Kickstarter in Review Part IV: The Mosaic of Organic Marketing
[Read the full Kickstarter in Review series]
Our paid advertising campaign for Nut Hunt brought in 32 backers for a total of $1,156 pledged... Which means that we raised $41,662 from 1,200 backers through our social proof (preview) campaign and mostly organically.
Which is pretty incredible.
So, let’s take a closer look at our organic marketing and social proof campaigns.
Social Proof
Before we dig into our organic outreach, it’s worth remembering that a Kickstarter is more than the sum of its parts. It is a mosaic of reviews, page content, gameplay, and community.
We had a paid review campaign that I’ll examine in depth in a future article. The campaign brought some eyes to our project, but more so was an additional touch point and a form of social proof.
Our paid preview campaign did give our campaign some exposure. Often people need a couple of touch points before a product clicks with them, and more importantly, the social proof from the campaign page was a large diver of convincing page visitors that Nut Hunt is a game worth backing.
Reviews from recognized content creators creates trust in terms of gameplay, tone, and is another data point that the publisher did their due diligence and is taking their campaign seriously.
The Blog
I am wary to label this blog as marketing. It is. And I think that social outreach and content creation is important for publishers and creators more broadly. But, it’s also more than a tool for marketing.
At its heart it’s something that I would be excited to create even if it didn’t bring eyes to our brand.
Long before I started the blog, I was active on forums, and have always shared my expertise through an array of media and outreach. The blog is a natural extension of that innate desire to share knowledge and to create.
However, the consistency of effort, time, and scope is informed by my responsibility as the face of Pine Island Games.
The blog is an interesting case study in content creation. It has been a powerful tool for our brand, has established our reputation as a publisher, and has helped me find our voice as a brand and set a tone that we strive to maintain.
And undoubtedly it has brought some eyes to our company, game, and helped us make connections within the industry.
But, at the same time, a blog on board game publishing is not directly consumer facing.
Aspiring board game publishers, and indie publishers (who I am assuming are the primary consumers of this content), are an extremely specific niche. And a small portion of the market that a board game should be targeted at.
A channel on reviews or gameplay would be more directly consumer facing.
But, I chose a blog on games publishing as my primary content creation (outside of board games). It was always a natural choice for me.
I didn’t and don’t think that I have much to add in terms of review content, I don’t have skills in video production, and I ramble too much for a podcast.
The blog allows me to explore topics in areas where I ran into difficulty, or places where I struggled to find in depth information all in one place. It’s something I enjoy doing.
My point with this context is to encourage creators to find the medium that is a natural fit for them. Not everyone should write a blog, be on TikTok, run a YouTube channel. Not everyone should create content around design, reviews, or publishing.
Over the past year our website has had 54k pageviews from 31k unique IP addresses. The vast majority of that traffic was to our blog articles.
It is hard to contextualize the impact that the blog had on our campaign. It isn’t a direct form of marketing. It contributed to the mosaic. It demonstrates our competence, and it helps us connect with the community.
Guests Posts & Podcasts
Leading into and during our Nut Hunt campaign, I was featured on, or wrote guest posts for other content creator’s platforms. Places like:
The Board Game Design Lab (podcast)
Diary of a Lincoln Geek (videocast)
And post campaign on:
Leaving a Legacy (podcast)
Crowdfunding Nerds (podcast) (episode airing Monday 08/01)
In past articles I talked about the importance of timing with these kinds of guest posts and appearances. Some of our higher traffic features (Stonemaier & BGDL) aired ahead of the campaign and so we missed out on a strong call to action from those audiences.
Timing aside, creating content for other creator’s platforms is a great way to build community, and reach more people. It adds validity and authority to our brand, it gets more eyes on our projects, and it’s a lot of fun.
It’s also a win-win-win for us as a publisher, the content creator who we are featured on, and their audience. I can say from firsthand experience, that it is always nice when as a creator you can take a day off of creating your own content. I love the occasional guest post that we feature on our blog – it gives a new perspective to our readers and is a lot less work for me.
TikTok
TikTok is a growing platform for board game content creators. Top channels in the review space have >100k followers, while most design and publishing channels have in the single digit thousands of followers (I think Mondo Davis may have the highest follower count design channel at 25k).
At the time of campaign launch we had just over 1,000 TikTok followers, which is an important threshold as it allows for live streaming on the platform.
