Gary is the Operations Manager of Gap Closer Games, Designer of Rival Restaurants and Rival Restaurants: Back for Seconds, and is on the Board of Directors at GAMA (Game Manufacturers Association).
You can watch the interview below:
Organic Marketing
Marketing comes in two main forms: paid marketing and organic marketing. Paid marketing is when you buy ads or spend money on things like booths at conventions. Organic marketing doesn’t involve directly spending money on advertising; things like reviewers and other tastemakers talking about your game, when you participate in panels or interviews, use social media, and/or give demos of your game to people are all forms of organic marketing.
One of Gary’s favorite ways to market games is at conventions. Conventions aren’t organic marketing in the truest sense of the term, especially if you pay for a booth, but you can reach out to a lot of people for a low cost, especially if you’re planning to attend anyway. Meeting people directly, making a personal connection with them, and playing his games with people is what Gary really enjoys about marketing at conventions.
Building Awareness
One of the end goals of attending and marketing at conventions is to have more people aware that your game exists. This can be as easy as setting up the game in the gaming hall and playing and waiting for people to ask about the game. However, unless they immediately decide to buy a copy of your game, it’s basically impossible to calculate the conversion rate with this method. When someone buys your game, it might be because a friend taught them, they saw it on social media a week ago, or a variety of other reasons that you can’t ever really know. Focusing on either building up your brand and/or game awareness is a much easier metric to plan for.
When you’re trying to decide to focus on either brand awareness or game awareness, it’s usually a pretty easy choice: if you’re a first-time creator, you should be focusing on game awareness. Most consumers don’t know about publishers, they just know games. After being in the industry for a while, Gary has now become a lot more knowledgeable about publishers, designers, and artists, but that’s more of a niche thing that only people that are super passionate about tabletop gaming care about.
Once you start getting a portfolio of games, you’ll want to switch to brand awareness. It’s not something that a lot of publishers initially think about, but their first game tends to really define what their brand is. If you don’t have your brand in mind when you continue to make games, it can be difficult to build up brand awareness. For example, if your first game is a short trick-taking game and your next is an 8-hour space battle, there’s not going to be a lot of overlap between the two games, and you’ll have to start the marketing process all over again for the second game.
When you’re thinking about what exactly your brand is, a good question to answer is this: what about your game are people drawn to? Focus on this and try to incorporate that same draw into your future games!
Chip Theory Games is a company that’s known for their high-quality components. That’s typically not enough of a similarity to define the brand, but they’re the exception to the rule.
Another example of brand awareness is Gamelyn Games with their Tiny Epic series. With those games, you know that the theme and mechanics will vary widely, but the box size, game weight, and price will all be about the same.
Smirk & Dagger Games did something really interesting with their brand; they have a sister company called Smirk & Laughter. Their segmenting of the brand was really smart, as just hearing the company names tells consumers what kind of games to expect.
Most Effective Organic Marketing
For Gary, the most effective organic marketing that he’s done has always been bringing the game directly to people to play, whether it’s bringing the game to a convention, friendly local game stores, or open game nights. This kind of marketing is entirely dependent on the product itself, as people love talking about what they love.
In contrast, when you’re on social media and telling people about the game, they’re simply hearing details about the game, not actually experiencing it. Experiences are a lot more memorable and impactful that just seeing a post or image on social media, although social media can remind people that have played the game that it exists, and they enjoyed playing it. The two types of marketing go hand in hand and combining them is more effective than just doing one or the other.
Another reason demoing the game directly to people is so effective is that when you teach someone how to play a game, you’re eliminating a major barrier to them having fun with the game. This includes doing a short demo of the game with people. As long as they understand what’s fun about the game and know a bit about it overall, they’re much closer to experiencing that fun themselves.
Finding People to Play Your Game
Meetup has a lot of local groups and there’s a ton of different platforms where you can reach people. You’ll really want to know your game and your audience, as that will determine the best way to reach out and find people to play your game. If your game is meant to be entry-level and light, with vibrant and inviting colors, you can simply sit down at a convention and people will be attracted to your game. You can also scan around conventions to see if people are playing anything similar. If so, ask if they’d be interested in learning about your game. With that light of a game, though, you probably shouldn’t approach people who are playing a much heavier game, and vice versa.
