Campaign Management

Many of the various platforms built to promote business online come with the ability to quantify results. YouTube tallies the number of views and comments for a video. Facebook ad campaigns let you drill down into the number of impressions and clicks received per ad spot, and then they let you look up demographical data for each spot as well. If you manage your email marketing with a tool like Constant Contact, you can set up emails in a way that they report how many times they were received, opened, or had content clicked through on an embedded link.

When these platforms don't aggregate data, or enough data for your tastes, you can always utilize free tools like statcounter or Google analytics to fill in the gap. Google analytics will even allow you to drill down to the point where customers backed out of a sale on your website. They show a funnel chart with percentages to let you see where you are losing potential customers. They even allow you to set goals within their easy to use control panel, and tie in your existing ad words campaigns you may be using for search engine marketing with Google.

At Huebris, we make video games. Our objective is to become a household name for selling games the whole family can enjoy. We want to sell games. We want customers to expect our games will be fun and safe for everyone who plays or watches them. Obviously, our big conversions are the sales of our game titles. Depending on the game, a conversion could be worth $15-65. We will have add-on content for games as well that will be worth $5-10. For the purposes of this article, we will look at the benefits, or lack thereof, of investing in the various platforms and channels discussed in our Situation Analysis. Costs will be relayed in terms of both hard advertising dollars and time multiplied by salary. We will consider the conversion of one of our $15 games that will be sold in the Xbox Live Arcade. In addition, we would like to amend our KPI's include actual sales of our game titles, and we would like our target to be 150 thousand sales per game title.

Search Engine Optimization
We will budget roughly $15,000 to be spent on a micro-site for our game titles. These sites will come equipped with good SEO practices in place, and the cost for these implementations will come in the form of labor within our company. Roughly one-third of the cost of the site will be reserved for SEO enhancements to the site, so $5000 will be spent per XBLA game title on search engine optimization. This is roughly 10% of our overall budget for marketing on a game title of this size and nature. Google analytics will be used to insure we have collected information about our visitors. We want to see how many of them came from search engines, but also we want to see if they came from links from our social networks, or from press releases on other game websites. We also want to double check to see if users are coming from our email campaigns. Hopefully, this site will help with micro-conversions, in that people will follow our company and game title on Facebook and Twitter as a direct result of their visit to our site. Our sites will house YouTube videos of our content as well, and aid in boosting views of our content. Ultimately, we expect the investment in SEO to increase traffic to our site by 500,000 visitors. We also assume that one out of every 5,000 visitors will buy our game, and one out of every 10,000 will fan/follow us on our social networks.

Paid Search/Pay-Per-Click Advertising
As mentioned previously, paid SEM will only be used to encourage people to join our email list or follow/like us on our social networks. This kind of advertising will be used to create a buzz factor. Currently, a typical ad campaign on Facebook, with the direct intent of gaining new followers, would cost up to $1.50 per click. Of course, a simple click does not guarantee we will have a new follower/subscriber. On our Facebook page, we would use a custom landing page, that will allow people to get a quick glimpse of our game via an embedded YouTube clip. Facebook's campaign analytics would allow us to see impressions of our ads, and clicks. We can then see how many clicks lead to "likes" on Facebook. We will discuss the conversion of Facebook followers later in this article. Huebris assumes that one out of every 10 clicks will result in someone either "liking" us or subscribing to our newsletter. We expect one out of every two clicks to result in someone watching our YouTube video. This will be the last thing we utilize according to our budget. After all other channels have been covered, the remainder can go into this area of marketing. Most likely, around $4,000 will be allocated to this channel. It is important to note that millions of impressions will be realized through this method of advertising.

