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.
- 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.
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