How to start driving traffic and sales for your Kickstarter campaign with the marketing basics
So, you've made your Kickstarter page (If you've not made your page yet, take a look how easy it is here!), set up your social media channels and posting online (check out my tips on how to create engaging social posts) and decided on a launch date. But now you need to start getting people interested in your game and getting their attention to become day one backers.
The bulk of your Kickstarter marketing efforts should ideally be completed well before your official launch date.
Kicking off with a strong start can increase your chances of a successful campaign (If you raise at east 30-40% in the first 24 hours, you're more likely to become fully funded by the end of your campaign) and being featured as a popular campaign, essentially giving you free visibility within the Kickstarter community.
Here are some Kickstarter marketing basics that can increase your chances of a successful launch before you go live:
Make a pre-launch landing page (or Kickstarter pre-prelaunch page).
Use email marketing.
Use paid ads.
Reach out to Indie channels for reviews.
Pre-launch landing page
There are two ways you can go about this.
Option 1: Create a landing page that shows off your game, branding and design skills.
or,
Option 2: Use Kickstarter's pre-launch page. It's super easy to set up and requires barely any effort at all.
Option 1: Creating your own landing page
This is my preferred option. It gives you the chance to show off your game in more detail and give you the benefit of collecting email address that you can use for email marketing (we'll get on to that soon).
A landing page serves as a single page where you can direct traffic during your pre-launch. I wouldn't view a landing page as your 'official website' as its only purpose is to get viewers to learn more about your game and sign up with their email address in a simple, one page design. Design is a secondary consideration here, as your main purpose is conversions (sign ups). In order for people to sign up, you need to offer an incentive to your potential backers - So get creative, sometimes 'save XX% discount' just doesn't cut it anymore, as you're going to offer the discount on Kickstarter anyway. Why not offer subscribers an exclusive in-game reward?
This option can be low cost-effective (depending on your budget scale and platform choice) and 'no-code-required' website building tools offer visually appealing landing page templates. These options include platforms like Wix, Squarespace, Mail Chimp, and Shopify.
Your page should use the following layout:
Headline
Tagline or Summary
Sign up fields (usually just first name & email address).
3 Features or USPs (Unique Selling Points)
You can add more to show off more aspects of your game like the story, game play or characters, but the best practises is usually 'the shorter the better'.
In short, here's the pros and cons of a landing page.
👍Pro:
- Used to collect email address for email marketing.
- More design focused.
- Modular and easy to build (with selected websites).
- Great to use for marketing.
👎Con:
- More time consuming to get right.
- Set up and creation time.
Option 2: Kickstarter pre-launch page
To start kicking things off with a Kickstarter pre-launch page, you have to have your page approved by Kickstarter. This could take a couple of days and you need to have enough content on your page to show that your game is legit. Once you submit your page, you can still edit it before going live.
The Kickstarter pre-launch page is very simple in design. It's a way to get people notified that your campaign is live without the hassle of a fully designed landing page (and its free!).
The downside to a Kickstarter pre-launch page, is that anyone who lands on the page and wants to pre-save, they have to make a Kickstarter account.
To say it again, my preference out of the two is to go for your own landing page. But here are my pros and cons.
👍Pro:
- Easy to set up.
👎Con:
- Users have to create or already have a Kickstarter account to pre-save.
- Not great for using in paid marketing.
Email Marketing
If you've opted in for the landing page approach (smart move!) then you're likely going to want to start some email marketing.
Email marketing is great for direct communication to your subscribers. You basically tell them in an email everything you want them to know through a series of emails before you go live. Your first port of call would be to set up an automated response as a 'welcome' email. This is just to introduce yourself in a personal way and then use a 'Call-To-Action (a marketing term to prompt a response) such as 'Join the discord!'.
Email marketing platforms can get quite pricey depending on the number of emails you have. But this is worth the cost with it being the most effective way to be directly in front of people. Wix offers a pretty good option for email marketing at a cheaper cost vs the likes of Mail Chimp, and if you use Wix for you landing page, you can easily set up email campaigns and automations.
Here's what I would send in my email marketing plan:
Welcome email - Introduce yourself and get people to follow your socials.
Download the Demo / Check out these game features.
Kickstarter page preview link / Reward Tiers.
24 hour before launch email include the launch time (and time zones).
Launch email.
Paid Ads & Paid Social Media
Your post on social media can only take you so far. You have to build up your own community through creative and interest content to capture peoples attention, hoping they like what they see to then join in. Social Media platforms are always changing their algorithm, limiting your visibility unless it really takes off, making it more difficult to be seen.
Using paid ads gives you the chance to scale your visibility and capture attention at a larger scale across all Social Media platforms.
Ad platforms give you a bunch of different targeting options to find your ideal audience and use algorithms to optimise your ad performance to a specific action or conversions.
In the example below, I wanted to target users who have interest in souls-like games, Diablo and The Witcher, and also included interest in Role-playing games. I then overlaid the interest in Kickstarter, which gives a potential audience size of people in the US of up to 1.6 million Users.
So here you can see the potential of audiences to target
You can see another post I've made talking about how to set up Facebook ads for your pre-launch here.
👍Pro:
- Scale up to more audiences.
- Easy interface to use.
- Use algorithms to optimise towards your desired goal.
👎Con:
- Costly to scale.
- Difficult back-end set up.
Reach out to Indie channels for reviews
Tapping into pre-built channels that specialise in Indie Games is a great way to show your game to a new audience and a get discovered - Make sure you have a demo ready for this approach.
Start off by finding channels that have similar interest in your games. For example, if you have a horror game, you might want to find a channel that favours horror over anything else.
You ideally want to use these just before your game goes live or once your game is live and ask the channel to post a link to the Kickstarter. You can keep the momentum going by staggering your reviewers across the campaign to keep visibility up. Here are my recommendations of channels I think will serve you well.
IndieGameiacs Indie game promoter and content creator. Host of the Virtual Indie Booth live show.
The Pillow Fort Upcoming game announcements and game reviews.
The Indie Game Collective A community of content creators spotlighting Indie Games in live streams, videos, written reviews, podcasts and more.
Best Indie Games Showcasing Indie Games on YouTube with over 140k subscribers.
Indie Game Lover An Indie game curator active with wholesome YouTube content.