Three Months From Launch

Goals:

1. Confirm your launch date
2. Drive paid & organic traffic (to your landing page)
3. Line up reviewers and media coverage

Confirm Your Launch Date

It is important to reiterate that everything discussed here is under a “give it your best effort” pretense. There is no way you’re going to get it near-perfect in every area unless you are an industry veteran and/or have tons of money to throw at subcontractors to help you. Your job is to give it your best effort, which might mean paying someone for their expertise, learning other things on your own, or just making a conscious decision to skip something entirely.

Just don’t let your fear of the unknown take over — burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the giant challenge ahead or slacking at this point is the worst thing you could do. This is the time that you must become firm on your launch date. While you can still decide to delay a week or two if necessary, the later you do this, the more you are going to mess up ALL your plans you set in motion with reviewers, fans, and more.

If you have cold feet, now is the time to reschedule the launch. You can’t let your launch date slide just because you procrastinate. If you cancel your launch plans, that means you’ve got a lot of things to reorganize, but it’s going to be a lot easier to do it now than after you’ve spent a few thousand dollars on reviewers, banner ads, and other marketing stuff.

If you’re freaking out around this time, I hope you have that fundamental education to fall back on. Fall back on what you know, and be sure to tighten your bootstraps before you take the next step. Ready to do this?

Drive Traffic To Your Landing Page

It’s time to polish up that marketing system and get people to join your email list, which you should be updating once per month with an email newsletter and as new subscribers join with an automated “Welcome” email.

By this point, you should have nice art available that you can use to really spruce up your landing page. Even an amateur landing page can get a great conversion rate when your art is fantastic. Give your landing page a review and do what you can to polish everything up so that you put your best foot forward.

A landing page that converts well is going to make the difference between your advertising efforts being a great success or an unsustainable bummer. My clock for launching ads begins at two months from launch, which means with three months to go, you have enough time to get your landing page updated before launching pre-marketing ads.

But before we dive into paying for ads, which not all campaigns can afford, let’s talk about other ways to promote! There are two broad terms used in marketing for how you will bring prospective backers to your website: Organic and Paid promotion.

Organic Promotion

Organic is free advertising that is generated by you or anyone else that shares your content in their sphere of influence. Not only is this form of advertising free, but it also has the potential to spin wildly out of your control and “go viral” due to others sharing at an exponential rate.

We all desire this viral sharing effect, but it is rarely within your control. Therefore, I recommend that you do not put all your effort into going viral but that you control what you can. This wonderful effect may happen as a result of your project resonating with people, but again, you cannot force this to happen.

I say focus on what is in your control, pray for the rest, and hope for the best!

More actionably put, you can invest your time into sharing details in places that want to hear about projects like yours! There are social communities all over that congregate into groups to discuss hobbies and other topics according to their interests. You need to find them, engage there, and share in a way they appreciate.

Please don’t spam their group — you need to share about your project, and you need to get e-mails! But you can’t just go in and share your web link with a short “Check out my game!”

That’s a quick way to show them that you only value them for the money they can give you, which is a bad showing indeed.

But if you share things they value without pasting your link, you will get people to engage with you and your content. They might actually ask you for a link to learn more!

There are three elements to what we need to cover in regard to organic promotion — where to find these groups, what to share, and how to do it.

Where do you find groups?

Social media and online forums are gold mines for groups.

Many Facebook groups have tens of thousands of members who are all interested in discussing board games or topics of interest that might be related to your game’s theme.
Social sites like Instagram and Twitter have audiences that communicate through topical hashtags like #boardgames and searching for tweets or posts on these topics.

Websites like BoardGameGeek.com and Reddit.com have communities dedicated to specific games and are full of relevant topical discussions you can engage with.

Many podcasts like the Board Game Design Lab and Think Like A Game Designer have dedicated audiences that are interested in hearing from board game designers.

