One of the basic ways to market a product is to list some of the features and benefits. Some key points to remember when you're trying to generate those for your product:
1) Know the difference. A feature is some aspect or attribute of your product; the benefit should be the reason it matters to the potential buyer. Your product may have many features that your potential buyers don't care about, and thus you shouldn't bother to list them. (My favorite feature listed on a product was "Four-color box"... which was good for a laugh but had nothing to do with why I might have bought the product.)
2) Keep it brief. An exhaustive list of features usually exhausts your target's patience; it can even have a paradoxical effect (gee, if it has so many features it must be complicated... I really want something simpler). A good guideline is to keep your feature/benefit list to 3 items. Your space is probably limited (on a package, a one-screen web page, a flyer) so keeping the list short, and keeping the actual descriptions of the features and the benefits brief, allows you to make them bigger and more visible, or to put in other elements that you also want in there.
3) Make it compelling. You should select the features and benefits on the basis of how important they are to the potential customer (not to you!), and the words you choose should make them as compelling as possible. Check out some feature/benefits listed for Borderlands on Steam. Here's the first one:
Role Playing Shooter (RPS) - combines frantic first-person shooting action with accessible role-playing character progression
So they list a game feature, briefly and in bold, and then explain the benefit to the potential buyer. It does assume that the buyer understands character progression and why it's desirable, but that's reasonable given the customer demographics.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Post-Halloween Scares
Now, it sure does look pretty, and there are supposed to be about 1,000 cars averaging 400,000 polygons apiece, and more than 70 tracks... but (just thinking out loud here) wouldn't it make more sense to do a small fraction of that amount, get it out the door in a year (instead of three or four), and charge $20? And then sell additional cars, tracks, and so forth? At least you'd know whether it was worth spending more on development before you spent $60 million.
Marketing can do a lot, but it's asking a bit much to rescue profitability when product development's left reasonable about three exits back.
iPhone Games: That Bumblebee Can't Possibly Fly
There's an interesting commentary by Jesse Divnich over on IndustryGamers.com. Mr. Divnich is an analyst with EEDAR (Electronic Entertainment Design and Research), which provides business intelligence and research. In this commentary Mr. Divnich shares his reasoning as to why the iPhone can't succeed as a serious games platform.
He offers some good points, like how iPhone software prices are too low to make any money for developers, the environment's too competitive, the size of the market isn't really as big as Apple claims (because older versions of the iPhone/iPod Touch shouldn't count), etc. All very persuasive... if it weren't for the fact that the damn bumblee does indeed fly.
Look, on the IndustryGamers site on the same day, here's an article about how Gameloft sales are up 18% in nine months due to the App Store. And Zynga, ngmoco, and other big developers are posting big gains due to their expanding iPhone sales. Oops.
“Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.” -- Thomas Henry Huxley
Yeah, marketing's like that, too.
He offers some good points, like how iPhone software prices are too low to make any money for developers, the environment's too competitive, the size of the market isn't really as big as Apple claims (because older versions of the iPhone/iPod Touch shouldn't count), etc. All very persuasive... if it weren't for the fact that the damn bumblee does indeed fly.
Look, on the IndustryGamers site on the same day, here's an article about how Gameloft sales are up 18% in nine months due to the App Store. And Zynga, ngmoco, and other big developers are posting big gains due to their expanding iPhone sales. Oops.
“Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.” -- Thomas Henry Huxley
Yeah, marketing's like that, too.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
For Effective Advertising, "Use Quotes"
I'll use the launch of this immense RPG to make a point about good advertising. One of the things that attracts your eyes in an ad is a quote, as you can see on the front page of Steam where the Dragon Age Origins graphic includes this quote: "Dragon Age is the RPG of the decade" from PC Gamer UK. Now, this may or may not be true... but it certainly catches your eye. And it provides some verification of the game's goodness from an independent source. Whatever the truth of the claim, or what you think of the magazine, or magazine reviews in general, it's certainly true that not every game gets a quote like this. Quotes and awards should be used as extensively as possible in ads, because they attract attention and create more desire for learning more about the game and for buying it.