Promotion/PR
Huebris expects about 90% of all our press releases to be picked up by the video game news sites to whom we distribute our materials. There are no hard costs associated with this type of advertising, but once again, we will incur labor costs. Every press release will require time by our marketing crew to write up a new article, and every article will be accompanied by a YouTube video. It is within this channel of our marketing efforts that we will add in the costs of developing these YouTube videos. They will be developed in-house, and will consist of recorded gameplay footage. These videos will showcase gameplay elements, and will require minimal effort to collage into a small video file. An example of one of these videos can be seen at joystiq here for the upcoming game Portal 2. Game news sites love these videos, and they will usually add a pre-roll advertisement to it, and they are usually not competitive with your own product. You can gage success of these PR efforts in several ways. Most articles on these sites allow people to leave comments. You can tally responses. A lot of these sites also have quick share buttons to Facebook, Twitter and other social media/sharing places on the web. You can see how many times people shared that article. In many ways, this takes the job of trying to go "viral" out of your court. You can also see how many times people viewed that video. Huebris expects that the average press release campaign will cost roughly $12,000 in labor and delivery. We also assume that these campaigns will result in roughly 10 million views of our YouTube videos for our game title. This is by far the best micro-conversion rate we will enjoy. Furthermore, we expect the same person to view several of our videos. In the end, we assume that one out of every 2,500 viewers will lead to a sale of our game. This will earn us around 4,000 sales of our $15 game. Our video stream is also expected to lead people to our website and social media networks as well. We expect to gain one new fan per 10,000 views.

Display Advertising
Display advertising will be used to get people to our social networks and to buy our titles. As mentioned previously, we will most likely advertise on channels that promote games already, and pay special attention to those sites where we already have press releases. Some of the advertising via Facebook could probably be considered Display advertising, but seeing as our goal of PPC advertising is to increase our fan-base, it made more sense to file it under that category. Sometimes, display ads can be offered at a PPC fashion, but many times websites like to price them by impressions. Pricing and quantification of results can vary from site to site, which is why Google's adWords is so popular for housing display advertising campaigns. Once again, this mode of advertising isn't expected to render nearly the same results as others. It is more on par with the results we expect to see from paid search and Pay-Per-Click advertising. Therefore, a remainder of our marketing budget will be used for display advertising. This means for a typical Xbox Live Arcade game title release, we would only spend around $4,000. However, we expect the cost of this channel to be lower, somewhere around .50 cents per click. Once again we expect that one out of every 10 clicks will result in someone following us on one of our social media platforms or joining our newsletter. We plan to double-check our ads are being clicked by measuring in-bound visitors from the pages where these display ads are housed via Google Analytics.

Social Media and Viral Marketing
As mentioned in previous articles, we have high expectations for our social networks, and plan on using them as part of our KPIs to gage how we are coming along in our objective of becoming a household name. Huebris has the specific target of 150 thousand fans on our social networks within our first three years of business. We believe that one out of every 10 fans will buy our game titles. That means, once we have attained our goal of 150 thousand fans, we can expect roughly 15 thousand sales of our game title. Huebris will push out a lot of content via our social media presence. We will post links to our press releases on other news sites. We will post links to our YouTube videos. We will also post announcements to when our game titles go on sale, as well as success stories like "Thirty thousand people bought 'Our Game Title' within the first 24-hours of its release!" The only costs for this channel are, once again, labor costs. Our marketing department will simply follow up on our press releases to publish links to them within our social networks. They will post updates to the game. The biggest cost to our marketing department will come up front when we customize our social networks to match our branding motifs. The overall costs are expected to be around $2,500. It should be noted, that Huebris has immense interests in gaining fans to our Facebook fan page from within our games. Game development studio Bizarre Creations is on the forefront of this idea. For their game, "Blur," they attached a game achievement to becoming a fan and sharing their game accolades online (PR Newswire). This resulted in them gaining over 67 thousand fans of their game title on Facebook. The cost of implementing these high-tech crossovers of video game titles directly into social media sites like Facebook is expected to cost  $10 thousand per game title. The initial game may cost more to meet the required amount of research and tools development. However, we expect to gain at least 20 thousand new fans to our Facebook account through this platform. It is important to note that these fans are coming after someone has already bought our game title. In many respects, this helps build are brand online, but not necessarily sales. It will most likely be immensely useful when our next game title, or sequel for the game is released. But, it can also be useful when friends see their other friends posting about playing our game, and earning achievements. We believe one out of every 20 Facebook fans will lead a friend to joining our social media stream there. Perhaps they could even lead to additional sales, but we will categorize this as word-of-mouth. It should be noted that word-of-mouth is expected to account for 90% of our sales overall. Advertising for a small company like Huebris is all about finding early adopters of our games, and then getting them to advertise virally to their friends. As Huebris grows, perhaps this model will change, but we believe it is perfect for a small studio environment.

