If you didn’t like the previous article you’re really not going to like this one. Before you start I am aware that the people who create miniature games are doing it for the love and aren’t marketers or PR guys but if no one else is going to call them out on the issues they run into I guess I’ll have to be the guy who casts the first stone. This is the second of three articles on everything I don’t like.
About the marketing:
On every box or book I would like a QR code taking you to a 2 minute video elevator pitch about the game. Selling is not about looking excited while sitting next to a board while you give people a blow by blow description of the rules. It needs to look like this, this or this. And not like the frothing love fest that Beasts of War churns out.
Key sales point. Games Workshop has a network of shops you can go into a find a person to play a game without buying a table or scenery, it’s the biggest. X Wing has pre-painted miniatures. Warmachine has the steampunk flavour locked down as well as a group of supporters who are all embittered former squat players who hate Games Workshop. Tor Gamings Relics has an army of patchwork cloth British infantry, Malifaux has pigs. Flames of War is the best way to command an army of real historical tanks and infantry. The Laws of Marketing suggest that if you aren’t the first in the market (Games Workshop) you need to be the first in a subsection of it.
Read books on marketing and human psychology. Marketing is not a scammy way of exploiting your customers to get them to buy from you, it’s a way of keeping your customer base happy and allowing you to provide them with a great experience. This does not mean you have to antagonise them with pop up windows or clickbait. Did you know there are 6 major ways to persuade people into following a certain course of action, find out more here and be amazed.
Create website, create mailing list, create content for website, add the subscribe button to the bottom of every post, build subscribers, send emails on your progress, repeat until you have enough subscribers to sell products to.
Don’t undercharge. Frostgrave, Warlord Games’ Historical and Bolt Action lines can sell you a standard infantry model in a set for £1 each, Mantic will match those prices when they run a Kickstarter but often seem to run at about £2, other companies seem to approach £3-£5. Character kits which will usually only need to be purchased once can be sold for £7-12. If you want to read about why you shouldn’t chase the bottom of the market you can read here, here and here. The bottom line is companies need money to continue making good products and so giving them less money will only make their next product less good. Another point is that these companies are making a product for you to spend real time putting together and painting. This will take at least 2 hours but sometimes 4 or 5. As an experiment take your current hourly wage and work out how much money you could have earnt while you were painting a model, if you look at it like this you’ll see that there really isn’t as big a difference between £1 and £5 as you think.
Don’t overcharge. Games Workshop has tried to sell single figure character kits for £18 before rapidly backing down and stuffing them in with a bundle of other miniatures. They have also tried to charge £30 for a unit of 10 models or £22 for a unit of 5 models that you will need to buy two copies of to complete a unit. While this does average out to the £3-4 mark I have just identified as being ideal for infantry you’ve got to remember that as part of a standard sized force both will be making up less than 10% of it.
Overcharge if you are offering extras. Kingdom Death offers models for £16 with base inserts, numbered and signed cards and two prices of artwork. If you only want to sell single models that will only be purchased once this seems to work out pretty well.
Mobile and tablet friendly website please. There are free products on the market that handle dynamic web design so you don’t have to, this blog for instance resizes itself depending on screen size. This website doesn’t: don’t be like them.
Shipping costs front and center. Anvil industries is what I want to see, hiding shipping until the checkout point like Kingdom Death is what I don’t want to see.
Well done, 2 down, 1 more to go, read part 3 here
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