What I love about TikTok is that it allows for real personal connections and interactions which are harder to make on other social media platforms. I’ve developed a number of real friendships through the platform, people who I play games with on TTS, chat with, and text about games publishing and life.
I don’t have the time or technical knowhow to create really well produced videos on TikTok. So, the platform will likely always be a bit of a secondary form of outreach. But, I really like the platform, because it allows for more casual content creation and interaction not just highly produced shorts.
Conventions
Over the past year we attended Gen Con, Pax East, and Total Con. We’ll also be at Gen Con next week – come visit us at booth 2151! We have a nice big, 10 x 20 booth so will have plenty of space for playtesting.
Playtesting at Gen Con 2021
Conventions are an expensive, but powerful and rewarding way of connecting with the board gaming community.
We’ve built strong friendships with gamers we met at conventions. They are some of our most ardent supporters.
Forums
I occasionally see advice to new designers that they should market their games on board game design forums. I think the advice is misguided.
Board game design forums are not your target audience. They are extremely niche and oversaturated with people looking to sell their games.
I’m pretty active on game design and publishing forums – r/tabletopgamedesign, r/boardgamedesign, The Board Game Design Lab (Facebook), and Crowdfunding Nerds (Facebook) being some of my favorites.
I think that most indie designers should hang out on the forums, should share their art and their process. But, the strength of design forums is not as a marketing tool. The strength of the forums is that they are a place for us to learn, to find community, to support each other and to make connections.
Sure, you might sell a couple of games to friends you meet on the forums – but it will and should be an extremely small portion of your overall audience – and not the focus of your marketing.
This is a chart of the daily funding of our Kickstarter.
You’ll notice a number of days with funding well above trend. Notably 6/14-6/15, 6/22-6/23, and 6/28. The 6/22 outperformance was due to a feature on The Dice Tower Crowdsurfing episode (which I will get to below), while the 6/14 and 6/28 outperformance was due to visibility our project got from Reddit.
When I talk about Reddit marketing, I am not talking about consistent engagement on forums. I am talking about targeted posts in high traffic sub-Reddits that can get a lot of eyes on your project.
Reddit marketing is extremely difficult, more than any other platform users there hate being marketed to. Not only do you need to hit the tone perfectly, you need an established account, to time your posts well, and most importantly, to provide value to the user base.
I encourage checking out Wonmin Lee’s blog for an in depth look at Reddit marketing. I also found these resources helpful:
Our most successful posts were to r/IAMA, and r/gaming. They were personal and honest.
Board Game Media
Momentum is a powerful multiplicative factor for the success of a Kickstarter. The more a campaign funds, the more eyes it gets – both from Kickstarter’s algorithm, and from it being talked about in board game media and on forums.
Nut Hunt funded in just under 24 hours and closed out the campaign with over $40k raised from over 1,000 backers. It wasn’t large enough for consistent user posts on board game forums, but it was large enough to get picked up by board game media.
More specifically, we were included in a number of round ups including Board Game Co, and Crowdsurfing.
Building Community & Engagement with Backers
The rest of this article has focused on outreach. Equally as important was engaging with our community of backers.
A strength of being an indie publisher is that we have the bandwidth to personally connect with our supporters. During our campaign I personally messaged every backer. I engaged in our comments, and I asked for feedback on the campaign.
I believe it helped us run a better campaign and deliver a game that we are proud of.
Beyond that, our campaign had a low cancellation rate (5.5%) and had a massive volume of comments - which helps discoverability in Kickstarter’s algorithm.
Mid campaign we put together a giveaway of game art as phone wallpaper. We created 6 wallpapers and asked backers to comment to receive 1 or share the campaign to receive all 6.
Thinking through ways to engage with and involve backers, is I believe an important part of running a healthy campaign. It is definitely an area that I’ll be putting more thought into in the future.
The Mosaic
This article took me a lot longer to think through and write than I had planned. When I put pen to paper, I hadn’t fully appreciated how broad and disparate our social outreach was. Or, how it all came together to create a campaign that was more than the sum of its parts.
In future articles, I am sure that I will revisit some of our strategies and go into more detail on technical execution.
But, for now, I hope you have the same takeaways that I do. Natural, organic outreach is a powerful tool that any creator can and should utilize. How that manifests itself will be different for everyone. And, it’s important that you find and lean into your strengths.
A successful Kickstarter is a mosaic of campaign assets, gameplay, social proof, and the crowd that we build.
What are the most creative marketing campaigns you’ve see in a Kickstarter?
