10 Video And Social Marketing Tips For Video Game Executives

Online video and social media marketing seem to be obvious choices for those tasked with marketing new video game titles, but I’m consistently surprised at how those strategies are misused, underused or used not at all.

Following are ways that video game marketing directors, brand managers and social media managers can help launch titles using video and social media marketing: 

1. Keep your balls in the air. Just because a new title demands your attention, don’t let go of titles that are still being actively discussed. In fact, the social media presence you spark on one title could be fertile ground for seeding your next title. Stay engaged and involved with fans rather than moving on. Rather than thinking with a one-and-done mentality, focus on making each video and social media marketing initiative build upon the next.  

2. Seek co-branding for video and social initiatives. What other brands and products appeal to your game’s demographics? Consider launching video and social media marketing initiatives that highlight both in a creative and engaging way. Co-branding helps your game reach new audiences and effectively requires less budget participation per partner, since two or more brands/products are involved in sharing the costs. 

3. Involve celebrities who carry built-in audiences. Actors, musicians and other celebrities, either mainstream or on YouTube, are often highly connected in the social networking space and can bring an audience to the table. Beyond simple endorsements, allow them to be part of the project — and in turn, share their work, along with your marketing message, with their audiences across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. On the PR side, you might work in a mainstream media mention to reach even more people.

4. Go beyond the video game trailer. There are lots of ways to use video and social beyond posting an obligatory game trailer on video game blogs, publications and review sites. One creative concept and shoot can yield not only a game trailer but also a Web series, branded entertainment videos, videos with multiple or choose-your-own-endings, TV spots, “banned for TV” or “red band” trailers, Web-only TV spots, contest announcement videos and videos to be used by your PR team or agency. These can all be strategically released to create a swarm of activity and awareness across social media and video-sharing sites as well as crossing over to a mainstream audience. Going beyond a basic game trailer can also help your title reach people who don’t buy video games — but should. 

5. Practice reactive engagement: act, interact, react and repeat. Engage reactively. Too many game publishers (and other industries, for that matter) launch video and social media initiatives but fail to act, interact and react effectively. Whether you’ve launched a multiple-video initiative backed by a contest across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, or simply launched an engaging game trailer, you will have stirred up conversation. Make sure someone is joining that conversation, answering questions, posting comments, responding to comments, interacting with YouTube messages, emails and tweets! If there is no reactive engagement, then you’re just broadcasting and hoping people talk about your video(s), but your brand and game title aren’t represented in the conversation.

6. Allocate a creative and production budget. If you work with a creative, marketing or ad agency, creative and production fees can vary from flat-fee, hourly and even incentive-based systems, depending on the project and the agency. Beyond that, plan on budgeting for the type of production you need. Live action can add new elements to the game trailer formula and can be either very expensive or not so expensive as dictated by the creative. A man-on-the-street gag, “talking head” or “faux amateur” YouTube video will not necessarily price out the same as five actors on a stage or location set with a big crew, special effects, post production, motion graphics and digital effects. That said, many brand videos that appear to be consumer-generated (UGC), actually required considerable planning and production budget. The best bet is to share your requirements and budget and let your creative agency offer you ideas. 

7. Allocate a social video marketing budget. Unless you are simply pitching a game trailer to gaming blogs and publications, plan to allocate budget for video seeding, which involves paid banner, blog and social game video placements, social networking and blog and publication outreach, all designed to take video content from “paid” views and engagement to “earned” views and engagement.  Earned views are the “free” views that happen once videos are being shared organically. Video seeding will return infinitely more bang for your buck, so if you need more bang, go get more bucks!

8. Integrate video and social with other advertising, sales and PR initiatives. Video and social media marketing shouldn’t exist in a bubble. Ideally, there should be a larger strategy at play. Integrating video and social media campaigns with your TV, print, radio, outdoor and PR initiatives will help you reach a much larger audience across multiple channels. Identify which internal teams and departments you should be working closely with on the launch and follow-through of your campaigns. Share the creative, production, viral marketing and social media strategy costs with these departments and create content that can be used for multiple purposes — including TV and video banner ads, social networking, trailers, sales videos, promos, outdoor and PR outreach. 

9. Educate yourself!  Familiarize yourself with the strengths and weaknesses of video, viral and social media marketing, including what’s possible, what’s working, what hasn’t worked — and why. Study what the competition is doing and follow video, viral and social media marketing blogs, publications and thought leaders.