Email
Our email marketing campaigns will be short, sweet and demand clicking through to outside content to get the big picture. Blasts will be used to show release dates, and current buzz surrounding a project. We will also mention if our game is being sold at a discount, and to announce that materials are being released for a game such as add-on content. Huebris will have its own company email blast, and individual game titles will also have their own separate email campaigns. The emails will usually being image intensive and may show a YouTube video clip in the middle of them. Of course, with the exception of Gmail, embedded videos don't play in emails very well. We will make the apparently embedded YouTube video, just link to our actual YouTube channel and play the video from there. It is important to note that we will eventually customize our YouTube channel to reflect either our game titles and/or our company brand. We expect to spend roughly $6,000 to setup and maintain an email campaign for our video game titles. This cost includes the platform such as Constant Contact, as well as setting up the email template for the campaign, and the labor cost from the marketer who would manage it. Between all our different channels, we hope to build a list of around 15 thousand subscribers, and we expect one out of every 25 subscribers to purchase our game title. We also expect one out of every 10 subscribers to eventually follow us on one of our social media sites.

Affiliate Marketing
This area of marketing is unique in that it guarantees profit for every instance that we are advertised. As mentioned in previous articles, we plan to utilize ad placement on the Xbox360 when users login to their accounts. Trending topics and news aggregated by Microsoft and Xbox are the first thing that a user sees when logging into their account. These topics are often advertisements for video games in their Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft would enjoy a commission of our game sales when they resulted from placement in these spots. Looking at our marketing costs if we were to choose other channels, we can come to a fair percentage of the take that Microsoft would have from these resulting sales.

Summary Recap
After examining the potential mediums where Huebris can allocate its marketing budget it is quite clear that press releases and social media are the outlets that lend themselves to the best results. Email is the next best contender, but is still far from the success we will find through PR and social media ventures. Of course having a website is essential for today's customers, and we will have one for our company and for our individual game titles. We may, however, not put as much effort into SEO after discovering it's low social and sales conversion. Pay-Per-Click and Display Advertising also offer marginal results when compared to other channels, and will only be utilized for their power of brand recognition later in our company's maturity. Currently they offer very little redeeming value for their costs. Below is a chart that shows the costs versus the benefit of each of the advertising channels discussed above:

Affiliate marketing has purposefully been excluded from the stats above, as it linearly follows a cost-to-sale structure. Thank you for your time, and for reading.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

Does the Internet empower or distract? Is Facebook a tool for networking or not-working? Reliance on technology has always come with simultaneous acclaim and fear. Check out the article we wrote on the topic at the Learning is Now Here blog.

Channel Selection

To obtain the various goals and core objective of Huebris, we will market ourselves on a number of Internet channels and platforms. Below is a brief outline of our strategy:

