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How to promote yourself and your work

Estimated time to read: 13 minutes

For most of us, game developers, the most important thing is to make games. But, in order to make games, we need to promote ourselves and our work. In this section, we will learn how to do that.

Defining the target to be promoted

Before we start promoting, we need to define what we want to promote. The main difference between promoting ourselves or our work is the tone, the message and the medium being promoted. So we can build a successful strategy.

In ether path you chose, consider the following questions:

  • What is the target audience?
  • What is the target platform?
  • What is the target medium?
  • What is the target message and content?
  • What is the target call to action?
  • What is the target result?
  • How to measure the success?
  • How to improve the promotion?

Defining the Audience

Before creating and running a promotion campaigns, we need to define the audience. The audience is the group of people we want to reach with our promotion and it can defined by the following:

  • Recruiters, HR, and hiring managers;
  • Other game developers, especially those who are in the same field as you;
  • Game players;
  • Journalists, writers and critics;
  • Investors;
  • Communities;

About Platforms

To reach specific audiences, we need to be in the same platform they are. For example: - Game players: Steam, Twitch, YouTube, itchio, GameJolt, Discord; - Journalists: Twitter, LinkedIn; - Investors: AngelList, Ycombinator, LinkedIn, Crunchbase; - Communities: Reddit, Discord, Facebook, Twitter; - Recruiters: mostly Linkedin.

Social media is a great way to promote yourself as a game developer. You can use it to share your work, your thoughts, your ideas, and your opinions. You can also use it to connect with other developers and learn from them.

Here goes my opinion about the most important platforms:

  • Twitter: it is the best and easy way to communicate with anyone in the world. The distance between to reach anyone is zero. And it has an awesome tagging structure. It is a great way to share your thoughts and ideas and ask for feedbacks. It is a great way to connect with other developers and learn from them. You can also use it to share your work and promote your games.
  • LinkedIn: It is a great way to connect with recruiters and hiring managers. Usually you will see other developers publishing their thoughts and ideas, so try to post relevant comments on their publications to get noticed and improve your visibility.
  • Facebook: It is mostly a general purpose social media. You can use it to connect with your friends and family, and collect feedbacks for your content. It is a great way to promote your finished games.
  • Instagram and Tiktok: Are more focused in fast, small and visual content. You can use it to promote your games and your work, but it is not the best way to share your thoughts and ideas.
  • Reddit: This one is the best for collecting feedbacks from other developers about your content, but the reach is limited.
  • Discord: The best tool be in touch with communities, you can build your own community for your game and be in direct contact with yours consumers. Another good use is to be in direct contact with other developers and learn from them.
  • YouTube and Twitch: The best way to share your work and promote your games.
  • Medium and Blogs in general: The best way to share your thoughts and ideas and ask for feedbacks. You can use it in conjunction with other platforms to catch the general attention and bring them to your content.

Mediums

The mediums are: Social media posts, Blog posts, Email, Podcasts, Videos, Events, Conferences, Meetups, Workshops, Webinars, Webcasts, and more.

For each type of medium, we need to plan the content, the frequency, and the duration. We have very nice tools to help us with that, like Buffer, Hootsuite and many others.

Message and tone

The message is the main idea we want to communicate. The tone is the way we want to communicate it. You have to match the tone with the message in the given platform to reach the right audience. So plan ahead how you want to communicate your message and what tone you want to use.

When planning the message, it is good to plan the emotions we want to trigger in the audience. For example, if we want to promote our game, we can use the following emotions: Excitement, Joy, Curiosity, and Fun. If we want to promote yourself by doing something interesting, you can use the following emotions: Curiosity, Fun, Surprise and Pride.

Call to action

The call to action is the action we want your audience to take. It can be: Download the game, Read my Resume, be part of by community, Take a look on my Repository, Buy the game, Play the game, Follow me, Subscribe, Share, Like, Comment, and more.

Results

Whatever is your goal, you need to define the results you want to achieve so you should track and measure your progress. You can use tools like Google Analytics mostly for web content, Google Firebase for apps and games and many other.

Here some ideas of results you can track: Number of downloads, page views, number of people reaching you, number of followers, number of subscribers, number of likes, number of comments, number of shares, number of retweets, number of reposts and more.

Improving the promotion

If you really want to go deep in this rabbit hole, I highly recommend you to create performance measurements such as KPI dashboard to track your progress and improve your promotion. You can use tools like Google Data Studio or Tableau. With the KPI dashboard, you can track your progress and improve your promotion. You can also use it to track your competitors and learn from them.

Another good strategy is to A/B test your promotion. You can use tools like Google Optimize to create different versions of your promotion and test which one is the best. You can also use it to test different messages, tones, and call to actions. I cannot stress enough how important it is to test your promotion, the most successful companies in the world do it. Zynga even quoted once "We are not in the business of making games, we are in the business of testing games" and "We are a data warehouse maskerated as a game company". So being data-driven and customer-centric is the key to success.

Homework

  • Create a promotion strategy for yourself and your work.
  • What would be your first content and medium to promote?
  • What is the message and the tone?
  • Define your call to action.
  • How do you measure your results?
  • How would you plan to improve your promotion?

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this content. If you have any questions, please create an issue in this repository. If you want to contribute, please create a pull request. If you want to support me, please share this content with your friends and colleagues. If you want to support me financially, please consider buying me a coffee or a very fancy wine.