How to Spot Scammers When Hiring Game Marketing Experts

You’ve reached a point in your game development journey where you realize that marketing is essential, but you lack the time or expertise to handle it yourself. You need to hire someone or an agency to take over your marketing, but you want to avoid hiring the wrong person—or worse, falling victim to a scammer.

Many developers have adopted the mindset that "if someone approaches you about marketing, it’s a scam." 

While it's fair to maintain skepticism about unsolicited marketing offers, this mindset could hold your game’s success back. Comparing the earnings of games that hire marketers to those that don’t reveals a key insight: marketing makes a difference.

• 50% of indie games earn less than $4,000 over their lifetimes, which has a close relationship with 54% of games do no marketing at all.
• 11% of games that make over $200,000 closely correlate with the 9% that pay for professional marketing.

A significant portion of games that don’t hire marketing help still manage decent profits so if developers put in the effort, they can do the marketing themselves. But whoever does the marketing, the data suggests that effective marketing can positively impact overall revenue.

This article is for developers considering hiring marketing help and offers tips to avoid scams.

Look At Their Brand

A company or consultant that engages in marketing should have a brand around them. After all, branding is big part of marketing. By a brand, when something is legitimate, they typically have one or more of these:

• A website to visit to learn more about them.
• Some sort of written content, case studies, or showcases of their knowledge.
• Some sort of social presence.
• People that are the face of the brand.
• Something showing past customers or experiences they have.

Brands take a lot of time and energy to build. Scammers, on the other hand, often create brands that are short-lived or superficial. For example:

• An Upwork account with only recent, all 5-star reviews.
• Social media profiles with minimal engagement (we will cover engagement analysis below).
• A lack of older content or past clients.
• Their content is sparse material with little depth.
• One Perfect Photo, can't research other photos and won't do video calls
• They might avoid associating a recognizable face or name with their brand.

Scammers typically abandon brands quickly due to bans or negative reviews, re-launching under new names to avoid accountability.

Legitimate brands, in contrast, take pride in showcasing their expertise. They invest in creating case studies, blogs, and websites to build trust with potential clients. They often associate real people with their brands, making them more transparent and accountable. Let’s explore two examples of legitimate marketing and gaming professionals:

1. Jordan Brown: Jordan uses a Substack newsletter to share in-depth insights into game marketing. At the time of writing, he has been publishing for over eight months, demonstrating his commitment to building a strong presence. His articles, such as his analysis of the top 50 AAA, AA, and indie games, are comprehensive and well-researched. Additionally, he is easily verifiable through LinkedIn.
2. Rami Ismail: Rami takes a different approach, emphasizing his personal brand. He showcases his experience working with past clients, features a visually appealing website, provides options to book consultations, and shares videos of his public speaking engagements. His extensive body of work and visible online presence make him a trusted name in the industry.

Brands are hard to build, and the two above are building strong brands for themselves. They are not going to risk their brand by scamming people out of money. While yes, ChatGPT can write content, its content is normally subpar, not innovative, and it can’t fake timestamps of when the content was created. Scammers rarely invest this level of effort, especially when it comes to attaching their real names and faces to their work.

Past Clients

It’s perfectly acceptable—and advisable—to ask for references from past clients. This step can help you filter out both scammers and poor performers. Keep in mind that client relationships can fail for various reasons unrelated to scams, such as:

• Misaligned expectations.
• Poor game quality, making it difficult to market.
• Difficult clients or unforeseen challenges.

Even so, legitimate consultants should be able to provide examples of successful outcomes, whether through references or detailed case studies. When speaking to references, ensure they are associated with real, verifiable games—not fabricated ones.

For newer organizations, they might not have a long client list and can just be beginning, especially if they are trying to break out from a job into consulting or an agency. In addition to looking at their brand, we are going to cover further ways to assess if someone or an agency is legitimate.