Selected Channels

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• This is a must for all of our websites, both in our company site and our product sites. If we want to have visitors find our site organically, we need to subscribe to good SEO practices. Unfortunately, the expectation of a video game's interactivity extends to the game's promotional website. To meet such demands, the solution has been to use Adobe Flash player. While Flash is great for rich Internet applications (RIA), they are not great for indexing content in search engines. The good news is that new HTML5 procedures will allow both of these benefits to coexist. We will most likely move with the industry to make sites that are engaging and search engine-friendly.
• Paid Search/Pay-Per-Click advertising
• The mainstay of our products will exist on channels outside the Internet and a visitor's personal computer. Seeing that we will not be able to convert visits directly into sales from the Internet, we will only use paid search options and SEM to build a community and generate buzz prior to a game title's release. Most of these paid searches will lead to our company site and our social networks. To gage conversion, we will look for things like email subscriptions and followers.
• Promotion/PR
• Huebris will utilize many of the major online video game websites and blogs. We will submit articles to IGN, Gamestop, Xbox Magazine, GameTrailers.com, joystiq, etc. Articles will share our production and development process, community involvement and release dates.
• Display Advertising
• Display advertising will be done minimally because of the hard cost attached. As a game company, our advertisements won't be the typical text or static jpeg ads. We plan to keep them Flashy and interesting. We want to build interest in our titles, so we will have these ads hosted on sites that would appeal to them. In fact we may request advertising on sites in which we already house press releases. We would be much more likely to generate clicks from people who have already clicked the site to read an article about our content in the first place.
• Social Media and Viral Marketing
• It's cheap and only costs time, of course we will invest our time in social media. This will be our channel through which we blend all our other marketing efforts. We don't want our efforts in each of these categories to be insulated from each other. For example, a new visitor to our game title's Facebook fan page, will land on splash page with a YouTube video embedded on it that will display our game's preview. The YouTube page will link to both the game's website and our company site. We will also use social media to engage our community directly, asking them questions and posting polls to see what they want from our games.
• Email
• Special focus will be used on emails so long as they continue to be the dominant force for engaging the masses. Currently, trends are showing that younger generations don't like email, and that they want information delivered faster and in more digestible bursts. But, polls also suggest that teens don't tweet. A majority of our customers will be younger, and we want to appeal to them. Huebris is a big proponent of the Pareto principle, and will invest our time in areas that will yield the highest return. Once again, we will cross-promote other marketing channels within this one. Buttons that link to our Twitter feed and Facebook fan page will exist on each of our email blasts.
• Affiliate Marketing
• Delivering our content via the Xbox Live Arcade presents a unique opportunity for affiliate marketing. When users turn on their Internet connected Xbox console, they immediately see advertisements and announcements of upcoming and newly released games and content. Huebris plans to pay Microsoft a portion of the sales from games downloaded directly from these advertisements. Microsoft pushes our content from the moment a gamer turns on their console, and in turn they receive a portion of the sale.

Campaign Budget

Our budget for a typical game title will be between 10 to 20-percent of the cost of development for the title itself. These costs will be comprised of either hard advertising dollars or direct employment costs for completing these tasks in-house.

A majority of our work will be done utilizing "free" channels. So we will spend most of our time and energy on email campaigns, SEO, social networks, PR and affiliate marketing. If a game title costs a half-million to produce, we will spend between 50-100 thousand on marketing it. Depending on the speed with which we need to start generating sales, for instance if a game goes to market in October, just a month before the Christmas season, we may utilize more hard cost advertising initiatives. Otherwise, we will build our message organically and methodically without paying as much on display advertising and pay-per-click campaigns.

Campaign Duration

We will continually put content into the hands of our marketers to go to press with during a game's development cycle. We will push this content at expos and conferences throughout the year, and send it to various game magazines and online blogs. We will update our community and fan-base throughout the development cycle as well. Within 3 months of our release date, Huebris will begin hard cost advertising to bring other fans into the mix. Not everyone is an early adopter, and we will advertise on sites like Facebook to get people to our fan pages and on our email lists. After a title has been released for two months, we will rely on word-of-mouth to continue the spread of our game's popularity. We will send out press releases that relay our title's success and community reception. For example, if a title is released in October, we will have begun advertising for it in the middle of July and our campaigns will come to a close by the new year.

Goals and Objectives

Within the scope of my business many different goals and objectives will exist depending upon the product being developed and sold. For the purpose of this article, I will focus primarily on my businesses ability to develop video games.

Objectives

In the broadest sense, Huebris wants to become a household name synonymous with the creation of video games that are fun and appropriate for the entire family.