Tons of YouTube Channels exist to provide board game content to gamers hungry for information about what is new and exciting in the world of games. Interviewers, reviewers, and previewers often create their own content without cost, only asking for some time to prepare a video for you with your nice looking prototype (that they will send back to you if you take care of the nominal shipping costs).

What & how do I share?

Each community has its own set of written and unwritten rules that you need to follow if you expect them to support you (and not delete/ignore your posts).

Facebook Groups have community guidelines that you should read — thriving groups are often strict if you break their rules, and the admins will delete your posts, warn you, and eventually kick you out of the group if you keep breaking rules (like the common “No Self-Promotion” rule). But you can be greatly rewarded if you engage with them! And better yet — create your own!

What to share:

• Questions you’d like answered by the community
• Helpful, positive, and constructive comments on others’ posts
• Images of your game’s art
• Visually impactful pictures of your game (i.e. – set up on the table, with/without players playing)

How to share:

• Provide context in your posts and comments (never post a pic without sharing something about the image).
• Never include a link in a post, excluding YouTube videos. Only share a link to learn more when someone comments (and keep it relevant).
• You can comment with a link to your website or your own Facebook Group, but be personable and avoid sharing things that aren’t immediately actionable (only links they can click).
• Find out when they allow self-promotion and leverage that! This is typically a weekly post or a once-per-month allowance. Get permission from an admin first!
• Get others to share your stuff in the group for you. It’s not self-promotion if someone else promotes you!
• Reply to every comment with a personable response (don’t overshare your link — once is fine).
• A “like” or other emoji reaction by itself is not enough!

A note on Facebook groups: You should definitely create a group for your game because when it’s your group, you can post what you want! It’s always nice when the community exists to talk about *your* stuff.

Instagram can be a strong source of engagement. When properly cultivated, your Instagram profile will pay dividends. Instagrammers react positively to visually impactful pictures and art, but you have to use the right hashtags so people can find your pics!

In addition, it’s not just about what you share, but about how your overall Instagram feed looks. When someone visits your profile and looks at the feed of images you have been posting, they need to have a clear idea of what you’re about! If they see tons of stuff about board games and art/pics of your games included, they are more likely to resonate with you.

Lastly, you only get room for a single link in your “bio” (aka the place people learn about you). This link is the key to getting people to visit your website and sign up to learn more. Your pics get them interested, your bio link sends them to the landing page, and the landing page closes them!

What to share:

• Images of your game’s art
• Creative/artistic pictures of your game (use filters for more awesomeness)

How to share:

• Provide context (aka — a description of what the pic is about in every post)
• Use as many relevant hashtags as you can think of per post (save them in a word document or note file for easy copy/paste)
• Reply to every comment (even the strange comments that are clearly bots) because they will encourage others to engage with your content.
• 1 post per day maximum

Twitter uses hashtags much like Instagram, but you are limited to 280 characters in your tweets. They are more often engaged if they are short, but sharing a long sprawling series of thoughts across multiple tweets can get engagement as well.

Communities find content by hashtags, but it is also common for others to follow you and engage even without hashtags if your content is interesting. Tweets rise and fall in a matter of minutes sometimes, so you can share multiple times per day without fear of repercussions! Text gets engagement, pics get engagement, and links get engagement.

What to share:

• Your inner monologue in text only
• Images of your life & hobbies
• Images of your game’s art
• Links that you find interesting (Only 1 in 10 tweets should “sell” your game)
• Creative/artistic pictures of your game

How to share:

• 280 characters or less per tweet, but you may (rarely) tweet as many times in a single conversation to get your message across.
• Keep it engaging, and use hashtags so people can find your tweet!
• Only use a maximum of 2 hashtags per tweet.
• Reply to every comment, like and reply to every retweet or mention from others

A note on Twitter: This is a political hub of information and can be quite toxic at times. You need to recognize that everything you share is public information, so I recommend staying away from sharing political stuff here… or you risk alienating some of your audience! If you’re fine with that, use at your own risk.