There is an upside to working with new consultants and agencies trying to build a name for themselves; you can often cut deals which is great for budget strapped indie developers, and they are likely to give you a lot of personal attention to create the best outcomes possible.

Analyzing Their Content

Next up, you might have the opportunity to examine the content they produce. This is important not only for agencies and consultants but also extremely important when analyzing influencers who can also be scammers.

The problem with content metrics is they can be deceiving, as followers, likes, and views can be purchased. But faking it can become expensive to buy for all interactions on a social account over a long period and is not sustainable. To understand how to spot potential scams, you have to look at organic reach, engagement rate across multiple past content they have created.

Organic reach is the percentage of followers who see a post without paid promotion in relation to the followers size. To calculate organic reach, the formula for a piece of content is:(impressions/total followers) * 100.

Typically, organic reach can be as low as 1% to as high as 15%. When they have a lot of bought followers, organic reach will be low. For example, they might have 1,000,000 followers, but the average post only gets 1,000 views. When this happens consistently, it’s a potential red flag of fake followers or producing a lot of poor content.

Then we have the engagement rate, which is the percentage of people that engage with the content in comparison to the amount of people that viewed it. The formula to calculate the engagement rate is:(likes + shares + comments, etc./impressions) * 100.

Now, the average engagement rate is anywhere from 1% to 5%, depending on the social platform. Like low organic reach, a low engagement rate is a sign of potential fake followers or producing poor content.

Lastly, content has a natural progression. One of the things our social media scheduler provides is the ability to track content over time. Look at the three charts below and the progression of views, reach, and the regression of engagement over a period of time.

The changes in the graphs are gradual, and the progression, reach, and engagement rate graphs all seem to mirror each other. If content has sudden spikes in it or the graphs seem misaligned, be wary that fake views or fake engagement might be at play - though not always.

Watch How They Engage With You And Be Wary Of Perfect Results

When you hire a consultant, you should never pay them everything upfront. Deposits are typically normal to show your commitment to them, and you should set up payment timelines with a consultant. Agencies often take a retainers.

One of the things that is tricky with marketing is payment on performance milestones. The process of marketing, like development, is figuring things out with both the content and the strategy. Unless the consultant is given a plan that is already actively working, every game has a different unique selling proposition targeted at a different audience, which requires:

• See which hashtags work the best
• Which social platforms have the best reception and what are the conversion rates from platform
• What regions in the world is your audience coming from
• What kinds of content best suits the game
• A lot of other considerations to optimize marketing

When you combine both content creation and strategy optimization, this process should take about a month, and from there, you can start to understand what the process of growth will look like. During this time, they should be communicating with you on both successes and failures. By the end of this process, you both should have a clear understanding of the audience, how to reach them, with statistical data to support the reasoning.

When dealing with a scammer, they will give you very little to no insight into this process and just produce a result. The post suddenly got 50k views, or you suddenly got 1,000 wishlists. And they always seem to hit the mark on results. Be wary of this. You want to have full access to and explanations for everything being done.

The worst kind of scammer to be wary of is the wishlist scammer, where you get fake wishlist sign-ups. These have the most harmful effect, because they do not convert to expected 30% sales on wishlists. This can lead to the game developer making bad decisions about their potential earnings that will not convert.

Navigating Game Marketing with Confidence

Hiring the right marketing professional or agency can be a transformative step in your game development journey, bridging the gap between a great game and an engaged audience. While skepticism is essential to avoid scams, dismissing all marketing opportunities outright can hinder your success. The data is clear: effective marketing can significantly boost your game’s revenue.

To make informed decisions, focus on analyzing the legitimacy of brands, checking past client references, evaluating content metrics, and monitoring their engagement process. Remember, legitimate marketers will prioritize transparency, showcase a proven track record, and provide you with actionable insights, not just perfect results.

By taking these steps, you can confidently partner with marketing professionals who align with your vision, driving your game's visibility and ensuring long-term success. Marketing isn’t just an expense—it’s an investment in your game’s future.