If you have a more mass-market game, instead of going to a board game convention, you might instead want to focus on other types of conventions, like comic cons, as those attendees are probably closer to your target audience.
Favorite Conventions
Gary is based in Southern California, so one of his favorite conventions is Strategicon, which draws around 2500-3000 people and happens 3 times a year. It’s also really convenient for him as he doesn’t have to fly or get a hotel.
Pax Unplugged is another great one, especially since it has a ton of fantastic food really close to the convention.
There are larger conventions, like Gen Con, which have somewhere close to 50,000 people at them. But they tend to be more expensive, and despite the hordes of people, you can only talk to a finite number of people in a certain amount of time. If you’re only going to be able to interact with maybe a few hundred people, it’s a much better bang for your buck to go to your local conventions. Another plus is that there are plenty of people that like to support their local communities and are willing to spend more money simply because you’re located close to them.
Conventions are great to make personal connections and allowing people to see the person behind the brand. It makes people feel more connected to the games if they’re met the designer or publisher directly.
Changing Market Strategy Due to the Pandemic
Practically everything changed for Gary in his marketing when the pandemic started. There was a sense in the beginning that he’d just wait it out, but it eventually became obvious that the pandemic was going to be longer than a few months. Closer Gap Games did some converting of their games to Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator, but they were lucky as they had just finished a Kickstarter campaign in February, so they didn’t need to do a lot of marketing in person at that point.
Most of Gary’s marketing has been engaging with their audience on the games they already released. He uses mainly Facebook and Instagram to engage with his audience. He’s also tried out TikTok a bit as it’s a different sort of medium.
Making Marketing Fun
Gary always tries to create marketing that’s engaging, usually asking people questions or having some sort of incentive when doing a specific marketing campaign. Having a goal for the post, either with clicking or sharing or somehow gamifying the experience tends to get a lot more engagement.
One recent campaign he did was to make a contest for a $150 board game shopping spree and asking people what they would get if they went on that shopping spree. Gary also tried a Pay it Forward campaign, where he asked people to send in a story of someone that’s had a bad 2020. Gary then went on to pick some of the stories and send them a free copy of his game. There were about 100 stories sent in total. It was a campaign that worked out really well, as it asked people to talk about someone in their life, then they did a zoom call together. Not only was the person who entered happier, but it also made the person they talked about happier as well. Gary ended up doing a zoom call between the winners and their friends, which allowed him to know each of them better and make a personal connection.
Knowing that a Campaign is Working
You often don’t know that a particular marketing campaign is really working in game sales, but you’ll want to establish objectives that you can easily track. For example, you can try to increase your mailing list subscriber count or your follower count on a social media platform.
You want to use SMART goals, which means goals that are:
- Specific (simple, sensible, significant)
- Measurable (meaningful, motivating)
- Achievable (agreed, attainable)
- Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based)
- Time bound (time-based, time-limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive)
You can find more information on SMART goals here.
You’ll want to keep track of your different metrics (follower counts, mailing list counts, etc.) so that you can see how they progress over time. You should be slowly gaining in all these numbers over time, and to see a specific marketing campaign’s results, you’ll need to take out the gradual increase that would’ve occurred otherwise.
If you’re tracking your data, you’ll also be able to see when spikes happen, and you’ll hopefully be able to attribute the spikes to specific events. Then you can try to engage more with those events to really get a benefit from them.
For instance, Gary noticed at one point from watching his google analytics that he was getting a lot of traffic from the Netherlands. He started looking into it and realized that someone on Instagram was driving the traffic, so he was able to lean in and send more copies of the game into that area so that the effect was multiplied.
What Gary Wished He Knew
One thing that Gary wished he knew when he started this was that moving physical things around the world is tedious, expensive, and hard. It can cost more to move the game than to make the game! Keeping that in mind when you’re designing can be super helpful.
Another important thing Gary wished he knew earlier was that you should use the design process as the marketing process. No one is going to steal your ideas and you can use the design process to start building awareness of your game. If people feel like they were able to see the game grow into what it is and like they helped with the design process, they’ll be really invested in the game and its success.
You can follow Gary on the following:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/penguinsoaring
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gapclosergames
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GapCloserGames/
- Website: https://gapcloserpublishing.com/
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