We have a great product in FlickFleet.
It has loads of fans.
People love it when they are introduced to it at conventions.
But our ads perform pretty poorly.
I've tried something new this week.
15 second videos of the game.
It's way more successful at driving traffic to our website.
But not helping with sales at all.
I really wish I had the time to work out how to do advertising right - I'm sure we could do much better!
Marketing is not my forte.
I’m still learning a lot.
Doing things for the first time.
Badly.
But I learn.
And slowly, I hope to get better.
We’re running ads ahead of our next Kickstarter for the first time.
Pointing to our first ever dedicated landing page.
Needs work
It’s not very good.
So I’ll improve it.
Expectations are low for this Kickstarter again.
So we can use it as a learning opportunity.
And hopefully get better.
For the next one...
Aside: I'm on holiday at the moment. I've posted this automatically and I'll respond to comments on my return.
Back to the matter at hand. 'I need to buy this game!' is how the exposition for a game should make you feel. The exposition of a game is what I'm calling the short description of the setting and mechanics that you use to summarise a game.
When I ran Reiver Games I used the exposition for many purposes:
If I decide to KickStart it, the exposition would be the first paragraph of the KickStarter page too.
Clearly, it's important. I've agonised over the exact wording of each of my games' expositions. They've been through several drafts trying to get them to a honed sharpness of hook. The exposition should leave you thinking:
That sounds fricken' awesome! I need that game. So badly that I'm willing to sell my family to fund its purchase.
Writing them is very hard. I'm not a copy-writer, or a master wordsmith. I'm just a software engineer and occasional board game designer. Moulding the English language to my will does not come naturally. I did an average job on the Reiver Games ones (scroll down a bit in the links below to read the Description sections):
They're functional, but not particularly exciting. They didn't work very well either. The number of you who sold your families to buy the games was considerably less than the number of games I bought from the manufacturers.
For Codename: Vacuum, I've got an early draft that tries to cover the steampunk to sci-fi transition and the deck-building nature of the game. But it's not very exciting yet:
It’s 1897 and the discovery of the anti-gravity metal Cavorite has the world powers are poised on the edge of a Space Race to claim the Solar System. Lead your nation to victory by building a deck of strategy cards that will shape your empire for 300 years. What will be the defining features of humanity at the dawn of the 23rd century? Conquest? Exploration? Reproduction? Greed? Technology? Choose a strategy. Advance your technologies. Race to ensure your choice is scored.
Upon reading that, I'm decidely meh. My family are safe. Needs some work methinks!
I've been running this blog since February 2006 when I started to gear up towards self-publishing my first game: Border Reivers. Since then, I (and my fellow bloggers during the community blog phase) have notched up over 650 posts.
However, I've only got blogger analytics stats going back to early 2008. During those four years, the blog has had around 2,000 page views a month on average. Recently it's been lower than that (there was a year or so during which I only posted twice, after the death of Reiver Games) and once it got as high as 3,400 hits in a month (when, bizarrely, www.microsoft.ca linked to it!). My posts have generally been fairly quiet: only three have broken 500 page views with one (linked by Microsoft!) over 3,000 views.
Since I can only assume the Microsoft thingy was a typo on their site, I never imagined I'd be getting back to those heady heights of popularity again, my goal for last month was to hit the 1,800 views that I'd had the month before and to try to post weekly. Then I wrote this post about what worked and what didn't with Reiver Games. It's fairly innocuous, I think you'll agree, but W. Eric Martin felt it was worth of a link on the Board Game News section of BoardGameGeek. Off the back of that link I had 500 (yes 500!) views of that page in a single day, shunting it immediately into my top three posts of all time. The month was looking pretty good too, with nearly a thousand views in the first few days.
But that was nothing. Someone decided they liked it enough to post it to the Reddit sub-reddit on board games the next day. That day I got over 2,000 views on that one page, almost all of them coming from Reddit. That page is now firmly ensconced in second place among my most popular posts and last month leapt to my most popular month of all time with 4,700 views.
When I started this blog it was to publicise Border Reivers, and then after the community phase I ran as a marketing tool for Reiver Games. In neither capacity was it particularly successful, but I'm still learning what it takes to attract traffic. Of course, now I'm not using it for anything really, more as a vanity project to record my new design efforts and to (hopefully) provide useful information for people who are considering or have just started setting up a publishing company. I've not got anything to sell or a company of my own to promote.
