Online marketing is key for most companies these days, but especially so with video games. In order to advertise to your clients, however, you first must determine where your clients are and how they’re engaging with media.
While social networks might be a big part of your media plans,it’s best to establish your media objectives beforehand. Four objectives can be split into marketing of the company’s brand, advertising a new product/service, customer services and research & development.
Once you’ve established some objectives, you need to start looking at how you are going to measure those objectives in six to 12 months. Setting goals isn’t complicated, but they do need to be done. Goals are going to vary across each organization but I try to get clients to setup S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) goals when we talk about getting into the online and digital space, writes Duane Brown. The reason you want to have measurable goals is to prove that your efforts in online marketing and the digital space are having a tangible effect on your business in a positive way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across organizations and people who want to get into online marketing and have not done any objective or goal setting.
Engaging in this sort of of an online audit poses further questions. For instance, how do others view your company, where are your clients online and what are they saying about your products and what are your competitors doing right now
When looking at the three Cs, I try and look for opportunities in the data that I’m pulling. Because as you start to assemble all this data on your consumers, company and competitors you may start to have a little déjà vu, writes Brown. For one client I had in a niche business, there were a high number of consumers asking for the same product and information over and over again. This was a great opportunity for my client to go after a new market, as well as take market share away from the competition. Plus they had a cool new article to write to help educate their community. This gave them genuine reasons to reach out to new potential customers and help educate them.
Those who are making a large investment in online marketing would do well to use leading monitoring tools like Radian6, Sysomos, or Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics. However, there are free options available as well, such as knowEm that lets you check to see what user names are taken across websites and Social Mention, a free monitoring tool that lets you see what consumers and customers are saying about a company and the competition.
Several steps can be undertaken for the audit. Important parts of the process include determining how far back in time you want to look, examining where your competitors might be online and seeing how long they’ve been using those profiles, seeing what consumers are saying, marking down both positive and negative comments, and then summarizing it by each company separately.
Depending on the size of your game firm and products and how active your consumers are will determine how much data you are going to have to search through. However, doing this work up front will help you sell online marketing to your organization as you show management what is going on with your competitors and consumers. There is something powerful in this day and age about what your consumers think. Take advantage of it, concludes Brown.
Source: Gamasutra
