PR is a key facet to video game marketing, and one that, well done carried successfully, can be key to the success of a video game. When reaching out to press outlets about your game, it can often be hard to know what the best course of action is. You may be tempted to over-explain your game, with paragraph after paragraph of explanation around the development process and content details of your game.
On the flip side you may think it’s best to write a few lines and link to a Steam page in your press release. Whilst it may seem something of a daunting task to find the perfect middle ground with your press outreach strategy, this article will give you 8 top tips to optimise your PR outreach campaigns!
1. Snappy Tag Line
Whilst the content off your press release will be the thing that worries you the most and the thing that you will spend the most time on, half the job of sending out successful PR outreach is getting outlets to open your email. For this reason, it is of paramount importance to spend time crafting the perfect subject line to your email. The key here is to find something that is attention-grabbing without being over the top, something that is both intriguing and exciting, and something that is concise whilst still being informative. You will want to avoid using too many all-caps words or over-use of exclamation marks, as this can be too obnoxious and only serves to deter press outlets. Your subject line should be punchy, to the point and informative. Eg You could write ‘CHECK OUT this BRAND NEW trailer for our first-person sandbox MMORPG’ but a better version might be ‘NEW MMORPG Trailer Released Today!’
2. Broad reach with a personal tone
Another important aspect to carrying out successful press outreach is to think about the tone of voice you are using in your email. Of course, in many cases, you will be sending outreach out on mass to several dozens of press outlets at once. Whilst you don’t want to spend the time in personalising all these pieces of outreach, an important thing to do is to make your email feel personal. Make the recipient feel as if they are the only ones receiving this outreach, and they will be more likely to cover your story.
3. Keep It Concise
As we mentioned in the introduction, a mistake that is often made with press releases is that people want to overload the email with information, making it difficult for a journalist to digest, and decreasing the chance of them covering your game. A good way to combat this is to carry out tasks such as describing your game in 100 words, or 250 words, and seeing if you can use that text within your outreach, to save yourself from over-explaining the game when it is unnecessary to do so. Utilising external links such as website, social media and Steam pages are another good way to share information without clogging up your press release.
4. Use External Links
Leading on from our last point, using external links in your video game press release can be a great way to share information and help journalists to better understand your game. Once again, whilst explaining your game in detail might seem like a great idea to some, the reality is people are much more likely to clink on a link and look at something for themselves than they are to read someone else’s description of it. Links to your game’s website, social media channels, Steam page etc can all be great ways to help journalists get a feel for the game.
5. Find Your Audience
Moving slightly away from the content of your press release, another key thing to do in order to run a successful PR outreach campaign is to make sure that you do your research and find your perfect audience. Of course, you are likely to want to reach out to top tier press outlets, and general gaming news websites when it comes to putting PR out about your game. However, another important thing to do is to search for more niche publications that might take interest in your game. For example, console-specific gaming press or genre-specific outlets are both things to look for.
6. Tailor Communications to Audience
Once you have found your perfect target audience you can then think about how you can tailor your outreach to them. In some cases, it may be best to put separate PR outreach campaigns out, using different approaches for each. For example, if your game is a VR game, you might put one piece of PR out for the VR-specific outlets, focussing on that aspect of the game. Your second campaign might be targeting more general outlets, focusing less on the micro details of the game, and instead giving a more macro-overview of it all.
7. Know Your Game’s Timeline
Another thing to bear in mind with PR, is your games timeline. When sending your PR out, what are you aiming for? Views on a trailer? People to Wishlist your game? Just general awareness? In any case you must think about where journalists can go from the press release – a website, social media page etc. The sooner that you can get the game into the hands of journalists the better, so if you are able to provide a demo copy to journalists when sending out your press release, then you should certainly do so.
8. Cover All Bases
Another thing that can be tough to decide whilst preparing your video game PR outreach is to know how often you should be sending press releases out and how often you should be sending out follow up mails. The fact of the matter is, along as you have something meaningful and important to say about your game, then a press release is always a good idea. Of course, you want to be careful not to spam people and reach out too many times, but you should certainly be sending out press releases for key milestones in your game’s development timeline, such as releasing early access, trailers, hitting key targets, and in some cases patch releases, and other things like attending festivals and events.
By carrying these 8 top tips in your PR activities, you can ensure that you are giving your game a chance of gaining press coverage and assisting with your overall PR marketing strategy. Want to hear how The Game Marketer can help you with your PR activities? Drop us a message and let’s have a chat!