Goals

We have several goals that will help us to maintain our objective:

• Always maintain an "E" (for everyone) rating on our game titles (ESRB Rating Guide)
• Utilize industry tools and develop proprietary tools for moderating and screening user-generated content
• Market ourselves to all audiences both in our message and the channels by which we spread said message
• Fill our games with universally appealing content

Key Performance Indictators (KPIs)

Obviously, we will utilize social media networks to advertise both our company and our game titles. Through moderation of our social media fan page on Facebook we will have access to demographical data. We will also use statistical data outside of Facebook from companies like Neilsen to assess different demographic data to weigh against our social media data. In addition to this data, we will use feedback on our own company forums, and from the users who create accounts in our company or game websites.

Targets

For a typical game title, we will want to see several targets achieved in our various KPIs:

• Gain 5,000 followers between Facebook and Twitter during the development of our title
• Maintain 25,000 followers within 3 months of releasing our title
• Maintain an even split between male and female users within 2% of game players
• Obviously, social networks are dominated by younger generations, but we would like to have our age demographic percentages mirror social network user age percentages.
• Gain over 150,000 followers, subscribers and users to our social networks, fan pages, and company website within 3 years of producing game titles.

The targets we set will be able to determine the success of our KPIs. When we see that we have achieved appropriate percentages of followers to our social networks by age, we will know that our titles are relevant to everyone in a household, independent of age. Or, if we discover that males dominate our social networks, we can course correct our marketing and/or game development to be less masculine, or to include more elements that would appeal to the female customer. This drill down process is great for examining when and where an area is coming up short from our overall objective.

Situation Analysis

Business Model

Huebris makes video games. In addition to this product, we also have a host of secondary, and even tertiary products and services rendered. Our own studio has a need for a strong Internet presence. This stems from our need to have a website that reflects the brand of our business in an engaging company site. This site is home to a forum for all our fans. We also have sites created for our individual games. Completing these tasks in-house is not only cheaper than outsourcing them, but also allows our game development staff to allow the world of their video games to crossover to the Internet and vice versa. The web team also helps to update our proprietary project management systems, which operate in “the cloud”. We update our project management software as needs are discovered, however, we package it for resell to other game development studios once a year. This product is very valuable to our company as well as others. We develop training books that outline how to use our own software, as well as books on good practices within the game development industry. Many of these books are compiled from research into our own projects, as well as our developer blogs and forum entries. We find that selling our trade secrets does not hinder our growth, but develops a loyal consumer base—both to our video games, and to our software releases. With time, our company also plans to produce our own game engines (the coded platform upon which a game runs), and sell other studios licenses to produce games in our engines. It's a lot to take in, so here is an outline:

• Direct to consumer products
• Video games
• Game expansions and add-ons
• Community websites
• Game guides
• Franchise toys and collectibles
• Official soundtracks
• Game developer products
• Project management solutions
• Training and educational materials
• Game engines

We consider our first priority customer to be our direct consumers. The products we create for other game developers spawn from the tools created to satisfy our own consumer base. Typical sales of video games for our customers will range from $15 to $65. Our $15 price will usually come from the sale of Xbox Live Arcade games, and the $65 price from full AAA titles. With time, we will package full titles at tiered pricing under naming conventions that sync with the game franchise. Higher priced packages will come with extra limited edition merchandise such as behind the art books, Blu-rays, etc.

Competition

The video game industry has been accused of being recession-proof on numerous occasions. However, the recent economic climate has proven that no industry is truly immune to such things. Despite the disappointment that such claims aren't true, the industry itself is in much better shape than most. In times of recession, the entertainment industries usually find that they do much better than others. Why? People still need an escape from their humdrum lives. They can't afford the fancy cars and houses, but they can dream, and entertainment media is all about the fantastical. It's the vicarious fulfillment of all our needs at a fraction of the price.

