Board Game Crowdfunding: build a solid marketing strategy in 9 steps! (part 1)
Who has ever started communicating about their project without a strategy? 🤚
Communication is often not the most fun aspect for a game designer, and yet this step is as necessary as it has to be structured if you want to :
⭐ Reach your sales targets
⭐ Save time and money
⭐ Gather a passionate and loyal community
Bonus: you’ll get to know yourself better, build up a relationship of trust with your target audience and have fun creating your editorial calendar!
In the first part of this article, I’ll take you through the first 5 steps in creating a marketing strategy, with examples tailored to board game projects undergoing a crowdfunding campaign.
SUMMARY
- 🔎 Audit: a matter of introspection
- ✨ Benchmarking: your competitors are your best assets
- 🙌 The target audience: talking to everyone is talking to no one
- 💪 Goals: be SMART !
- 💌 Messages: the starting point of a content strategy
🔎 Audit: a matter of introspection
If you don’t know where you’re going, look where you’ve come from.
Audit is the first step to take when you start to create your strategy. It’s the one that allows you to step back and take an outside look at the parameters that could affect your communication.
It consists of analyzing (non-exhaustive list):
➡️ the means and resources you have at your disposal (human, financial, material)
➡️ ️the means and resources you are can and want activate to achieve your objectives
➡️ your communication history (communication platforms, existing community, etc.)
➡️ variables external to your project that are likely to have an impact, positive or negative (online or face-to-face events that could give you visibility, the launch of a similar crowdfunding campaign in the coming weeks, etc.).
To structure your audit, you can create a simple 4-box table called SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and list :
➡️ internal strengths, so that you can put them to good use
➡️ external opportunities, so that you can make the most of them in your communications
➡️ internal weaknesses, to try and resolve them
➡️ external threats, so that you can prepare to counter and/or deal with them
The audit also enables you to identify what has already worked in the past, and to measure the effectiveness of what you have put in place for your project. It’s an analytical stage that’s important to carry out at least once before you start communicating about a project!
✨ Benchmarking: your competitors are your best assets
Yes, your project is unique. But there are certainly similar projects that have gone through the same stages as you or that are currently competing with you: same objectives, same audience, same communication channels.
And that’s GREAT! Do you know why?
🥁 🥁 🥁
Because you can learn from their failures to avoid repeating them, and because you can draw inspiration from what’s already working! Analysing your competitors’ communications will stimulate your creativity and save you a huge amount of time in developing your strategy.
The competing project have a Coming Soon page on Kickstarter? Find out how the publisher is trying to attract followers.
- Do the creators have a newsletter? If so, sign up. How many publications do they post per week and what is the content?
- Is the crowdfunding campaign already up and running? Find out what methods are used to generate commitment and attract backers.
- Do they publish ads on Facebook or Instagram? Take a look at the Facebook Advertising Library
- Their crowdfunding campaign has been successful? Good for them, and good for you. You now have access to all the communication carried out during the various stages of the pre-campaign and the campaign.
Please note: optimise your time on this part of the strategy by selecting up to 5 projects similar to yours and to list only 3 to 5 pieces of data you want to analyse: publication structure, formats used, interaction with the community, etc.
There are many benchmark models available on the Internet, like this one. Feel free to download, edit it depending on your needs and fill it in directly.
🙌 The target audience: talking to everyone is talking to no one
We don’t talk in the same way or about the same things depending on who we’re talking to. It’s the same with communication!
Before you announce or share anything, ask yourself who might be interested in your game. And let me stop you right there: your target audience isn’t “everyone who likes to play”: if you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.
Do you want to finance a board game? Of course your target audience is gamers. But gamers of what? Deckbuilding won’t necessarily attract the same audience as a management game with miniatures.
Your goal will be to reach one or several audiences attracted by specific features of your game. Break down the many interesting aspects of your project to define sub-categories of audience. In the case of a board game, define :
- The game’s type: strategy, management, exploration, civilisation, deck building
- Its key elements : dices, cards, miniatures, etc.
- Gameplay elements that looks like to other well-known games, to reach an existing community
- The number of players: games played in co-op and/or with a single-player version have their own audience.
- Special features: exclusive to Kickstarter for collectors, deluxe elements, magnificent illustrations or a well-known illustrator or author, etc.
