Indie game developers often believe they’re in the business of making video games. Unfortunately, only those at large companies have this privilege. The indie game developers, with a small team, are not just in game dev. They’re in sales and marketing as well.

In 2023, 12,000 games were released on Steam. Creating a great game alone might not be enough to cut through that massive amount of releases. You need a robust marketing strategy to promote your game. Otherwise, it risks becoming a niche masterpiece waiting to be discovered.

Content marketing is the most cost-effective strategy to attract people to your game, and if you don't have the funds to run a high-profile marketing campaign, you'll need to rely on content as your primary marketing medium.

To take matters into your own hands and save on costs, you, the developer, need to become the content creator. This article will guide you through each stage of crafting a content marketing strategy for your video game.

Market Research and Audience Analysis

The first step in building a content marketing strategy for your video game is understanding your audience and researching how other games are marketed.

Knowing a small subsection of your core audience closely is essential for testing initial strategies and polishing your game before launch. Understanding the content they watch helps you effectively reach a broader audience beyond your core community.

If you already have a community, start by asking them directly what kind of content they like watching or reading. You can also try making an educated guess based on your game genre. For instance, if you’re making a horror game, your core audience might be interested in narrated horror stories on YouTube.

Another option is to think of similar games and look at what type of content about them is prevalent on most popular platforms. You could think of Hollow Knight as Dark Souls meets Metroidvania, so you’d look up what Dark Souls fans watch on YouTube.

Browse YouTube in incognito mode to avoid personalized suggestions and see what keywords and videos the platform suggests.

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With this game, you quickly come to realize that fans love long video essays. So you might want to create a video essay on the core concept of Dark Souls that your game also shares and showcase your game, but without revealing any lore details.

You can also gather a list of YouTubers who create content for video games like that for future collaborations.

The next step is to take a look at how similar games marketed themselves. You can run a quick Google search using the “before” attribute. It will show you mentions of the game before its release or surge in popularity.

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In the case of Hollow Knight, which was released in February 2017, we can see that it had a subreddit and an IGN video several years before the release. You can dig deeper and take a look at their content.

Finally, read up on the content marketing strategy other games in development use that might not have existed before. You might find that many game developers started using short videos as a medium of marketing, something you wouldn’t see back in 2017.

Content Planning and Strategy Development

After this market research, you'll have a list of content formats, themes, and influencers to draw inspiration from. Expand these rough ideas into a more concrete form.

First, consider the overall angle of your content marketing strategy. The key question is: what aspects of the game will you focus on in your marketing? Think about the core concepts of the game and the experience you want to convey to your audience.

In Undertale, the gameplay itself isn’t very captivating; it’s the inversion of the standard video game logic and the tough choices that come with it that make it great.

In Inscryption, it’s the challenging gameplay choices paired with diving into the rabbit hole of the lore and trying to break the game before it breaks you.

In Mr Shify, it’s the lightning-fast gameplay that makes the game click.

Decide on the focus of your content marketing strategy, as this will guide your choice of content formats. Consider whether you will create short gameplay clips, long-form video essays, streams, devlogs, or concept art to share on platforms like your blog, subreddit, or X (formerly Twitter). Determine the number of trailers you will release and how to frame them.

One thing you should note is not to turn your content marketing into a development log. While solving coding errors might interest other developers, it won't engage gamers. Save that content for a separate blog.

Once you have answers to these questions, create a content calendar. Schedule major content pieces such as game and gameplay trailers or longer videos, ensuring you have ample time to prepare them. Leave space for spontaneous content like sharing concept art or short game updates.

Divide your content strategy into three major phases: pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. Plan to create most of the content before and right after the launch to maximize user interest.

Lastly, set clear goals for your video game content marketing strategy. Content marketing is a technique at the top of the marketing channel, so your goals should mostly be focused on awareness, not sales. You can track the following content marketing metrics:

• Views and impressions;
• Average video watch time or average time on site;
• Website traffic;
• Click-through rate;
• Engagement metrics: likes and comments;
• Follower growth;
• Backlinks.

