Earlier this year, I was invited to record a short video for the Australian Roleplay Community’s live stream for Melbourne International Games Week on marketing for TTRPG creatives.

Transcript:

Hi folks, I’m NephthysNile and I’ve got some general tips and tricks for marketing your TTRPG.

First things first, know your product and know what you’re bringing to the table.

Once you have this very strong sense of identity around what it is that you are bringing into the TTRPG landscape it becomes a whole lot easier to know where you should be, what words you should be using and how you want to present that to people.

Part of building that really strong identity is things like logos, your usernames and any other visual sorts of assets that you might be using, as well as a tone of voice. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, there are a lot of tutorials about tone of voice and that sort of a thing, so you can absolutely find information on that online.

Insofar as logos and usernames are concerned, there are tools that will help you with these. I highly recommend going through something like Namecheckr, which tests a whole heap of different platforms including web domains to see whether or not they’re available before you start making any of your profiles.

That’s if you want to make a separate identity for your product.

If you’re utilising your own, make sure that your product is front and centre. Do away with your own personal avatars and headers and put your product up there. If you’re the face, the face needs to be the product.

You don’t need to be everywhere all the time.

If you’re already in the TTRPG community, chances are you are where your people are. So make sure you’re on the right platforms talking to the right people at the right time. You can do this by doing a simple hashtag search for the sorts of things that you would already add to a post. “TTRPG community”, “tabletop games” – that sort of a thing – whatever it is that you’re utilising to make sure you’re going to the right people, generally it’s hashtags if you’re looking at social media, you want to be sure that it’s got a lot of people using it and it’s being used regularly. It’s no good to use a hashtag that isn’t getting used, because then you’re just not going to come up in searches.

You don’t have to pay for marketing, but if you do there are some simple tricks you need to know. Search marketing, social media marketing – it’s all pay to play. it’s a bit of a cesspit of marketing and a dirty little secret that the more you put in, sometimes the more you get out. But the easiest way to make sure that you’re getting a vaguely decent return on your money investment for any marketing dollars that you’re putting in, is making sure that you have a very strong presence that’s going to show up organically, so without being paid.

What I mean by this is a website domain, or some other central platform that is operating as your primary house for your product. If it’s your kickstarter, it will be your kickstarter campaign. If it’s a website, it’s probably going to be your homepage or your product page.

Regardless, you need to make sure that you have very clearly spoken about what it is your product is, when it’s going to be available, who it’s going to be available to and why people would want it. Without these things, you’re flowing in the dust and you won’t come up in search.

The idea of this marriage between paid and organic is a really really old one and it’s proven. Paid marketing gives you a shot in the arm. Organic helps lift it up slowly over time. So, if you’ve got your organic search central repository of your home of your TTRPG nailed down, it is going to work overtime and any paid marketing that you do is just going to help in the short term.

Speaking about being where your people are, playtest. Playtest your whole game. Playtest portions of it. Get it out there in the world. This works two fold.

First and foremost, it pressure tests parts of your TTRPG and this is great if there’s things you haven’t quite nailed it down, or maybe you don’t know how to communicate it. It really put you in the driver’s seat to make sure you figure out these things really quickly, and in a collaborative sort of a way.

Secondly, it gets people excited about the product even before it’s launched. You can’t buy marketing like that, seriously. What you can do it you can go to social media platforms again and go, “Hey, I want to playtest my game – Who would be interested? I need 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 people on this day at this time.” Alternatively, discord channels – there’s a number of them where people are always looking for new things to try and buy and this may be a really condensed great opportunity for you especially if you don’t have a lit of time. The Australian Roleplay Community is always looking for new TTRPGs to have a go at, so maybe you might want to try their discord.

Once you’ve finished doing your playtests, make sure you try and get some contact details of the people who have playtested so that you can let them know once the product’s launched. Maybe you want to give them a special discount code for being part of the development process. It’s a great idea – it helps, especially if you’re on something like a kickstarter to get more people right up front. I cannot suggest that enough.

My last tip, really, is collaborate. Collaborate with artists for your TTRPG. Collaborate with editors and proof readers. The more people you can get involved in your project while you’re developing it, the more people are going to want to talk about it on their own channels. That’s going to boost any new profile or your existing profile just by mentions. It’s seriously a great way, and a very organic conversational kind of way, of getting your product out there to as many people as quickly as possible.

But first and foremost, have fun with it. It’s a product and yes, there is money riding on it, but it’s also supposed to be fun.If you’re not having fun check what you’re doing and see maybe if there’s a different way of doing it.

I’m NephthysNile. These have been some tips and tricks for how to market your TTRPGs. If you want to know more, I’m always happy to talk about TTRPGs, marketing, writing.

Are you a creative in the TTRPG space and want some help figuring out your marketing? Drop me a line for an obligation-free chat.