One of Sun Tzu’s most quotable lines from The Art of War is “Know thy enemy and know thyself and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.” And while you should never think of customers as the “enemy,” it’s still crucial to understand them in order to wage a successful marketing campaign. Understanding your customer means figuring out who they are, what their needs are and how you can serve those needs. And the first step in that journey is video game market segmentation.
Sun Tzu once said “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” In order for your tactical marketing decisions to be effective, they need to be coordinated around a central strategy. Your strategy is your guiding light for more than just ads. It impacts your target customers, your choice of platform and publisher, and how you respond to competition. In this post, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of establishing a video game marketing strategy.
Marketing games. Some people consider it a necessary evil at best. At worst, it’s the root of all of the industry’s ills. But what is marketing? The problem is that most people don’t know – and don’t realize they don’t know. And if you don’t know what it is, you can’t effectively develop a marketing strategy or manage the people who do so. You can’t ask your marketing department the right questions if you don’t know what the right questions are. So, before we dive into the functional aspects of marketing, let’s formalize our understanding of the field.