





Overall, Facebook was great for us as a “free” marketing channel”. I highly recommend using your resources and reaching out to your friends to support your campaign. Many of your friends and family will be excited to hear that you are creating a board game that is on Kickstarter!

Email Sales to Retailers – ROI… Very Good!



Remember earlier when I said the bulk tier is important later on in your campaign? It was extremely important to Emergence’s success because it gave us a channel to reach out to retails and offer retail specials. The general rule of thumb is that the retailers don’t want to pay more than 50% MSRP. The more games the retailers bought, the better the discount you should provide because you will save more and more on shipping. For example, if you ship 100 games to a retailer, per game it will be much cheaper than sending just 1 game. It’s generally cheaper per game to send multiple games in a box than 1.

Below is a sample email we sent to one of our retailers:





Newspaper and PR – ROI very good! (no spend)



Geekwire is NOT a marketing channel. Really, it is a online news website that we were lucky enough to land an article. The truth is, that we reached out to dozens and dozens of newspapers to tell them our story. If you can craft a story that incorporates being local, and a fun tale then it will really help give the press an angle to work with.

We pitched it in emails as “High School friends, raise nearly $10k on Kickstarter in one day”.



We sent dozen and dozens of emails to news sites, and only a few actually got back to us. We were ambitious and sent emails to the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Forbes (etc.)…. None of them responded to us . However, we were able to get some responses back from smaller newspapers such as the Bellevue Reporter and Washington Daily!

Below are some of the articles we were very happy to be featured in! PR is always good!!



Geekwire article on Emergence:

Bellevue Reported article on Emergence:

UW Daily article on Emergence:



Reviewers and Bloggers - ROI at 7.07

As mentioned earlier, Reviewers should be something you complete before you even launch your campaign. You can continue to get reviewers during your campaign, but ideally it is something you do beforehand. While most people get prototypes created by GameCrafter and Print and Play Games, we opted to save the money and instead hand make our prototypes. We detailed the process here.

We sent a prototype copy of emergence to the following reviews:



http://www.boardgameauthority.com/emergence-game-review-kickstarter/

https://geekdad.com/2016/03/emergence/

http://www.dropthedice.com/droppod/2016/3/26/emergence-a-kickstarter-adventure

Also here is a list of all the reviewers who are willing to review games. Excuse the excel document, its a bit messy.

Reddit - ROI 3.93

Reddit was a solid marketing channel for us. With Reddit, we did a mix of AMAs in the r/boardgames subreddit and paid marketing. With reddit, you can target specific subreddits that have board games.

Definitely set up an AMA in the /r/boardgames subreddit because it is free to do, and because it informs a passionate community about your game.

Emergence AMA

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/4aox2r/i_worked_with_a_group_of_friends_for_the_past_six/

When we paid for Reddit ads, we generally had more success paying for subreddits that were board game related. Unfortunately, the board game subreddits have a cap you should spend because there only a few thousand people who are active in the board game subreddits. As a result, I would recommend spending no more than $100 on reddit advertising.

After spending about $100, you have already saturated the board game community on reddit and you would have to move on to less profitable/focused subreddits.

Board Game Geek – ROI –(0.88)

I have heard that Board Game Geek can be a positive ROI channel for Kickstarter, however this was not the case for Emergence. We paid for a $500 banner ad on the website, and we believe it might have brought one or two sales to Kickstarter. The –(0.88) means for every dollar we spent on BGG marketing, we lost about $0.88 of that dollar… Throw away $0.88 for every dollar spent.

I’m not saying don’t use BGG for your Kickstarter Campaign! As a free marketing channel, Board Game Geek is great! It allows people to discover Emergence. As a Kickstarter Creator, you should definitely create a page on BGG for your game such as ours below:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192623/emergence

If you are interested in advertising on Board Game Geek, here is a blog post on how to do it successfully. Unfortunately, we were not able to mirror the same success:

http://stonemaiergames.com/kickstarter-lesson-94-the-top-10-ways-to-survive-and-thrive-on-board-game-geek/

Other Marketing

There are dozens and dozens of other ways to market your Kickstarter that are not listed in this post. This post is simply a case study on Emergence, and will not necessarily translate to other board games. This blog post was simply for helping others from learning from our successes and failures. I hope the lessons from our campaign, will help you down the road!

Adam

-The Emergence Team