In the book trade, quotes are used extensively. Authors trade them with each other, there are many reviewers to quote from, and you'll see these quotes on the cover, on the back cover, inside the covers, and sometimes even whole pages are devoted to quotes. Does this liberal use of quoting diminish their effect. Yes, perhaps a bit... but the overall effect is still hugely positive even though quoting (blurbing, in book trade parlance) is far more widespread than in the gaming business.
"Quotes are a powerful advertising tool," said Steve Peterson. And feel free to quote me on that.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Friendsourcing
An interesting article in the New York Times this morning on new ways to find iPhone Apps. While the article is focusing on one product that offers to help find new Apps (by showing you what your friends like), this is symptomatic of the larger problem: The App Store sucks for finding new Apps unless you already know exactly what you want. Even then it might be difficult... witness the plethora of new e-book Apps and how they are flooding the App Store with titles. Search for Treasure Island and you'll find a dozen copies, all in different e-book readers as companies vie to get you to use their reader. After all, the novel is public domain now, so it's no cost to them. However, the users are getting flooded out by the waves of titles. It's starting to look like the Atari VCS market just before the crash. Now, I'm not saying Apple has to start exerting quality control... but they have to put more effort into making the App Store (and the approval process, by all accounts) better. Right now, they're a victim of their own success. And we're collateral damage. This problem is shared by any online store with a lot of products (hello, DriveThru RPG and Amazon), but others have provided better tools. Apple should take some of that expertise in interface design and apply it to the App Store, and soon.
The High Concept
This is the foundation of your product... the phrase or short sentence that tells someone what your product is in a brief and memorable way. Ideally it also creates an urge to buy or at least see the product, and also incorporates the key advantages of your product. That's a lot to ask for a phrase or a sentence! A good example for me has always been the two-word pitch for a software title that got funded at Electronic Arts, back in the day... "Indiana Cousteau." You knew it was a game set underwater that involved an intrepid archeologist hunting for treasure, with lots of action... all from two words. (What was the title? Heck, I can't even remember it, beyond that it was for the Amiga... but the high concept lives on for me.)
Why is such a phrase useful? Several reasons. Most important, perhaps, is that it serves to focus your marketing efforts. All of your efforts should be in support of that high concept. Many times, your product will have lots of cool features, and plenty of good reasons why someone might buy it, and numerous benefits... but if you can't unify those things under one banner, your marketing will be confused, confusing, and less effective.
Another good reason for an effective high concept is that most of the world thinks in such sound bites. Now, as a game's creator, you can probably describe it in loving detail for hours (or until your audience falls asleep or discovers something else really important they need to do right away). Let's say that you can succeed every time in explaining your complex, unusual, one-of-a-kind game to someone else, as long as you have ten minutes to make the pitch. You have failed in the larger sense, because I guarantee you that once the target of your explanation wanders away, and someone else asks them what it is Your Game is about, that whole impassioned ten-minute presentation will disappear. Instead, your audience member will answer "Oh, it's blah blah blah." In other words, they'll come up with their own short phrase or sentence to describe your product, neatly compressing your ten-minute presentation into a few seconds. And I can also pretty much guarantee you that you would not be happy with whatever phrase they come up with; it will fail in some way to describe the awesomeness that is Your Game.
This scenario will happen again and again... when a retailer asks a distributor about the product, when a customer asks a retailer about the product, whenever somebody not you is asked about Your Game, it'll be described in a brief way. So if you want that brief description to be as accurate as possible, and to create a strong desire to buy your product, you should be the one to create the memorable high concept phrase.
And if your game doesn't lend itself to a strong high concept, maybe that's a sign the game itself needs some additional oomph.