Getting links from the likes of Reddit can really transform the reach of your blog (if only for the one post that was posted to Reddit), so if I was trying to sell something, getting the attention of Reddit would be something I'd be trying hard to push.
Clearly, this is an anomaly, and my page views will be back to a pedestrian 2,000 or so a month from now on, but I hope some people who found the blog through BGN or Reddit liked it enough to carry on reading...
As I've mentioned before, there are basically four links in the retail chain: manufacturer (that's me!), distributor, shop and customer. Ideally what you want is to get your product to the customer as quickly as possible.
It's possible to skip steps, either by selling directly to the customer (via your website or at a convention for example), or directly to shops, but you'll never hit the big time doing that unless you have an extremely popular website.
What you want to do is get your game carried by most shops. Most shops won't want to order enough copies of a game to make it worth your while selling to them directly, in addition, they want the convenience of dealing with a single supplier (or two) for all the products they carry, rather than dealing with hundreds of manufacturers. So you want distributors to carry your products.
Distributors will either pay you when you invoice them for an order or when they sell to a shop (if the games are 'on consignment'). If they pay on invoicing, they won't place another order until they've sold the first order to shops, so you want shops to carry your products.
Similarly, shops will only re-order your games if customers buy them, so you need to get customers to want your games.
You will get a little help from one link to the next (distributors will tell the shops that they are carrying your products, shop staff will tell customers that your games are available), but you really need to get your marketing to work on each link in the chain.
I've got a pretty good network of distributors, some of which I've contacted myself, some of which have contacted me and some of which have been asked by their customers (the shops) to carry my games. I've spent some money on online advertising and I occasionally make a fuss on BoardGameGeek to contact customers. In addition, I attend Essen, several UK conventions and I'm currently doing a tour of UK game shops to promote my games to customers.
So the missing link is clearly the shops. I've been thinking for a while about how I can best contact the US shops (there's at least 2,500 of them!), while spending the least amount of money. I've considered paying my distributors to advertise my products to their customers; getting volunteers to demo games in their local stores and now I'm trying something new: email.
Email has the advantage of being free, and simple to do. The downside is that any email I send is going to be to a public email address from a webpage which is likely to be heavily spammed, so my emails might not get through, and if they do they might themselves be considered spam.
I'm currently sending a brief email to every shop I can find out about, introducing myself, my company and my products and asking the shop to consider stocking them. I ask them to let me know if they will start stocking them (or do already), and give them an incentive to reply by offering to list them on my website as a stockist.
In addition to sending the emails, I'm building up a spreadsheet of all the shops I find out about, including their contact details (phone number if I can't find an email address) and whether or not they've replied and are a stockist. I'm using the FLGS of the USA meta-thread on BGG as a starting point to try to find out about the shops.
So how's it going? I've had nine replies so far from about 100 emails. Most of them already carry at least one of my games, two are going to carry them from now on. That seems a pretty good response rate for an email marketing campaign. I'm going to keep it up for a few weeks, and see if it leads to any re-stock orders from my US distributors.
Today and again Tuesday I'll get some information about whether or not the BoardGameGeek competition lead to a boost in sales.
Most of my distributors place a stocking order of 30-90 games and then I don't hear from them again until they've run out and need some more. Since I competition I've had one of those re-orders but to be honest I've no idea whether that was related to the competition or not.
A couple of my distributors have my game on consignment. They place a large order, and then each month they tell me how many games they've sold. I invoice them for those games only, and then they pay me. This allows me to better track how sales are progressing as I have a monthly history with these distributors and I can see any peaks and troughs in their sales. I can charge more for games on consignment too - since by only paying for a game when they've sold it the distributor is getting an improvement to their cash flow and reduce their risk at the expense of my cash flow.
Will the competition have helped sales? I hope so, and judging by BGG ownership stats I think so, but the consignment returns over the next few days should either confirm or deny it.
I read Seth Godin's blog. I recommend it, he posts most days, short pithy posts that make you think. There's a definite marketing bent to his posts, but lots of the stuff he posts is applicable outside the marketing world.
In one of his recent posts he recommended Chris Guillebeau's '279 Days to Overnight Success' a free manifesto explaining what he had done to make it in the social media arena. I found the manifesto pretty interesting, so I popped over to Chris' site to find out more.
One of the things that Chris recommends is recruiting a 'Small Army' of willing volunteers who will help you achieve your goals.