Forum sites like BoardGameGeek.com and Reddit.com have some serious organic traffic you can take advantage of if you play your cards right. BGG has a lot of game-specific forums and also a great set of game design forums to share your game. Reddit has many board game “subreddits” (aka sub-forums) that are specific to topics (like r/boardgames). Critically, if you want to be taken seriously in any of these forums, you need to spend time actively engaging and learning the culture of what people value (and what they hate). If you don’t, you could find your post removed or generally downvoted into oblivion.

What to share:

• Your project with pics (Links are ok on BGG, but don’t post links in your Reddit posts — just in comments)
• Relevant topical discussion and news

How to share:

• Be genuine, and be prepared so you don’t get your feelings hurt by those commenting (depending on the site you visit, people can be toxic)!
• Don’t reply to trolls ever (When you feed them, they get stronger and more vocal)
• Trial and error — you will need to spend some time learning the ropes by making mistakes!

Podcasts can be a great way to talk about your game because they have dedicated audiences that listen! The key to getting invited onto a podcast is to pitch them a discussion idea at an angle they find interesting. All respectable podcasts have the hosts’ contact info available at the end of their podcast, on their website, and/or social media.

You’re much more likely to succeed at getting an invitation to a podcast if you reach out to the host with a personable outreach that shows you have been paying attention to their content. It is a lot easier to customize a message that is attractive to the host when you understand the subject matter they care to discuss on their show.

Some podcasts are also booked months in advance, so you should consider this when reaching out! These people are busy, so be gently persistent until you get a response, and be open to rejection. Your job is to do your research and pitch ideas.

For example, I might go to a great podcast creator like Gabe Barrett from the Board Game Design Lab and write an email like this (using “marketing” as my subject):

Hi Gabe,

First off, I recently discovered your podcast and have been enjoying your interviews a lot! The interview you did with Justin Gary was super helpful to my own design efforts, and I appreciate that you discussed the subject of making games that last in so much detail.

Your format gave me an idea that I think might add a lot of value to your listeners, but I wasn’t 100% sure how to frame it to you. Here are three ideas I was thinking about:

1) How to market your game on zero budget
2) Marketing 101 for board game designers
3) Kickstarter marketing basics

If you think a discussion on marketing would be a good idea but would rather frame in a different context, I’d love to hear your idea. But if you would like me to expand on any of these ideas, I’d be happy to do that for you.

I love your podcast, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Kind regards,

Andrew

Many hobby YouTube Creators would love to have more content to share on their board game-focused YouTube Channel. They are building their followings and often have a goal of growing into a place where they can charge for their services, but in order to do that they need to command a large following that promises a good return to a prospective buyer.

They are often very appreciative of anyone that is willing to send a prototype. Just make sure to get their buy-in first! Also, as it is a very low barrier-to-entry to start this effort, you risk losing your prototype if someone elects to just take your game and never finish the video. You have little recourse in that case, so buyer beware!

I recommend looking at their history of producing content — if they have been around for a while and produced some decent content, I’d trust them a lot more with a prototype copy! They also often send your prototype wherever you want after they are done, which allows you to use one prototype for multiple reviewers! Just contact them directly off of YouTube searches or ask for referrals to these creators in other gamer communities on social media.

The one thing I will highlight here is that you should consider the sort of games they review before sending a prototype. If they are into short party games, don’t be surprised if they are less than enthusiastic about your giant, solo, narrative-driven sandbox dungeon crawler. Do your research before reaching out, and make sure they know what sort of game you want reviewed!

Paid Promotion

Paid forms of advertising all require you to pay for the privilege of reaching those people you cannot reach otherwise. There are many platforms to advertise on — in fact, there are far too many to write about in this article. What follows are the “big” sources and an effort to lump everything else together for a bit of actionable, general advice when dealing with advertisers.

Before we dive into paid ads, there is a fundamental level of knowledge that you need to gain in order to even browse advertising platforms that you will not learn from this article. The purpose of this article is to help you effectively use them, and therefore, we will assume that you have a basic knowledge of the platforms herein. That said, many that read this article will need to run a crash-course of these platforms on their own, so I’ll try to drop keywords here and there so that you can find your way to the things that matter. If you need help, it may be worth your while to pay for an hour or two of an expert’s time to help you learn the basics.

