Feedback Wanted / OOTP Marketing

[battists]

For what it's worth, we're currently undergoing some SEO improvements, and looking to increase our search engine output. Obviously, we want to get it so that "baseball game" and such have a shot at pulling us in on the first page, and so on.

Meanwhile, let's say I find a Twitter like this one:

Jimmy Ct (baseball_news) on Twitter

Seems to be fairly baseball-oriented, 300+ followers. I follow this site?

Do I write a comment somehow? Should I, or would that be spammy?

OK, off to bed with me.

Steve

[esovia23]

The people that like OOTP are the people that like numbers. They like mathematics, they like pouring over statistics, and they like baseball. So it's probably going to be hard to find anyone outside of science communities that will be into this game.

You need techy/scientific types that like baseball essentially.

[AndrewG]

I am now targeting those who DL demo, but dotn buy...

I think some potential newbies might be imtimidated a bit by how immersive this can be.

Perhaps if there were different PRESET levels of set up at fingertips so they could try different ways to get hooked.

Incluiding with demo (Because this is where you hook people) different preset leagues like one with no minors, no managing ect ect. YES those of us hooked know how to set this up, but were talking people who dont know the game. Maybe tutorial set up leagues.

It what is a great written PDF guide for the game, it reccomends you work your way up if you are a newbie. But face it, many people just slap it in and try to play right away, we must kid glove it as much as possible to make it easier to learn the basics.

[AndrewG]

Originally Posted by battists

Does this link work for you?

OOTP Baseball Facebook Page

Facebook site looks good.

Facebook, like any even dedicated fansite/website, just takes a little timke to get ball rolling. the thing about Facebook is people tend to check it regularly like email, which is often done more often that hititng your favorite site each day.

[knockahoma]

One of the first rules of business is you have to spend money to make money; and another rule is to advertise. So I say spend money on advertising!

I've worked in radio and advertising most of my adult life. I also advertise two products of my own. There's gospel in the above quote. There's something called Top of Mind Awareness.

Generally-speaking, the idea is this: The more people think of you FIRST, the larger your piece of pie. If you live in Colorado and I say Tire Store, you might say Big-O Tires! Sure enough, Big-O Tires market share leads the pack. Well, after all. You're heard of Big-O Tires. Who the hell is Mike's Tires? Can we trust Mike? It's just the way humans think. That human tendency to trust what sounds familiar also explains why an inferior product sometimes rises to the top of its genre.

If I say "Baseball game" the same phenomenon happens (generally-speaking).

Your competition is taking advantage of all the freebies they can (some good suggestions have been posted here). I think most major businesses now have someone on staff who concentrates on Social Marketing through twitter, facebook, etc. But, the leaders are also spending money to be the First to come to mind. The Grand daddies of baseball gaming, Strat-o-Matic and APBA, both knew they had to spend money advertising. They sucked it up and reaped the benefits.

Recently, we worked with a major marketing company which surveyed thousands of people with these


questions:

1) What company first comes to mind in this category?

2) Are you more likely to buy from the company that comes to mind FIRST?

Over 90% said "Yes".



Advertising isn't fat; it's muscle. It's like the light bill. Include advertising in your budget and be smart about how you use it.

Don't cut the muscle.

There's also something called Unique Selling Proposition. It means, " What makes you truly different from your competition?" For my money, OOTP's uniqueness comes from its "customability". It truly leads the pack in that regard. If you spend money advertising, I'd pound that point til kingdom come. It's OOTP's TRUE "USP". OOTP kicks butt in that regard.

"It's your game; play it your way." is a fantastic line.

[JWay]

Originally Posted by battists

For what it's worth, we're currently undergoing some SEO improvements, and looking to increase our search engine output. Obviously, we want to get it so that "baseball game" and such have a shot at pulling us in on the first page, and so on.

Meanwhile, let's say I find a Twitter like this one:

Jimmy Ct (baseball_news) on Twitter

Seems to be fairly baseball-oriented, 300+ followers. I follow this site?

Do I write a comment somehow? Should I, or would that be spammy?

OK, off to bed with me.

Steve

That can become extremely tedious, but that's the thought behind it, hopefully you build relationships with other twitters and they mention you in their tweets, and their followers see it and check it out. Fun stuff!

[battists]

Originally Posted by JWay

That can become extremely tedious, but that's the thought behind it, hopefully you build relationships with other twitters and they mention you in their tweets, and their followers see it and check it out. Fun stuff!

So, here's the $64,000 question: if I were to directly comment on a Twitter like the one above, something a la "Gee, if you're into baseball, you should try OOTP!" is that not "spammy"?