Set achievable, time-bound goals for these metrics, such as aiming for a 30% increase over three months. If you offer pre-sales, you can also establish sales goals and monitor which content drives the most conversions.

Content Creation

With that content plan, you can now start the content creation process. Depending on the type of game you have and its strengths, you might have to produce different types of content.

If the focus is on interesting gameplay, create gameplay clips and stream your game. If the focus is on visuals and story, you’ll have to create storytelling content.

Be careful with the latter, as you don’t want to reveal too many details about a game. Games that are based on story or exploration often rely on users finding answers to the important questions the game poses themselves.

The right approach in content marketing strategy for video games is to tell just enough about the plot and the characters to peak interest in your audience and have them guessing.

You’ll have to create different types of content for your game:

• Trailers;
• Screenshots;
• Gameplay footage;
• Behind-the-scenes content;
• Development diaries;
• Imagery;
• Blog posts;
• Social media posts.

That might be too much content for a small indie team to handle. The good news is you can repurpose content. For instance, your long storytelling video about your game can be transformed into a couple of articles about video games and a couple dozen social media posts.

When you’re writing website content or repurposing video scripts, you can use ChatGPT or a specialized tool like AI Writer by SE Ranking. ChatGPT can create short texts of pretty good quality; however, you’ll have to optimize them for better performance on search results pages. Opting for SE Ranking’s SEO platform with a built-in content module allows you to create well-optimized articles from scratch based on keyword and competitive research. 

Another type of content that can prove vital for marketing is user-generated content like memes and fan art. It’s important not to force it, though. You can hold fan art contests, but trying to make memes yourself would probably not go great, leave it for the community.

Optimizing Content for SEO

In content strategy for video games, most of the content you produce is video content. But the fact that it’s posted on YouTube doesn’t mean you can neglect SEO — Google searches often show videos.

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You can optimize both written and video content for search engines by following these steps:

1. Ensure your website works properly and loads quickly on all devices. Run a Lighthouse report in the Chrome Inspect tool to assess its performance.
2. Conduct keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner. Identify relevant keywords and incorporate them into key areas of your written content, such as the title tag, headings, and meta description tag. For video content, include these keywords in the video title and description on YouTube.
3. Build links to enhance your content strategy. Reach out to online video game journals like Rock Paper Shotgun and offer to write articles or do interviews, including links to your home page or content. Additionally, search for articles that list "best games like Dark Souls" or "best challenging games" on Google and ask the editors to review and potentially include your game.

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Distribution Channels

Just like a good game needs marketing to flourish, a good content marketing strategy needs distribution to catch on. Here are some key options:

Social Media Platforms: Share your content on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). These platforms offer excellent engagement opportunities. Engage with your audience by asking questions, conducting polls, and starting conversations. Tagging users or influencers can help gain their attention and start discussions.

Live Streaming: Building a follower base on streaming platforms can be challenging, so promote your streams on other platforms. Repurpose Twitch streams into long-form videos or short clips for YouTube and TikTok. Use keywords in YouTube titles and descriptions to improve search rankings on both YouTube and Google.

Community-Based Sites: Promote your content on sites like Reddit. Share clips in relevant subreddits but avoid posting links immediately, as moderators might delete them. Engaging with the community first can increase the chances of your content being accepted and shared.

Leverage Influencer Partnerships

As a video game developer on a budget that already can be rather thin, your best bet is to create content yourself. But the best way to promote both your content and your game is to share your audience with other people. That’s why partnering up with influencers is key to growing awareness.

To find those people, you just have to search for similar content on the platforms you’re active on. Compile a list of YouTubers or Twitch streamers who create content on topics similar to yours and then group them by subscriber count.

Contacting content creators is often as easy as sending an email to the address they have in the profile description or texting them on X if they have a profile there. Enticing them to make content about your game or together with you might be harder.