With all the new technology and devices, games will assuredly continue to enjoy growth. Today's TV's are coming packaged with "apps" and app stores (Samsung app store). The mobile game market is exploding as all the manufacturers scurry to catch up with Apple's app store. Today games are being developed for the iPhone, iPad, Droid, Blackberry, and the new Windows 7 phone line. The latter is giving users the chance to sync up with other phones and even with their Xbox consoles. So we have an influx of devices, and they are all starting to talk to each other. This doesn't even include social gaming that happens by the millions every month on sites like Facebook. The hard question to answer is, "Where do you invest your time as a developer of these games?"

Huebris plans to make fun games for the whole family. We believe that no company has truly monopolized on attaching their brand to this idea. As a console, the Nintendo Wii came close to selling itself as fun for people of all ages. This idea certainly helped them to sell more consoles of this generation of devices than their competitors at Microsoft with the Xbox360 and Sony with the Playstation 3. Although, some may attribute this success to the much cheaper price tag, sitting comfortably well under the competition. Nintendo is a huge console vendor; Huebris is a game developer. We intend to be the first developer to become a household name for family-friendly games. We believe games can be fun, engaging and entertaining for everybody. Our philosophy is that we do not need to market to one group through exploits into the arena of gory violence and hyper-sexualization. These markets are already saturated anyways. So, in many ways, our titles will vary in content when compared to our competitors.

They will, however, not vary in pricing structure. We want to establish ourselves as a major competitor in the world of video games, and as such our games will match the prices of our competition. This will instill the idea that our games are quality entertainment in the minds of our consumers. In a way, it is prestige pricing. People assume quality from full cost titles. For this reason, we have no plans to sell ourselves short of our competitors. So far, the closest competitor that we feel resembles our philosophy is TT Games. They are the driving force behind the Lego universe of video games. Their titles include Lego Indiana Jones, Batman and Harry Potter. These games are built around high action franchises, but still maintain a playful "G-Rated" feel. However, they probably aren't nearly as universal to people of all ages as Pixar movies are to the film world.

Customer

Obviously, Huebris will market products to both consumers and other businesses. In the world of our video games, we hope to reach all demographics. We believe titles can sell that are popular to children, college students and adults. The game industry is evolving and maturing. Society is finding that kids who grew up with video games aren't letting go with age; they are further cementing their childhood obsessions. According to a very recent Nielsen report, the average World of Warcraft player spends 471 minutes a week in the game. That's nearly a full workday spent in a digital universe, and most people play more than one game! Even more promising for games that appeal to all ages is the fact that the same Nielsen report shows the top ten titles, and among them are games like Call of Duty (for college aged people and adults) and Lego Harry Potter (For Years 1-4). Access the Nielsen Report here.

For our business-end product lines, we have very few competitors. There are very few companies that sell both video games and the tools to make them. Even fewer, are the developers who sell project management software tailored specifically to video game development studios. Most studios have to depend on solutions developed in-house, which can have the benefit of doing exactly what the studio needs, but more often has the negative consequence of being developed haphazardly and becoming a tangled mess. Huebris would probably receive more competition from everyday business project management suites such as Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com) than specific suites that cater to a game development studio's needs. So far, we have been unable to find a single example of such a product.

Game engines are an area where competition will exist, although still not on a large scale. There seems to be a gap between pricing structures for game engines as well. The high-end engines run at around a million dollars to license. This price can be seen in the Unreal engine. The engine has the latest and greatest capabilities and robust developer back-end toolsets. There are few engines that are comparable graphically, easy to use, and have community laid track work. Few competitors also parallel their support. The Crytek engine is on par graphically, but the support community and ease of use aren't nearly as approachable.

Once you get past these behemoths, other engines range in the $1,000 - $10,000 range. Engines like the Unity3D engine and Torque engine are much cheaper to develop games on, and they have seen much success in allowing their engine to operate on mobile platforms like the iPhone. Even small Flash engines can make their way onto the Xbox Live arcade, and cost very little to license. Huebris believes that there is room for a mid-range tier of game engines. Much of the reason the Unreal engine license costs a million dollars is because there is little competition for it. If Huebris creates a true quality product--and we should, we are following the same development plan that the Unreal engine did--we can offer an excellent game engine at a much more affordable price model.