It struck me that I've (without really trying) started to do that - there's a bunch of people out there who have helped me get Reiver Games off the ground, often for little or no compensation. Much of what I have achieved so far is in no small part due to them, so I thought now would be a good time to thank them (in no particular order):
If I've forgotten you from the list I apologise, say hi in the comments and I'll redress the balance.
Want to join my small army? I'd love the help :-) Things you can do:
There are things that you can do that cost money, things that cost time, and things that are almost effortless - do as much or as little as you feel like - any help is appreciated.
That's what my last two days effort is called according to The Wife.
Yesterday I was going into London to meet Philip duBarry (of Revolution fame) for dinner. Seeing as I was spending £25 on the train fair into London I figured I might as well make a day of it and visit a few board game shops hawking my wares. Today I've done something very similar in St. Neots and Cambridge - a bit nearer to home.
In preparation for my visits I first rang the shops to arrange a rough time for my visit and to make sure that they were interested in seeing me. With one exception they all seemed quite keen - I didn't feel too much like a cold-calling salesman, which was effectively what I was. I also got together a small pack of information for each store: a business card, and 'sellsheets' for each of my games (a sheet of A4 with information about the price, some art and the blurb from the back of the box). I stapled this information together so that I wouldn't have to be faffing around when I got there.
For each visit I got the name of the person I spoke to (or should speak to on the day) so that I could ask for them when I reached the shop. I hit five shops in London on Wednesday and three today. On arrival I went up to the desk, introduced myself and asked to speak to the person whose name I had got on the phone. I then handed over the information pack (so they've got something to check after I've left and remind them of the salient points) and then spent 15-20 minutes giving a brief overview of my three games: It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria.
About half of the shops I visited already stocked one or more of my games, the others generally had never heard of them. As a result of the trips all of them were interested in stocking them, though admittedly some only if I acquiesced to their conditions (in some cases ridiculous). Three of the shops are going to pick them up as a result.
Even in the cases where they already carried my games it was often only one of the two (so it was worth it from an awareness raising point of view) and in most cases the staff had only seen the game box, never the contents and knew nothing about how to play the game that wasn't written on the box. Hopefully in these cases the extra information will lead to the staff recommending my games to some of their customers.
In addition, a couple of the shops wanted me to come in one Saturday and demo my games to their customers. This sounds like a great idea, so I'm going to be visiting them for the day to demo my games - like a mini-convention. The shops will advertise it in advance and get some stock in so that interested customers can buy the game there and then.
I consider these visits to be a great success and I'm now trying to work out which other shops are within range of another day trip.
Which was the jingle for an advert in the UK. No idea what it was an advert for though.
So the BoardGameGeek competition seems to be working. Yesterday several people commented how my games were near the top of the BGG Hot Games list, and Reiver Games was the hottest company. Today it's even better. Carpe Astra is the hottest game (with It's Alive! at number 3 and Sumeria at number 7), Yehuda, Dirk, R. H. Aidley and I are in the Hottest people list (though fairly near the bottom!) and Reiver Games is still the hottest games company (just ahead of Fantasy Flight!). As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've been keeping track of the BGG statistics in the run-up to this competition, so I could see what a difference the competition makes. Probably the two most interesting statistics are Owners (i.e. people who have bought the game and can be bothered to record the fact on BGG) and Num. Views (the number of people who have looked at a game). Here's the average increases before and during the competition (though I've only got two days data for during!):
| It's Alive! | Carpe Astra | Sumeria | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Owners | Num. Views | Owners | Num. Views | Owners | Num. Views | |
| Before | 0.69 | 42.67 | 0.23 | 38.00 | 0.00 | 28.83 |
| During | 0.50 | 1167.00 | 2.00 | 2395.50 | 0.00 | 558.50 |
The number of daily views for each game has increased by between 19 and 63 times (1900% and 6300%). I wouldn't expect a spike in owners buying each day yet, as I imagine people will wait to see if they've won the competition first. Fingers crossed I'll notice a boost in sales within a month though.
Now that the layout for Sumeria is almost done, I've got some time on my hands. What to do with it?
What I need to do most of all is bring my games to the attention of more people. I've got the BoardGameGeek competition coming up, and I'm going to advertise on Spielbox, but advertising costs money and I can't afford to do a lot of that. I need to save up some money so that I've got enough cash to pay for Sumeria when it arrives. So what can I do that's free to raise awareness?