If you’re reaching out to a smaller creator or you think your game will impress a large-scale creator, you can simply showcase your game and ask whether they’d like to get early access to make content about it. You can also send them game-related freebies if you have an early bird pack.

Other than that, you’ll likely have to pay for exposure. The pricing of working with gaming influencers may vary, but a user on Reddit shared what he paid for marketing.

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The pricing is rather steep, so you might want to stay on the side of earned, not sponsored content. If you do want to sponsor content, take a look at how many views their sponsored videos typically get. You want the cost per view to be $0.10 maximum.

Apart from having influencers create videos about your game, you can also co-stream with them. 

Community Building and Engagement

In indie gaming, unlike AAA games that can afford conferences, a lot of the content marketing relies on word-of-mouth. That’s why you should strive to create a community of the game fans before the release.

Your best content channels for that are Discord servers and subreddits. Create one for your game, post content and updates there, and engage in conversation with the members.

Apart from sharing quality content you’ve made, make interactive threads. Ask your audience questions about their experiences with the early access game, feedback on gameplay clips you’ve shared and mechanics, or host AMA sessions.

Holding community contests and rewarding the best posters with in-game freebies or free codes can also be a great video games content strategy.

You can also get active on other online communities like r/DestroyMyGame. There, you can find new subscribers and share your game content with a wider audience.

Analytics and Optimization

The key to a successful content marketing campaign is tracking the results and changing the strategy as you go.

You must already have a list of the metrics you want to track, such as engagement rate or website traffic. Track all of them and make notes when you’ve released content according to the calendar or received a mention from a gaming website or YouTuber.

You can also try running A/B tests with content — serving equal parts of your audience, different variants of blog articles, titles, or thumbnails to see which variant performs better.

Note how that impacted your KPIs and identify trends in the metrics you track. Make changes to the plan to prioritize specific collaborations or types of content that produce the best results. Improve based on this data and educate yourself on the new content marketing trends in the video game industry.

Case Studies and Success Stories

A good example of marketing that you could follow is Hollow Knight. It’s a souls-like Metroidvania developed by a small independent company Team Cherry. It’s one of the best games in the genre, as stated by multiple reviewers and influencers, so a large part of its success was the quality of the game that had people talking about it.

But it had a good deal of marketing effort as well. It started with the Kickstarter campaign that brought them a couple of thousand early adopters and $50k in cash. It also had videos and articles about it pop up well before the release.

That, paired with how great the game was, built anticipation and interest in the audience, and the first couple of months of sales were a great start.

Another good indie roguelike card game, Slay the Spire, a product of an independent studio Mega Crit, was close to failure in the first weeks of launch. The creator, Casey Yano shared in a GDC talk that sales were tiny and the move that saved them was marketing outreach.

He sent keys to reviewers with Keymailer, and after a very popular streamer streamed the game on Twitch, they had a large influx of new users that snowballed into game success.

Stardew Valley is another example of good content marketing. The developer, Eric Barone, was active on social media while making this farm-life simulator with exploration elements and posted updates on the content of the game. As a result, when it was released, it was already popular on the main gaming subreddit and received an instant positive response on Steam.

Summary

Each game is different, and the exact things that worked for popular games before might not work today. So you might have to be a trailblazer both in terms of game design and in terms of marketing.

The only thing that is certain is that content marketing is the ultimate marketing tool for video games. A successful offline event can be a way to test your game with a live audience or network, but only interesting content can bring people in and start word-of-mouth marketing.

Be strategic about your marketing efforts, and if you’ve already had a poor launch, don’t abandon your magnum opus just yet. Improving the game, adding more content to it, and working on exposure can make it blow up well after the release.

About the Author

Yevheniia Khromova is a seasoned content marketer and copywriter. She has a knack for creating content marketing plans that work great for different industries. Her approach combines deep SEO knowledge with a creative flair to craft compelling narratives that engage target audiences and drive conversion.