10. Don’t be afraid to experiment — and remember the basics. Take chances! Rather than copy what’s out there now, think in terms of what can be the next big buzz-generating campaign and encourage your team and colleagues to think that way as well. Video and social are all about generating conversation and converting that conversation into action. Surround yourself with people who think this way and push the limits, while continuing to pursue traditional marketing and PR initiatives. If you’re worried about jumping too far outside your comfort zone, just remember that video and social media are tools in your marketing toolbox, and don’t represent a complete paradigm shift. Marketing is, and always has been, about influencing behavior and selling more stuff!

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10 Tips for Building Fans via Facebook Advertising

Managing Google campaigns can be immensely complex and if you really want to make them work, they have to be nurtured and optimized in real time. Ad copy, bids, targeting selects, and keywords all have to be constantly tested and manipulated based on ROI results and changing marketing conditions. Well, guess what, the same applies to Facebook advertising.

Making pay-per-click (or pay-per-like) Facebook ads can be even more complex because you’re not just dealing with simple keyword-targeted ads (the first mistake people typically make when looking at Facebook). For example, if you want to sell life insurance on Google, you use the keyword “Life Insurance.” But on Facebook, no one is searching for life insurance or has necessarily listed life insurance as an interest or like. However, lots of people have expressed interest or listed themselves in certain categories such as age group, getting married, having babies, etc.

The second big mistake is that people list all the demographics and interest categories for their target in one giant selected group and then they run just two or three ads for that group for the duration of the campaign. They treat it like a display campaign, where the creative is launched, the optimization is done on the creative level, and the results are tabulated. So the same people start seeing the ads again and again and the ads rapidly burn out.

This simple approach hardly comes close to the real-time nurturing and optimization that is actually required and typically applied to say, a Google AdWords program.

In this column I want to list some tactics and best practices related to getting fans via Facebook advertising. The first thing you have to think about is what are the interests and demographics of the people who already love your brand. That is what we are trying to accomplish with building our fan base in the early stages. They are the lowest hanging fruit and will be a) the most engaged and b) the most likely group to become advocates. Real-world fans who become Facebook fans.

So how do we get those real-world fans via Facebook ads?

1. Targeting. Don’t just think of keywords, think of demographics: behaviors, related interests, competitive companies, and other things that your target audience is into. Facebook targeting is as much about “who” as it is about “what.”
2. Targeting groups. Don’t just lob everyone into one giant group. Break your campaigns into smaller groups – I like 10,000 to 15,000 people per group. That way you can customize and optimize your ads for each group.
3. Friends of fans. Target friends of fans: your ads will be shown displaying people they know who like your brand. Birds of a feather on Facebook often flock together.
4. Ad creative. Create many ad variations, at least 20 per campaign and have your next round of images and ideas locked and loaded for continual testing and optimization based on what you learn works. Ads can burn out super fast on Facebook – this is not search, where a good keyword ad keeps working because new people keep seeing it. These are small groups, so an unappealing ad will quickly die and stay dead.
5. Images. Show close-ups and customize the images for the micro-groups you created in your campaigns. People’s faces, women for women, men for men, couples for married, colored borders, city name in the image, bright backgrounds, etc. Have an arsenal of images to test and swap continually – often images are the easiest thing to test.
6. Copy. Have an arsenal of copy ready to test as well and keep it short and provocative. You don’t need to use every allotted character. Offers and questions that illicit an action are clearly best. Do you like XYZ – then hit “like”? Like or Dislike? (There is no dislike, so they will not click “like” if they don’t like it.)
7. Ad format. Make sure you’re using in-line or in-ad “likes.” Sponsored Like Stories help you leverage your fans to recruit their friends.
8. Segmented tracking. By breaking your campaigns up into segmented groups, you can now see what targets perform best and even apply that to other forms of advertising.
9. Ad rotation. Keep trying different creatives and if your CTR is below 0.05 percent, you are doing something wrong – try changing the image first. Typically ads have to be changed out every week.
10. Engagement. Don’t forget to engage your fans to build your EdgeRank (story for another day) by running sponsored post stories to your fans. The reality is you may have a ton of fans, but if they stop engaging with your posts, they will stop seeing your status updates.

One of the challenges of Facebook is its continual innovation and modifications to its ad offerings. But for an optimization-focused marketer, this is great because it increases the options that can be tested. So a final tip is to make sure you are up on all the current targeting selects and ad formats. They change very often, so keeping a change log and option menu is advisable.

So those are the big tips for now. As always, please comment and share any tips you have with the readers of this column.

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Meet up with top voices in search, social, display, and email marketing during ClickZ’s Connected Marketing Week, Aug. 15-19, in San Francisco.

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