Your game’s target audience is the demographics and interests of the majority of it’s players. For example if you’re launching a match-3 puzzle game, your target audience is likely female, 35 years of age, and cares mostly about achievement over all other aspects of the game.
This article was originally posted on Launch Your Indie Game.
But before you’ve launched your game, before you’ve gathered any real player data, you’ll need to make an educated guess about who your players might be, so that you can make and market your game to attract them.
Contrary to popular belief, not all games benefit from the same marketing channels, tactics and strategies.
And investing what little time and money you have on marketing the wrong way can lead to devastating losses, if not failure.
In fact, it’s such an important part of launching games that AAA publishers spend exorbitant amounts of money building in-house teams whose sole responsibility is to gather this research and use it to decide whether or not they should move forward with even making games that are in the conceptual phases of development.
However if you’re a bootstrapping indie game developer, you probably don’t have access to those teams or their tools. But you still need some idea of who your target audience is.
So I’m going to unpack for you why target audience research is so important before you launch, then I’ll illustrate my signature strategy for getting that research, and finally I’ll show you my process to build a tentative target audience profile for zero cost.
In other words, you don’t need to be a AAA publisher to make an educated guess about your game’s target audience.
Why It’s Important to Research Your Game’s Target Audience Before You Launch
Before you launch your game, you’re no doubt going to spend a lot of time and money on marketing. If not in actual dollars, then definitely in sweat equity. Think about all the time you’ve spent just on things like your website or social media. Now add in trailers, a press kit, media outreach, newsletters, conferences, and all those other marketing efforts that everyone else is doing.
Marketing games, even small indie games, is time-consuming.
Making an educated guess about who your game’s target audience will be helps you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of what you spend to choose your time and money on.
For example, let’s say you’re planning to experiment with some Facebook ads at launch. You could lose a lot of money by failing to hyper-target your ad campaigns based on very specific demographic and interest data. Even the seemingly trivial chasm between shooters and WWII shooters is wide enough to lose all your money in.
Or let’s say you’re spending the weeks leading up to launch promoting your game on various game development forums, but your game’s target audience isn’t actually other game developers.
The colossal waste of time and money is painfully obvious, not to mention the opportunity cost you will miss at launch.
Conducting target audience research before you launch helps you design the right marketing foundation to launch upon. That way, when you begin collecting actual in-game analytics, you can optimize your marketing strategy based on that real player data.
The Lookalike Target Audience Research Method
One of the biggest mistakes that indie game developers make is believing that their target audience is made up of people who are just like them. After all, they typically make the games they want to play. And that’s ok, a lot of great games are made that way, but it doesn’t necessarily mean your target audience is anything like you.
You and your games are far better served with the more data-driven approach of measuring the audiences of games that are similar to yours. It’s called a lookalike audience, as in your-audience-probably-looks-like-their-audience.
Here’s the gist of what you’ll be doing:
The first thing you’ll do is make a list of your game’s 3 biggest competitors
Then you mine their audiences for demographics and interests, documenting the results along the way
And finally you’ll note the overlap to find your game’s tentative target audience
I call this the Lookalike Target Audience Research Method.
Obviously, it’s not rocket science. It’s just common sense, and you’ve probably already been thinking this way.
Unfortunately, there’s no empirical way to prove your game’s target audience before you launch. All assumptions, by you or big AAA publishers, are still assumptions. Building a target audience profile from competitor data is the best way to make a best guess about who your game’s target audience might be.
And that’s really all you need to move forward with.
You don’t really need teams of people, data warehouse subscriptions, and keynote presentation decks being pitched to people in suits. Sure, those help. But they’re nice-to-haves, and not really need-to-haves for where you’re at.
So here’s exactly how I execute this strategy:
1. Create a list of 3 competitors, and prepare a spreadsheet to collect their demographics and interests data
Who are your game’s 3 biggest competitors?
What we’re looking for here is to match your game with other games in the same genre, with the same mechanics, done in the same style or art direction, and that have similar pricing or business models.
You might not be able to find exact matches (unless you’re making a clone), but do the best you can with those requirements.
If you find that your game is unlike literally any other game out there, that you have zero competitors, that’s a big red flag. 9/10 times that means your game is going to flop. Just throwing that out there.
Make a copy of the Google Sheets spreadsheet I use to do target audience research. The pre-populated data is from researching the target audience for a new multiplayer first person shooter.
My Google Sheet spreadsheet for researching game target audiences.
Think of this like making your own personal finance budget, where there are some staples (such as housing costs), but no two budgets are the same, nor should they be. Use your experience and instinct to choose which categories of data to focus on depending on your game.
Now that we’ve got our spreadsheet set up, we need to go out and find your competitor’s demographics, interests and behaviors.
2. Mine and collect the demographics and interests of those 3 games in your spreadsheet
Demographics are the age, gender, and race of players. Interests are, well, categories or things they’re interested in. And behaviors are activities they do either online or offline.
For example again using the match-3 puzzle game illustration, and having already talked about their demographics, their interests would be things such as other games by King, women’s health brands, and the Hallmark Channel. And their behaviors would be things such as dining out, buying pet products, and clicking mobile ads.
So if you’re making a very colorful and cute match-3 puzzle game, I’ve pretty much done your work for you.
But for those of you who aren’t, let’s mine some data!
1. GOOGLE ADWORDS DISPLAY PLANNER
Most official game websites and app traffic comes from organic search. And Google is the king of search. Thankfully, they make the demographic and interest data of certain keywords and websites available to you for free in Google AdWords.
If you don’t already have a free Google account, grab one and head on over to Google Adwords. Log in to your dashboard and navigate to Tools > Display Planner.
Then type a competing game’s official website domain in the “Your landing page” input box.
I’m using Candy Crush Saga for my search:
Don’t forget to consider region. If you’re soft-launching in Spain, filter for Spain otherwise your results will be useless.
As you can see you’re not only getting juicy demographics for over 10 billion impressions, you’re also getting interests and specifically where they’re running display ads, if at all.
Here’s a fun side note: The Display Planner shows an affinity audienceof “Fast Food Cravers” for Candy Crush Saga. Looks like candy isn’t the only thing they like!
I mean, who doesn’t? McDoubles are crazy cheap. Just saying.
2. FACEBOOK ADVERTISING AUDIENCE INSIGHTS
Almost 17 million people like Clash of Clans on Facebook. What if I told you that Facebook makes all that demographic and interest data available to you for free?
It’s totally true, all through the magic of Facebook Advertising Audience Insights. Grab a Facebook account and head on over to the dashboard for Facebook Advertising.
Go back to your home dashboard and click the new “Ads Manager” menu item on the left-hand side of your screen.
On your Ads Manager dashboard and navigate to Tools > Audience Insights.
Once you arrive on the Audience Insights page, you’ll notice the general demographics and interests for all of Facebook have already been pre-populated.
But we want to narrow that data down by interest. On the left-hand side of the screen you’ll notice a section appropriately named, “Interests”. Start typing “clash of clans” in that input box.
