Introduction:
A marketing plan might sound something awfully hard to do for a game developer, but to briefly put it: the marketing plan is flight plan on how to get game to players. The contents of a marketing plan can be divided into several sections. A strategic plan or the company’s business plan will describe the company’s strategic objectives. The marketing plan will focus on those major objectives, and how to reach those goals.
Contents of a Marketing Plan:
These sections of a marketing plan are listed below.
[1] Goals
[2] Distribution
[3] Product
[4] Promotion
[5] Website
[6] Demo
[7] Measurement
[8] Maintenance
[9] Refinement
1. Goals – Make Sure You Know Where You Are Heading:
Goals define where we are going. In an marketing plan, we can start by choosing the goal for the desired income. Then, we continue by adding the goals for sales, downloads, conversion rate, and the price for your product. Let’s assume our goal is to make $50.000. The pricing of a game may depend on several variables. We might look at what others are using and settle for $19.95. Or you might try a bargain price and go with $9.95. Some people have used $29.95. Depending on your game, the company’s profile, target market, you might price your game differently. It’s worth noting that we might want to adjust the price later. Maybe you realize that $9.95 is too low and go with $15.95 and still get the same number of sales. But for starters, let’s assume we use $19.95 as the price of our game.
The eCommerce provider gets about 10% of each sale, so the actual profit for us per game would be about $18. To make $50.000 we would need about 2800 sales. If we assume that one out of hundred players purchase our game, then game’s conversion rate would be 1.0%. The rule of thumb could be that very targeted games receive higher conversion rates, up to 2%, 3% or even 5% while more generic games, or games with severe competition may