Once you’ve listed your audience sub-categories, prioritise them to find out which are the top 3 audiences you want to reach. You can help yourself with variables such as audience size; even if a niche audience will be more likely to want to buy your game, there need to be enough purchases for the project to be profitable.
If you have a bit of time on your hands, you can even have fun bringing together all the characteristics of your ideal audience in a single fictional persona: age, profession, hobbies, social networks, consumer habits, etc. You can then communicate as if you were addressing this “persona”. This will give you an idea of which social networks to prioritise and the tone to adopt in your communications.
💪 Goals: be SMART !
To avoid spreading yourself too thin, I suggest you define 1 to 3 goals in order of importance. These will enable you to categorise your publications and guide your community by defining “Calls to Action”.
A Call to Action is a hook that invites the reader to take a specific action. Its aim is to convert your prospects into customers. Example: “Follow our coming soon page: [coming soon page link]”. It must be preceded by engaging content to have a better chance of being activated.
To define objectives that won’t gather dust in your strategy, and to reach milestones quickly, make them SMART:
➡️ Specific, clearly defined
➡️ Measurable, and therefore quantifiable
➡️ Achievable, corresponding to the means put in place for communication
➡️ Realistic, and therefore not too ambitious (at least not at first)
➡️ Temporally defined, by setting deadlines
Example: Reach 1,000 followers on my project’s Coming Soon page before 15 April 2024.
- Specific: followers on the Coming Soon page
- Measurable: 1000
- Achievable: if human resources allow you to publish on different networks several times a week, and if financial resources allow you to plan paid advertising.
- Realistic: if the project already has a small community on its social networks and communication begins 3 months before the deadline (for example)
- Deadline: before 15 April 2024
Once your objectives have been prioritised and defined, you can get down to the nitty-gritty: content strategy.
💌 Messages: the starting point of a content strategy
Start by listing your Key Selling Points (KSPs), i.e. all the arguments that will enable you to :
➡️ let your audience know that your project will be of interest to them
➡️ convince them to engage with your CTAs
➡️ stand out from your competitors
➡️ find interesting content ideas for your future communications
You can use the research you’ve done to categorise your audience to list the basic information about your game (type of game, number of players, playing time per game, etc.), its strengths and its special features. Here are a few examples:
- The author of [name of game] is [known author], creator of [names of known games].
- Playable by 2 to 8 players, co-op mode available for 4 players
- Thanks to the modular map, replayability is infinite! No two games are the same
- The game is a limited edition and will only be available to buy on Kickstarter/Gamefound
- Simple, in-depth rules system, with no randomness and dynamic rhythm
From this list, have fun creating a list of ideas for publications! These ideas should fall into one of these three categories:
➡️ Entertain/Inspire (around 30% of overall content, from my experience)
Examples: share an extract from the lore, beautiful illustrations, create a meme about your game, ask your community questions, etc.
➡️ Inform/Educate (around 50% of overall content)
Examples: explaining how co-op mode works or a game in progress, sharing an interview with the author,
➡️ Selling/convincing (around 20% of overall content)
Examples: pitching the game, highlighting replayability, the quality of the elements, the advantages of crowdfunding, etc.
Don’t forget that too much promotional is likely to bore your prospects or drive them away, so think about adding value to your audience with content that is informative, inspiring and entertaining.
Now that you’ve done all of that, you can be proud of yourself! The analytical part of your strategy is over, we can get down to the (very) fun part of the process: the operational part of your content strategy. See you in part 2 (coming soon).
I hope this article has made you aware of the importance of developing a communications strategy to increase the chances of success of your crowdfunding campaign, and has given you the information and tools you need to put it into practice!
🌳 At The Crowdfunding Agency, we can create your communication strategy or support you in its creation so that it is solid and quickly applicable.
💡 Depending on your needs and budget, we can also offer consulting-type support to give you feedback on your strategy, answer your questions when you have them, and help you move in the right direction.
📃 The various aspects of the communication strategy will be detailed in future articles, along with lists of social network publications to exploit if you’re short of inspiration.
If you have any specific questions that you would like to see answered here, please contact us!
💌 victoria@crowdfunding-agency.com
Victoria Cribier
Social Media Manager at The Crowdfunding Agency