Seth Godin does a blog on marketing which I highly recommend. He covered this topic a few weeks ago. His first point was to improve yourself. I've got some reading about marketing to do, and the German course I bought last year in preparation for Essen, both will hopefully help me in the long run, and are free (since I've already paid for the German course). His second point was to build a following or a reputation. I like to think this blog is a step in the right direction (this will be my most read month ever), but how can I improve on that? I guess I can try to be more vocal on BGG, but vocal answering questions and providing advice, not spamming the forums with continual mentions of my games - that's the sort of thing that will just piss people off.
I'm also going to visit a few local games shops to introduce my wares and explain how to play them. Maybe even get some demo games in with the staff or some customers. There's a couple of games shops within sensible driving distance, with several more a short (but expensive) train ride away in London. I'm also hoping to get to more games clubs and small conventions to demo my games - helping to raise awareness. Of course this only helps in the South-East of England, it does nothing for my international sales.
Any other ideas?
Here's another area I'm not very good at. This blog is turning into one long 'I'm hopeless' rant! On Tao and Pinebars advice I'm conducting some Market Research on BoardGameGeek. I'm doing it in the form of a small competition, to give people an incentive to take part - there's a free game up for grabs.
I'll run a similar competition/questionnaire after the main BGG competition has run its course to see how effective it has been at boosting awareness of my brand.
Feel free to enter, it's open to everyone.
Update: I meant to post this first thing this morning, but experienced some user error! The competition has received over 75 entries, and it's generally getting good feedback ('Thanks for giving us this opportunity' not 'stop pimping your games already'). It looks like there's a lot of potential for the main competition, lots of people have never heard of me or my games, and several have heard of the games but not the company.
Seth Godin has just posted his 3,000th post. In it he encourages his readers to post something really interesting today in honour of that achievement. No pressure!
I've received a couple of direct orders today, possibly due to this GeekList on BoardGameGeek, where my games (and Ad Astra!) are getting some good feedback.
This brings me to a conundrum. Do I take their money (and get a larger cut for myself) or direct them to a local retailer (and build up my company in the marketplace)? One is thinking short-term:
I normally get 40% of retail, if I sell direct to the customer I get 100% of retail, minus 15% tax - that's 45% more for me! Yeay!
The other long-term:
They'll ask for it at their preferred retailer. Either they'll sell it (and possibly re-stock) or they'll ask their distributor for it. Their distributor will either sell it, or order it from me. Since a distributor order is usually 30-70 copies, this will make me more money in the long run (and might even get my games into more shops and/or distributors). Yeay!
If the customer emails me first I'll always suggest looking in a local retailer, but once they've placed an order I'm not so rude as to refund their money and tell them to look elsewhere - that would be a pretty stupid thing to do. Some customers like ordering direct from the publisher, they know I'll make more money that way.
In the long run though, the only way this company is going to work is if tens of distributors sell my games to hundreds of shops who in turn sell my games to thousands of customers. For that to happen several things need to fall into place:
In most cases it's better when the customer asks for a game, as that convinces the stockist that there is a market for it. I can try to convince the distributors/shops that people will buy my games, so they should stock them, but when one of their customers is stood there with a dirty wad of cash they want to spend, that's going to be much more convincing than yet another unknown game company hawking their wares as the 'next big thing'.
As with any game, my games aren't for everyone, but bringing them to more people's attention means bringing them to the attention of more people who will like them. How best to do that? That's the 1,000,000 dollar question. I was considering running a poll on BGG to gauge how many people were aware of my company and my games (thanks for the idea, Pinebars!) but now I'm thinking I'm best off waiting until after the competition has run there. Maybe before and after would be more use?
Two posts in one day! Madness.
I've been on Facebook for a while now. At the beginning it was all about Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies, but since then I've grown as a person and login very rarely. I just got en email from a shop who suggested I create Facebook pages for my games. It seemed like a good idea, so I've just spent the last hour or so knocking up a page for It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria. As with all things social and networking these pages are linked together by people. If you're on Facebook (and you like the game!) you can become a 'fan' of it. When you do your friends see that you're a fan and they can follow the link for more information, or to become a fan themselves. In theory, it could lead to a huge groundswell of interest. Or not. At the moment all three games have one fan - me!