Furthermore, the elite “tricks of the trade” on how to really crush it with ads on these platforms have entire books written about them, so I will not exhaust every possible thread to teach you everything I know. What I want is to give you a solid fundamental base that will help you make your Kickstarter ads a success, or if you hire out, a set of key performance indicators that you can measure against your current results to prevent a malicious advertiser’s attempts to mask their poor performance.

In this section, you’ll receive some important benchmark figures for determining the effectiveness of your ads. A disclaimer about these figures that you need to keep in mind is this: If you aren’t routinely connecting with your audience after your ads, they will forget about you, and you will end up with far inferior results than what you could have if you were consistently sharing.

I’ll say it in a different way: If you don’t send regular email newsletters to your list, they will forget you. If you don’t post regularly in your Facebook group, Twitter feed, etc… then the audiences you once captivated on your platform(s) of choice will disappear, and your results will be far less than you could have earned if you had been diligent and courageously updating your audience.

Facebook Ads

The giant of Kickstarter marketing is Facebook ads. Companies that make millions on Kickstarter all leverage this advertising medium because it is the one location that you can segment users by their actual self-declared interests. Other platforms may also imply a general board game interest, which we will discuss later, but Facebook can segment people through highly specific criteria that is unlike any other platform out there.

• To use Facebook ads effectively, you need to use a “Pixel” which tracks data. Remember when I said this article wouldn’t teach you the basics? I’m sorry to say this first bit of direction might be annoying for some of you, but it’s important:

Make a pixel. Install the pixel on your landing page. Track your sign-up forms as “Lead” or “Subscribe” events using Facebook’s Event Set-up Tool (technically, you should be labeling them as “Leads,” but I find “Subscribe” makes just as much sense as a label for an email signup).

Again, I’m sorry for what this will put some of you through. Work at it, make it happen, and don’t neglect it!

The benefit of having your Pixel on your landing page is that Facebook will use it to learn. Yes, that is right — Facebook will figure out who loves your content, and then work to show highly qualified people your ads. Facebook will filter people that aren’t likely to subscribe to your email list *if you set that Pixel up.*

Primary “great” benchmarks for Facebook ads (in $USD):

• Cost per click: $0.20 or less
• Cost per Lead/Subscribe: $2.00 or less
• Landing page conversion rates: 10% (1 in 10 clicks or better should subscribe)
• Starting budgets: $20 per day (assumes 2 months of ads at $600 per month)

I find subscriber to backer conversion rates are as follows:

• 10-15% of these email subscribers that go to a landing page and then sign up will also back your campaign when it is a list that has been specifically created for that game.
• 5-8% of your company email list will back your new games (with potential for more if your company does a great job turning fans of your games into fans of your company).
• 1% or less of nearly all other email lists will back your game. That means most offers to have your game blasted out on a large email list will return little to nothing for you.

A few notes on these benchmarks:

• If you’re getting great cost per click, but your cost per subscriber is high, your landing page is the problem. It isn’t converting as well as it could (refer back to the landing page section in this guide).
• If your cost per click is high, but your conversion rate is 10% or better, your ad OR audience is the problem (diving into audiences in a sec).
• In the tiniest number of cases, these numbers might help you realize your messaging is off, or people don’t like your game in its current state, but this is typically a problem that stems from a lack of playtesting.

Note: Facebook also has “lead ads” that do not require people to go to your landing page. These offer amazing conversion rates from users to emails, but awful conversion rates from email subscribers to Kickstarter backers. Avoid this like the plague.

Creating an Audience

I can’t stress to you enough the mentality of “picking the lowest hanging fruit” in your ads. You should be targeting the people most likely to throw their money at you and excluding everyone else unless you have a very large budget to invest.

