This post originally appeared on IndieWolverine.com

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to talk about ways to conduct market research during this years Indie Revolution Expo. The presentation was originally titled "Ways to Research Player's Path to Purchase". However, while building my presentation, it became clear that learning how to identify who your player(s) are is more important and is more easily explained within 45 minutes, so I made a slight change to the title, to read "Ways to Research Players" (clever, right?).

The updated presentation focussed on ways to research your target market and identify segments of your audience and how to create what I call a player persona (more commonly referred to as a buyer persona). In conducting market research and identifying segments of your target market, you will have a much better understanding of who you're speaking to. This should allow you to more effectively promote your game in a more clearly defined manner. This should also give you better ideas on how to communicate the values of your game, depending on who you're speaking to (AKA, your pitch). This doesn't have to just stop with marketing and PR. With this type of research, you can also identify ways to possibly improve your game, or add in additional features.

You can check out the full presentation video above, but my head is kind of in the way for the majority of the presentation, so I have uploaded the original presentation slides below:

Indie Game Market Research Presentation from Logan Williams

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them in the comment section below this post.