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.
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:
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