The three parts of a Facebook campaign are labeled as follows: Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad

Your audience is determined inside the ad set. There are a great number of possibilities for audience angles, but for board games, we can pair down the possibilities to the following essentials that you should probably not touch:

Location: United States
Age: 18-65+
Demographics: All (Men + Women)
Interest Group 1: Kickstarter
Interest Group 2: Board Games
Interest Group 3: Specific Interests -or- Lookalike (discussed later)

If you cut your age to something like men only aged 25-45, you’re hurting Facebook’s ability to help you by its learning. Facebook will find cost-effective outliers that will subscribe and back your game based on their interest matching algorithms, so let Facebook have room to help you here!

As far as location, the US accounts for over 60% of backers for the average campaign, so target here. If you’re looking for an English audience and are logistically prepared to expand your audience, Canada, the UK, and Australia are what I target (in that order).

Three different interest groups can have more than one similar interest inside them depending on your game. The only interest I recommend against changing is Group 1 — leave Kickstarter by itself, because you’re driving for Kickstarter sales, so you want ads that target people that already know how to use the site.

Interest group 2 is all about the type of game you have. You might have a heavy board game, so you could add strategy games as an interest, which would complement this group. If you have a card game, you would want to add card games and maybe even collectible card games as interests. Make sure to remain as specific as you can be here — multiple interests in this group can cause you targeting issues.

Interest group 3 is where you can go wild. You have targeted those that are into Kickstarter AND Board Games, so your third interest is really about your game’s theme. You get to explore different segments of people in this group, and the right groups can reward you with great numbers. My best numbers ever for a client were $0.06 per click and $0.35 per email subscriber, and they were thanks to a very good ad and a very good audience segmentation in group 3.

To use a specific example, I am marketing a game designed by Wes Woodbury called Die in the Dungeon!, which is all about playing a boss monster in a dungeon doing battle with heroes using a set of RPG dice to account for stats.

We targeted dungeons and dragons, tabletop role-playing games, and every D&D creature listed in Facebook’s interest list. We had at least 40 interests in this group, and the ad campaign performed very well, earning nearly 500 emails for an investment of just under $800 for an overall cost of about $1.58 per email. We had a ton of additional organic reach develop from those ~500 email subscribers, which were filtered into a Facebook group and to their Kickstarter landing page. Their Kickstarter launched with 800 Followers, about 1,000 emails on their list, and over 500 members in a Facebook group.

The biggest part of all of this: The vast majority of all of these leads that will back the project are going to do it on day 1. They have already been convinced, and all they care about is getting this game!

The first day saw 377 backers pledge over $16,000 to fund 80% of the project on day 1. The conversion rate of all of this interest was well over normal standards of 10-15% due to the amount of buzz generated by the organic and paid marketing efforts.

This is a great example of when organic effort and paid promotion are combined, and I am sure every new creator would consider that $800 to be well spent.

Creating an Ad

It is my firm belief that ads drive interest through three elements, and in this order of importance:

1. The Image
2. The Headline
3. The Primary Text

For the purposes of this article, we’re not going to go deep into video ads, but I can tell you that they are almost always less effective than images.

The image should be a picture or art from your game that shows the theme or the game itself. The main pitfalls to avoid here that are beyond common sense are text on images or busy art — Facebook doesn’t like text on images, and if an image looks busy, someone will fail to grasp what it is and will keep scrolling.

Here are a few ideas for great uses of images:

• 3D renders of your game box and components
• Your box art or art that shows the beauty or horror of your game’s world
• Art of your main characters
• A combination of multiple sources

The headline is your main callout. What makes your game special, or why is it fun? Make sure to keep it to 2 lines, and don’t allow your ad to cut your text off with a “…” – Also, Emojis are great to use here! Keep it short and impactful!

Primary Text is where you answer the question “what is it?” If you have space, tell us why your game is special. Again, don’t let your text get cut off with a “…” – you are limited to 3 lines, including your emojis!

