Hey, If you want to read more about Content Marketing: I have created a 2-piece guideline:
Besides getting press coverage for your game you’ll also want to provide different sorts of promotional material, articles, gifs, screenshots, demos and basically anything that could portray your game in a positive light, especially when you are marketing on a $0 budget. But what different formats are they? Hubspot has you covered:
But how do you create most of those when you’re on your own programing the game and also have to do the dirty work of marketing? Well, there are a lot of super easy tools that you can utilize without knowing Photoshop or hiring a content marketer to directly produce outstanding visuals to promote your game. Here are my top tools and resources that I use on a daily basis (also for this article):
1. Gifcam/Gfycat
Besides having cool images you’ll probably need Screenshots and most importantly Gifs of your game. Gifcam is a tool to help you record those and since some people claimed that the quality wasn’t as good as one would hope for you can also just use Gfycat’s or ezgifs.com online converter from Video->Gif (webm) and just use pre-recorded footage. Other alternatives to Gifcam are LICEcap or gifrecorder
2. Open Broadcaster Software
OBS is an amazing and easy to use tool to record or even stream footage of your game – for example to create a teaser or a proper trailer. If you have an NVidia card, Shadowplay is also a great free alternative to record gameplay.
Here are also a couple of resources to help you further with “How to create a Trailer for your game”
- Video Pixie: How to make a game trailer
- Gamedevelopment.tutsplus: How to make an indie game trailer without a budget
3. Soundcloud
Soundcloud is an easy free website which is getting used by more and more developers to upload and showcase their soundtrack as well as link podcasts directly to their website without having to leave the site.
4. Canva.com
Most content marketers have been asked and this was in almost everyone’s top 3 list. Canva.com is a website offering a huge library of pre-made templates and assets that you can manipulate while also adding your own imagery. It can also be used for infographics and basically create every picture for you that you could need for Social Media to Blog posts. Like this picture below were 5 minutes of effort with 0 design experience.
5. Giphy.com/Gfycat.com
I know we probably all hate Buzzfeed articles with those annoying gifs, but they do serve a point and didn’t generate a lot of attention without a reason. Searching through giphy for fitting images to put under your Twitter posts to bring across a point or integrating a supporting gif in a blog article doesn’t hurt and only adds character if done correctly and in moderation.
6. Grammarly
We all make mistakes writing blog posts or sending or clicking send on a huge Reddit update about our game. Tools like Grammarly are here to for triple-checking before you press “publish” or “send.” This free tool checks for grammatical errors – and even for plagiarism.
7. Hemingway App
It is extremely important to most readers and fans that your texts are easy to understand and digest. Like I for example am not a native speaker and had my fair share of difficulty writing blogs in the beginning but thankfully as for all things there exist an application that indicates how you can make your written content easier to read. My favourite features include identifying passive voice and hard-to-read sentences.
8. Pexels/VisualHunt
Not really a tool but a source of free stock images, you will notice that besides taking your own quality screenshots out of your game you might want to use stock images for blog articles and content on social media.
Thanks for reading, I hope that you can integrate some of those tools into your day to day marketing work.
Until next time!
Dom