social properties.

Stage 2 - Building a Content Calendar

To set expectations, you will have to post a lot of content. At minimum 3 times a week, but ideally 5 times a week for each platform. The biggest mistake we see developers make is to give up posting after a few posts and under a week. Now you want to set up a content calendar with different kinds of content.

There are a variety of content types that you can utilize to get a diverse audience engagement:

• Trailers: Action-packed trailers that show the best images of the game. While highly engaging, they are expensive to produce on a consistent basis.
• Devlogs: We don’t mean in-depth explanations of deep developer insights; the best devlogs are videos under 1 minute that show you making something quickly. Think of “behind the scenes” in a movie where they might show the brief making of a stunt, but with development here.
• Artwork: Showcase your game’s artwork and cool images that have an allure with some audiences.
• Before and After: If you have old assets that were touched up, you can combine how they were to their final versions. Again, under 1-minute videos or images.
• Gameplay: Show some of the highlight scenes from the game.
• Team Interviews: Have interviews with various members of your team talking about the game.
• Fan Videos: If you’ve given out early access to fans or content creators and they have created some content, you can chop it up to use their content.
• Positive Testimonials: If you have positive testimonials left, you can screenshot them and use them to promote your game.

Try to produce at least 30 different pieces of different types, and then decide on a day to post each piece of content. Remember how we had the watermark and the outro video with your game’s brand in the above section? To each piece of content, add these. One of the biggest mistakes developers make is not having any branding on their content to correctly inform interested players what their game is. Glitch’s social scheduler has the ability to auto-brand content as it's posted so you don't forget. See the branding example below:

At most, you should only post about one piece of content a day, maybe two. If you are worried about spamming an audience, don’t. We highlighted in this article why posting a lot will not come across as spam.

Stage 3 - Post Your Content

Stages 1 and 2, with both establishing a brand and its assets, drafting a content calendar and creating the content, may take anywhere from a week to 3 weeks. This is why we said push your launch back at least 3 months because marketing will take time, especially if you want quality marketing efforts.

When posting your content, you want to:

• Learn the best formatting for each social platform
• Understand how the hashtag works for each platform
• Collect and analyze the data from each platform
• Run tests multiple times to make sure you are not getting false positives or negatives

If you post 3 times a week and you use 5 different platforms, that ends up being 15 posts a week, at minimum. Remember, it’s suggested at this stage that you post 5 times a week for each platform, or 25 posts a week.

There is both an easy way and a hard way to do the posting. The hard way is to sign in to each platform, schedule content out yourself, and then collect the data manually. Afterwards put everything in an Excel sheet to generate reports later. While this approach is doable, it will start to feel like a full-time job.

The easy way is to use a marketing automation tool that can automate the posting and centralize all the data in one place. Tools exist for that.

• Glitch’s Social Scheduler: We have an automation and data analytics tool specifically designed for gaming, that not only formats the content for each platform but also integrates with Steam and Itch.

• Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management tool that brings scheduling, content creation, analytics, and social listening to one place.
• BufferApp: Buffer is a software application for the web and mobile, designed to manage accounts in social networks, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn

The trade-off for paying for a tool is the time you save. Pick what you value more: time or saving money. Once you start posting, remember it is imperative that you record your data. Your data will be critical for understanding your performance, as discussed in the next stage.

Stage 4: Analyzing Your Data

Make sure you keep posting for at least one month, testing out different content types, hashtags, times of day, etc. It is recommended that you do at least 5 of each type to start to see patterns emerge. Now we have to analyze the data. We want to know:

• Your follower growth
• Organic Reach
• Engagement Reach
• Wishlist Conversions

First, measure your follower growth: what was it when you started to where it is now? Your follower growth is what is going to help first figure out what your organic reach is. Organic reach is the percentage of people your content reaches without paid promotion. The formula is simple: (impressions on content / follower count) * 100.

When you reach is good, depending on the platform you will get between 2% to 15% of your total follower size.

The impressions are important because it is your ability to raise awareness; people have to be aware that your game exists to even know they can buy it. Look at the chart below on the number of impressions you need for a certain amount of wishlists.

Then we can switch over to the engagement rate. Engagement rate measures if people like the content you are producing. It is calculated by:(comments + likes + shares, etc.) / impressions * 100

The higher the engagement rate, the more it means people like the content you are producing. Above 2% is typically a good number. You should be looking at what kind of content produced the highest engagement rates and consider how to produce more of it.

Finally, we need to see how all of your efforts are converting into wishlists. Go to your Steam page for unique visits for the time frame you were promoting your content. Then also find the number of wishlist additions you had during that time. The formula for determining this conversion rate is: (wishlists / unique visits) * 100.

If your conversion rate for the wishlist is 5% to 15%, you are in good shape. If it’s below that, you might not have optimized your game’s landing page. Make sure that you have a good trailer followed by other media. Have your text be clear, compelling, and well organized. Avoid large blocks of boring text and break it up with media. While Steam provides a fairly uniform setup, Itch gives developers “enough rope to hang themselves,” where landing page design can sometimes be a turnoff.

We have now learned how to calculate the most important numbers. This process should take you between 1 - 2 months to put together the assets, create and post content, and analyze all the results. Take all of this data and let’s get into the next stage.

Stage 5: Deciding On Next Steps

We have now reached the stage where we have the beginnings of enough data to know what our growth rate will be on certain plains, what kind of content our audience likes, how many impressions we are able to generate in a time frame, and how this all converts to wishlist additions.

For example, if you know that your gameplay videos generate 10,000 views a month across all your social platforms, 4,000 of those go to your game’s landing page, and 15% of them convert into wishlist additions, that’s 600 wishlists a month. In 3 months, you will have 1,800 wishlist additions. Factor in the continual growth as well for more wishlists. It also should be noted, during this time, you should also be doing other free activities like entering your game in showcases like NextFest.

You will be at the point where you will need to decide a few things:

• Continue Growing: If there is no rush to launch, you can always opt to continue growing. At your current growth rate, how long will it take you to get the number of wishlists you want to launch with?
• Paid Advertising & Influencers: If you have identified the content that converts best, paid advertising can now become a viable option because you will know how the money you spend converts. This is also the point where you can engage with influencers as well, with your new understanding.
• Launch: If you were doing your posts, your social media should be “warmed up.” You may feel you have done enough work; now you can just launch your game.

The bottom line is, the decisions you are making at this point should be data-driven and designed to best align with your vision and objectives.