Why is such a phrase useful? Several reasons. Most important, perhaps, is that it serves to focus your marketing efforts. All of your efforts should be in support of that high concept. Many times, your product will have lots of cool features, and plenty of good reasons why someone might buy it, and numerous benefits... but if you can't unify those things under one banner, your marketing will be confused, confusing, and less effective.
Another good reason for an effective high concept is that most of the world thinks in such sound bites. Now, as a game's creator, you can probably describe it in loving detail for hours (or until your audience falls asleep or discovers something else really important they need to do right away). Let's say that you can succeed every time in explaining your complex, unusual, one-of-a-kind game to someone else, as long as you have ten minutes to make the pitch. You have failed in the larger sense, because I guarantee you that once the target of your explanation wanders away, and someone else asks them what it is Your Game is about, that whole impassioned ten-minute presentation will disappear. Instead, your audience member will answer "Oh, it's blah blah blah." In other words, they'll come up with their own short phrase or sentence to describe your product, neatly compressing your ten-minute presentation into a few seconds. And I can also pretty much guarantee you that you would not be happy with whatever phrase they come up with; it will fail in some way to describe the awesomeness that is Your Game.
This scenario will happen again and again... when a retailer asks a distributor about the product, when a customer asks a retailer about the product, whenever somebody not you is asked about Your Game, it'll be described in a brief way. So if you want that brief description to be as accurate as possible, and to create a strong desire to buy your product, you should be the one to create the memorable high concept phrase.
And if your game doesn't lend itself to a strong high concept, maybe that's a sign the game itself needs some additional oomph.
Monday, November 2, 2009
3 Ways to Track the Wild Marketing Dollar
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted;the trouble is I don't know which half."
John Wanamaker, 1838-1922Before embarking on any marketing spending, you should try to determine how you're going to track the results. Tracking can be difficult, but it's worth the effort to guide your marketing spending in the future. Here are some thoughts on how to track results.
1) Search advertising. Why has Google has become so huge? Because when you spend money on advertising through them, you can see exactly how much it does (or doesn't) pay off for you, and adjust your advertising accordingly. You buy an ad for a search term... a user clicks on your ad, goes to your web site... and some of them buy products from your online store. You get all the information on how much you spent per visitor, and you know how many sales you made in that time period and how much profit you made per sale. A few clicks of the calculator and you know whether you want to do more of that advertising or not. If only all marketing tracking was that simple.
2) Landing pages. Perhaps you're planning to put an ad in a magazine, or buy some banner ad placements on a web site. Send those viewers not to your home page, but to a special landing page. Then you will know how many of the visitors you receive in a month were driven to your site specifically by that one marketing effort. And you should be able to track the percentage of those visitors you converted to a sale; give them a special offer (for instance, free downloadable content with your purchase) so you can track that redemption. At the end of the promotional period, you can look at your cost for the ad or banner buy and see how much you made in sales from the promotion.
3) Non-internet tracking. Let's say you're going to a convention and you want to see how many sales you can generate by having flyers handed out to convention-goers. How do you track that? Put an offer in the flyer, either leading to a special landing page on your web site (see #2 above), or if you have a booth at the convention, a Show Special offer redeemable with that coupon only. (This can be a discount, or a poster, or a signature by the author, or even downloadable content.) At the end of the show, count up the number of coupons that were redeemed. You should know how much the flyers cost you, and the cost of your promotional offer, and if you had to spend anything to have someone pass out the flyers. A little math and you'll soon know if you want to try that again.
These are just a few of the ways to track your marketing spending and what it's bringing you. A word of caution, though. Just because you didn't make money the first time you try one of these marketing efforts doesn't mean you shouldn't ever do it again. Perhaps you need to fine-tune the offer, or the placement, or maybe the timing. Sometimes these promotions can have other benefits, perhaps bringing you some PR value or helping with your product positioning. Sometimes the benefits can last beyond your promotional period. Make sure you analyze the promotion before you proceed.
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