The importance of grassroots marketing as small studio

We were a 100 YouTube subscriber team: We were under no illusions we were a small team, and much like us trying to target IGN, we knew a bunch of smaller reviewers / sites / influencers would love to work with us. We felt it made no sense for us to reach for the stars with our attempts to achieve “main stream” coverage if we weren’t willing to help those trying to get coverage for their platforms / sites / channels.

Practice makes perfect: At the initial announcement of Brut@l I had practiced, in my head, our pitch for the game, but practicing in your head and doing it on a podcast, on a stage, on a video or in person is completely different. By working with smaller content creators such as Roger Pokorny I could work on my promotion for Brut@l and learn what worked and didn’t work. This allowed me to better perfect how I promoted Brut@l in interviews, create content with passionate individuals, and cross promote with whoever I worked with – promoting both our game and their site / channel.

Build Lasting Connections:  Promoting your game as a “one off launch”, a fire and forget style of campaign, is a huge mistake. By working with new content creators and reviewers, those working to push themselves into a professional capacity, you get to work with the next wave of IGN, Gamespot and Kinda Funny employees. By being genuine, honest and upfront with what you’re trying to achieve you can build lasting relationships. We’ve been very lucky to build friendships with budding reviewer Trevor Starkey, video editor Tom Hawkins, new IGN Social Producer Sean Pitts, the aforementioned Roger Pokorny, the team at Knerds, the talented Ally Mushka, and countless others. We gained a lot from these relationships, and we believe they did too, and quite honestly, we hope to work with all of them again on our next release.

Working with established communities: Internally we were big fans of Kinda Funny, home of the number one PlayStation podcast and the Best Friends community. Because we were genuine listers of the show we knew a select group of folks would be interested in collaborating immediately. We reached out to this group and set up podcast appearances, game previews or simple chats. With this content going live we then followed up on the Kinda Funny forums and looked for further collaborations. This resulted in several more content pieces and allowed us to share a host of content that both promoted Brut@l and promoted these new creators. We used this as a platform to extend our reach and find new creators to work with

Cold emailing: We created a mega excel document that had 1000s of websites, content creators and podcasts and from here we began matching up the sites with contact details. We emailed each site, podcast and content creator a unique email and explained to them what Brut@l was, what we were looking to do as well as offering to collaborate with them in any way that suited their audience. This had a low % return, but again it allowed us to establish a host of connections as well as improve our use of email for outreach. This yielded some interesting results, we appeared on a radio station in Brazil, were featured in an Italian print magazine, conducted interviews with PlayStation Universe and PlayStation Lifestyle, appeared on MTV in Italy, but most notably, we had our very own Giant Bomb Quick look created. Emailing everyone individually, with unique emails, took days, infact on the first day of a holiday in London I dragged my fiancée into an internet café to help me finish the emails, it was an interesting moment, but overall I think it was worthwhile.

Constant Content: We took a page out of the upcoming content creators book and made content constantly over 2016. For a few weeks in April we were even putting out unique and weighty content every day to drive interest and interaction. This stream of quality content (we think so anyway!) allowed us to stay in the minds of our current community and reach a new one via social sharing and, quite honestly, a lot of people believing in us and being willing to go above and beyond to promote our message.