[JWay]

Originally Posted by battists

So, here's the $64,000 question: if I were to directly comment on a Twitter like the one above, something a la "Gee, if you're into baseball, you should try OOTP!" is that not "spammy"?

If you mention that there's a free demo, that's a great idea. But you honestly want to create as many mentions as possible. So instead of the direct message, I might say something like:

Thanks @(twitternamehere, @twittername2) for the add! Be sure to check out the free OOTPX demo located (link use a link shortener that points straight to the demo page) Have a great day!

Those two people will see the tweet on their page, and the OOTPX tag gets that search link bumped up, and hopefully they're kind enough to retweet your message, meaning all their followers see it.

You may want to work on the actual words you use, that was the top of my head thoughts there.

[JWay]

Also for the getting the google page stuff, just start a wordpress blog and use it. My personal blog while I was working at Hollister (a clothing store) got 1000s of hits every day because I made one or two posts about the music hollister played, and we shot up to the top of the list really quick. You won't need to blog about the same thing over and over again, but you can mention the same stuff in different ways. And the way everyone eats up every word that Markus says around here, have him post his updates on the blog and the hits and recognition will flow in.

heh if you type in new hollister music my blog comes in 5th now, used to be #1. But i haven't talked about it in over a year since I quit working there.

[knockahoma]

P.S.

We regularly receive what's new in advertising strategies, what works and doesn't and why. I'd be happy to send you some of that stuff as you consider your options. There are some mighty paradigm shifts going on right now in the advertising world.

I'd also encourage you to look up a guru of advertising named Roy Williams on the net. He wrote the business book of the year back in 98, I think. It was called The Wizard of Ads.

[AndrewG]

It looks like OOTP Dev marketing team now has a bunch of new consultants in this thread!

[AC]

Originally Posted by battists

Hi folks,

Curious to get some feedback. We don't sell an enormous # of copies of OOTP, and of course, the name of the game is trying to sell more. We also don't have any staff with marketing background, or time to spend marketing, really. We also have extremely limited marketing/advertising funds.

I have a theory that there is "baseball fan spectrum," with casual fans on one end, and "geeky" fans on the other end. OOTP sits squarely at one end. We do an adequate job each year of "preaching to the choir," by which I mean selling the game to the avowed baseball geeks. Sorta like this:



I believe that fantasy baseball players range from fairly casual to extremely geeky. I read an article recently that said that in one particular year, an estimated 6 million people played fantasy baseball. As you can imagine, that's several orders of magnitude beyond our annual sales. I'm of the strong (and totally unscientific) belief that the vast majority of these fantasy baseball players simply have never heard of OOTP.

I likewise believe that if we could simply get OOTP in front of more fantasy baseballers, we could generate a lot of sales, possibly multiples of our current sales. Anecdotally, we hear all the time, "I wish I'd known about this game years ago!"

So, I'm just curious to hear thoughts from the crowd, especially in answer to this question:

How can we get OOTP in front of more people, with fantasy baseball players as an "ideal target," but without big advertising expenditure, and without requiring a lot of man-hours?

Thanks for your ideas!

Steve

I haven't read through the entire thread yet so my apologies if this has been mentioned already, but there are a number of solid baseball bloggers out there that are slowly but surely starting to gain some noteriety and expand their audience. Each ML team has 2-3 bloggers that are pretty well read and respected by both geeky fans and casual ones. I would start a PR blitz w/ them. Offer them free copies of the game, discuss ways to economically advertise the game on their blogs, see if you can get them to do a review or mention the game every now and then.

Just my two cents. Let me know if you need any help in this area.

[Stu]

Originally Posted by battists

Hmm, I'm torn about the "X" because then when 11 comes out, we've lost the momentum.

Just use #OOTP then.

This has been suggested already but I think it would help make the game more approachable to new players if there were more quick starts included with the game. You could have a small team on beta whose job it was to create and test the leagues. There are numerous fictional leagues out there with unique features and backstories along with custom uniforms and logos. You could setup historical leagues in the same way. Although the logos would probably need to be released as a mod.

[JWay]

Originally Posted by Stu

Just use #OOTP then.

This has been suggested already but I think it would help make the game more approachable to new players if there were more quick starts included with the game. You could have a small team on beta whose job it was to create and test the leagues. There are numerous fictional leagues out there with unique features and backstories along with custom uniforms and logos. You could setup historical leagues in the same way. Although the logos would probably need to be released as a mod.

