itch.io Community » Game Development » General Development

B2B Marketing Collab - Case study

A topic by 16bitnights created 7 days ago Views: 77

Viewing posts 1 to 1

B2B Marketing Collab

INTRO

Hello,

For the ones that don’t know me, my name is Cristi P. and I represent 16 BIT NIGHTS.
Recently I made a marketing collab with some awesome developers and I had so much fun that I decided to make this case study about it.

HOW IT HAPPENED

So, I am part of several game developer communities and mostly I only see spam and small talk but not long ago I joined a Discord: The RTS Dev Saloon and I saw they had a nice topic about the upcoming Steam Strategy Fest.

Everyone wanted to do something like organize some multiplayer games with content creators and so on.
I also noticed everyone was too busy with their own games to take initiative but at the same time I saw potential in this community, maybe the fact that it’s a bit of a private community also attracted me, so I decided to take a little initiative.

And no, I am not a godlike PR to organize MP game matches with content creators but I wanted to do something so I asked if they wanted to make a trailer collab for the RTS fest regarding this particular community.

Four things impressed me in particular:

First: The developers were 100% cooperative and professional (except for the one who kept sending me pictures of barrels, dunno what is wrong with him but even so I think he is ok to), no s**t talk, and they sent footage as instructed within the timeline (TBH 50% of me believed that they would just forget about it, this was one of the times I was happy to be proven wrong).

Second: The second thing that impressed me was when I saw the footage and did a bit of background research on the devs who submitted entries, I mean WOW, some of them have stellar projects.

Third: The third thing that impressed me was that this made me feel like I am actually part of a community, this was an awesome feeling to experience in this industry.

Fourth: I will keep the fourth thing that impressed me for a bit later in the case study, don’t go just yet.

HOW IT WORKED

OK, now to the substance stuff.
I had the full support of my partner, Sadoff who did all the video editing while I made the trailer design, text, intro cutscene, and outro cutscene, selecting music, SFX, and posting it.

The main goal of this collab was to do a cross-promo. The YouTube algorithm trigger was not critical.

Almost all of us involved in the video have our own communities and social media pages with fans and followers, so after the video got uploaded it got shared by the participants in their own respective communities.

This is as simple as it gets, cross-promo at its origin form.

Now please, understand that cross-promo only works if it’s a similar target audience, in our case we all had real-time strategy games so it was exactly what the doctor ordered.
Competition is not always your enemy!

Games who participated in this B2B Marketing collaboration:

RESULTS

I had in the first half of the day +35 wishlist additions, the second day went to +131 but for the second day some of us also got featured in the Perafilozof video so I cannot estimate correctly exactly how many WL came from the cross-promo video second and third day but it was on plus.

Valentin from Beyond Astra also had a spike in WL and he did not appear in the Perafilozof video.

CTLN7, the developer from Global Conflagration also had a spike.

In addition to this The RTS Dev Saloon got some nice branding, 48 hours after releasing the video I got at least 5 messages from people asking me for an invite to that server.
Just to clear things out, I am not the owner of that Server, tatsu(dev from ZeroSpace) and Pourya are the owners.

The video itself also got some nice results, 7 days after release it managed to get 4k views and 145 likes.

Link to the video itself: https://youtu.be/CyIZfiEC38I?si=E11HLGxHO3vQVhGj

Now, remember that I was also impressed a fourth time? This was because of Perafilozof

He is one of the best, if not the actual best source of news in regards to Strategy Games.
Also, he is very cooperative and responds to everyone, this is a rare thing among content creators.

But this is not what impressed me this time.
What impressed me this time is that when he saw our trailer video collab he actually shared it himself in his discord community, he genuinely wants to help out RTS games and developers.

You can find his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@perafilozof
And if you are developing an RTS game I definitely recommend dropping him a press kit.

CONCLUSION

This B2B marketing approach did not make miracles but it had some results and it was fun to make.
More developers should experiment with this based on genre and audience.
Other things that can work in this regard can be Steam bundles of 4-5 AA RTS games and another bundle with 4-5 pixel art RTS games.
Hell, maybe even some sort of giveaway regarding the system between developer fans.
Right now I am very tired especially since I have a release coming soon but if the opportunity arises I will surely do it again.

Regards,
Cristi P. – 16 BIT NIGHTS

Like Reply