The sun is shining today :-)
I'm also starting to get some more positive feedback on Sumeria from my playtesters, and one of them (who hadn't noticed I was a co-deisgner on Carpe Astra) sent me a nice email about how much he liked Carpe Astra and how he's spread the word amongst his friends.
Back on topic:
If you have a weakness you're definitely best off recognising the fact and then trying to do something about it. I'm aware that marketing is not my strong point, so I've admitted it (here and on BoardGameGeek) and asked for advice. The next step is to do something about it. What though? My friend Wilka has recommended a few blogs that I've added to my RSS reader, I'm enjoying Seth Godin's the most of his suggestions, I was previously aware of it due to the Yak-shaving story but I'd not been following it. I should also get my hands on a decent book on the subject, as yet I don't know what that is though.
Of course, if I had more money I'd be able to hire a decent marketing guru, but in the meantime, I need to be able to do an adequate job by myself. Reading through the blog's Wilka recommended they make a lot of hay about Twitter the micro-blogging tool (it allows you to post blog-style comments about what you're doing limited to 140 characters in length). What do you think? Is it worth Twittering as well as these longer blog posts? Does anyone care? Would anyone read it?
Another big thing on those blogs is Word-of-Mouth. Getting customers to market your product for you to potential customers by being enthusiastic enough about your products to convince others to try them. How do you cultivate Word-of-Mouth? I've no idea yet - that's something I'll have to work on!
Update:I'm still catching up on the backlog of posts from the blogs Wilka recommended. One of them, Brand Autopsy, had posted in December this list of great marketing books published this year. Look's like a great place to start...
Marketing is really one of my weakest areas - I have no idea what I could or should be doing in this arena. There are a few different levels of marketing, to the different customers in the supply chain:
Marketing to DistributorsDistributors are my main customers, the vast majority of my sales are to distributors, who then sell to shops/online stores and then on to the final customers. I've put the most effort into this form of marketing, though very little money. I've been sending emails and making phone calls to potential distributors and I've had some degree of success. I've picked up 17 distributors for my games, ranging from the US, to lots of Europe and Taiwan and New Zealand. The big weaknesses in my coverage are: Australia, Eastern/Southern Europe and Canada. Eastern and Southern Europe has the added problem that my games aren't available in the languages of those regions. Shipping to the US is very expensive unless I send a lot of games via sea freight, so I'm considering a flooring deal in the US. The same goes for Australia, which also has a fairly small population, so the market is smaller as a result. My best chance of picking up Asutralian distribution might be to wait until I have more titles and then try to get an Australian distributor interested in a mixed pallet.
Marketing to ShopsThis is the area I'm weakest at. I've emailed a bunch of UK shops to tell them my games are available, and had replies from just over half of them. My coverage of UK shops seems to be pretty good. Not knowing the companies elsewhere I've not done any of this abroad. I'm hoping that the distributors will do some of this themselves (they've got stock to shift after all), but I'm wondering what more I can do to help the distributors (and hence myself).
Marketing to CustomersThis is where I've spent the most money. I've run ads on BoardGameGeek and Boardgame News. I figure if the customers want it, they'll ask their favourite stockist, who will ask their distributor of choice, who will ask me. This has already happened in the US (it's how I picked up Brown Box, Inc. as a distributor). The problem is while Carpe Astra is definitely a geek's game, It's Alive! has broader appeal. Advertising where I do is never going to reach those other people. Also, while BGG is the larger market of the two, lots of people on BGG pay money to hide the adverts.
How can I improve?I asked this question in BGG a while ago, and received lots of advice. One of the suggestions was a BGG competition. This has several advantages over straight advertising:
As a result they are more expensive! But, I'm going to suck it up and run one shortly.
Another thing that came out of the thread was a former Marketing Assistant for Fantasy Flight offered to help. In exchange for a free copy of Carpe Astra and It's Alive! he offered to ring around the big shops in the US, bringing my games to their attention. The games are relatively cheap for me, so I took him up on his offer. Hopefully, this will help US availability and awareness, if it does I'll try to make more use of him (for more recompense).
I still don't know the best things to do to help build my company, but I'm learning all the time so hopefully in a few years time I'll be good at this (or I'll have hired someone who is!). In the meantime, any advice you've got is gratefully appreciated. And if you want to support me, ask your local shop to carry my games. Unless you run a shop, in which case ask your distributor of choice to carry my games. Alternatively, you can just buy a couple of thousand games from me directly!
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