I see what you mean with the X. OOTP is fine, but we will crash into the harry potter order of the phoenix crowd... Whenever you think of something clever let us know.

[Stu]

Originally Posted by JWay

I see what you mean with the X. OOTP is fine, but we will crash into the harry potter order of the phoenix crowd... Whenever you think of something clever let us know.

Yeah you're right. Lots of Harry Potter geeks when you search for ootp.

How about ootpbb?

[knockahoma]

I likewise believe that if we could simply get OOTP in front of more fantasy baseballers, we could generate a lot of sales, possibly multiples of our current sales. Anecdotally, we hear all the time, "I wish I'd known about this game years ago!"

I'm sure that's true. There are a lot of deep thinking baseball fans out there.

Although I understand the idea of trying to broaden one's audience, I'll throw in a cautionary tale from my world. In the video baseball game era, I think it's probably safe to say that OOTP made it's name by filling a niche.

There have been a ton of niche radio stations over the years that wanted to "broaden" their audience for bigger advertising dollars. In doing so, they lost their value as a Niche. Their niche format didn't allow them to compete with mainstream stations, so they wound up serving.... no one. They're not really great at anything.

If I have a really good Oldies station, I'd concentrate on getting the word out to people who liked Oldies music. I wouldn't worry too much about getting classic rockers, or Miley Cyrus-lovers. You'll get a few of those trying your music and liking it, just cuz they're music lovers. But spend your marketing money and time on your core audience.

I'm feeling pretty certain that OOTP still has a whole sea of "geeky" fish to hook, certainly enough to double sales.

That said, I gotta add, the OOTP Team has done an admirable job of marketing. I think you might be happily surprised at what could happen if you took that marketing ability and applied it to Advertising (and no, "advertising" and "marketing" are not synonyms ).

For example, there are several satellite radio companies out there. These companies offer a variety of music formats (country, oldies, rock, top 40, sports stations, etc) to individual radio stations across America. You can hit a 100 markets for a shockingly small amount (and no, I'm not an advertising rep for one of those companies ).

Snapple is probably the best example of using radio satellite stations exclusively to explode their business. They exploded with Rush Limbaugh's help. But, there are a lot of far, far cheaper opportunities in satellite radio than that.

[VARoadstter]

Facebook ads are targeted to people with similar interests (mention baseball on their pages or whatever) and are a cheaper alternative to Google and Yahoo. There are a lot of people on Facebook.

Definitely put together a Facebook OOTP fan club. Hell, just say the word and I'll start it for you.

Here's the link to fanclub creation if one of the Mods or Marcus wants to take the lead.

[thamolas]

Originally Posted by kingcharlesxii

1) As mentioned above, a better 2D/3D engine goes a long way to attract casual gamers.

Clone the in-game engine of Baseball Stars (NES) for an additional option to play out the games.

[JWay]

Originally Posted by VARoadstter

Facebook ads are targeted to people with similar interests (mention baseball on their pages or whatever) and are a cheaper alternative to Google and Yahoo. There are a lot of people on Facebook.

Definitely put together a Facebook OOTP fan club. Hell, just say the word and I'll start it for you.

Here's the link to fanclub creation if one of the Mods or Marcus wants to take the lead.

They just got one! http://www.facebook.com/pages/Out-of...8957260?ref=nf

[thamolas]

Originally Posted by Malleus Dei

Your market really isn't fantasy baseball players. I know a large group of them, and none of them have shown any long-term interest in OOTP or even BM or a console game. They like the ties to real baseball too much.

The console audience is lost from the start.

So what you are left with are hard-core baseball gamers and hard-core strategy gamers (and calling that audience "geeks" is demeaning, Steve, many of them are not geeks). There's your potential customer base: people who like extremely complicated baseball strategy games and people who like extremely complicated strategy games of any kind and who will play a baseball game - or, for another example, a soccer game - even though they are not baseball or soccer fans, but simply because the game is rich, detailed, offers numerous opportunities for significant decisions and rewards good decision-making.

Therefore you guys need to be selling OOTP as two things:

1. The most complex computer baseball game of all. Get some kind of slick advertising phrase behind that to tie to the game, like "OOTP, the king of baseball computer games" only better.

2. A complex and feature-rich strategy game. Puresim forged a relationship with Matrix Games, one of the biggest online marketers of strategy games, which helped sell games to new customers; maybe you should look in to affiliating yourself to either them or, say, Shrapnel Games or such, as that will get you strategy gamer eyes on your product. Or find some other way to do that.

But going after fantasy gamers will not pay off. They don't do and don't want to do complicated games like OOTP.

I want to second this.