Board Game Specific Forum Sites

In the world of board games, there are only a few websites that you can advertise on that will have a direct reach into the hobby board game market. You probably know some of them well, and others may escape this list. They are all great sources of traffic, but they can sometimes cost a pretty penny and have a poor conversion rate in the wrong circumstances.

You’re probably not going to advertise on these sites until you launch, but it would be a good idea to figure out their numbers and book space for when the time comes. The worst thing would be to find out that the time slots you wanted are all booked up!

Here is a partial list of great sites to consider:

• Boardgamegeek.com
• Kicktraq.com 
• Reddit.com/r/boardgames
  
• TheDiceTower.com

Facebook Group Banners & Giveaways

This segment is another that usually falls into the “go live when Kickstarter goes live.” However, it is in this section, because you need to book your space 3 months early. The popular board game groups sell their banners a week at a time, and they often sell one giveaway per week. These fill up quickly, so make sure to book early!

Here is a partial list of great board game Facebook Groups to consider:

• THE BOARDGAME GROUP
• Board Game Spotlight
• Board Game Revolution Community
• Tabletop Backer Party
• Board Game Design Lab Community

Paid Reviewers

Paid reviewers will do professional board game previews and share them with their audiences. The reason these guys and gals require payment is because their reputation moves the needle for people looking at your Kickstarter page *and* they bring a large audience with them, which means potential backers and return on investment.

These reviewers often need at least 2 months of time to produce a great video or written preview and will charge you extra if you need it rushed. Get your orders in early! You can always find their contact information on their YouTube channels or websites.

One extra thing to consider, just like the free reviewers listed in the Organic section, is that they each have preferences in the types of games they like to play. These guys will likely reject your project or, even worse, give you an unfavorable review if it’s not the type of game they like. Therefore, it is important to vet your reviewers before you reach out to them.

As far as the quantity of paid reviews you need from one of these high-end sources, I’d recommend getting at least one professional overview and a playthrough video for your Kickstarter page. You don’t need a ton of these, but they lend credibility to your project. Their audience backing you is a bonus but not a guarantee! I recommend having 3 preview videos + 1 playthrough video, but only one of these sources needs to be a professional — the others can be from the freebies.

As a last note, they will freely pass on your prototype to an address you designate as long as you pay for shipping! These people are very reliable as they rely on a great reputation to get more work.

A few professional reviewers who carry a lot of weight:

• Man Vs Meeple
• Rahdo Runs Through
• The Dice Tower
• Undead Viking
• Tantrum House

You can find a more in-depth list here: boardgamedesignlab.com/reviewers

Media Coverage

Many websites that cover gaming, as a general interest, exist out there. In fact, even mainstream news sites like the New York Times have covered board games. You can create and distribute a press release to try to attract attention here, and though this is listed in the paid channel, it is often free if you get interest.

Other sites will welcome your payment for writing an article, and they may have the website visitor metrics to justify such a payment! The key is to ask them how many website visitors they receive, how many average pages those visitors view, and what their average time on the site is… Make sure to get a few estimates by asking around to see what the best options are if you want to go this route. I have seen many of these sites deliver backers from a well-syndicated press release, which means you’re probably going to want to pay a professional to write and deliver it.

Marketing Agencies & Freelancers

I’ll not spend a ton of time in this section, but you can hire an agency to do a lot of this work for you. I routinely consult with Kickstarter creators to navigate these waters, and there are more than a few other highly reliable professionals in the industry that do so. Rather than give us too much time, I’ll say that you really need to vet these people.

It’s easy to talk well on the surface, but it’s often only after you have paid them and received far less than expected (or even nothing at all) that you see through their smoke and mirrors. It might sound harsh, but you are only doing yourself a disservice if you trust someone’s technical skill. 

For example, I’m giving you tons of actionable marketing content in this article, but it would probably be better if you would ask what projects I have helped fund, and then go ask those creators about their experience working with me.

Do your due diligence and make sure you are willing to trust your marketing team. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, so go get some hindsight from a few happy customers!