The Importance of Marketing

Anyone creating content - be it a video game mod/module, a home video, fan fiction or mobile apps, to name a few - realizes the importance of marketing or if they don't, should realize and respect it's importance. The ultimate goal of content creation is consumption by the public; a narrow demographic for certain types of content like video game mods or the general public for things like home videos.

How do we get people to consume the content we create? Obviously, the first step is to make them aware that such content exists. Now, some modders might say (and I have heard this before) - I'll let my work speak for itself ; I don't need marketing. My question is - how will the work speak for itself if it is not even in the radar of the folks looking for such content? Alley of Murders, an excellent add-in for Dragon Age and if I recall, one of the first, had less downloads than other add-ins that were released after it. I think one of the problems was marketing.

Granted, most hosting sites have methods in place to show new content that has been uploaded. However, when there is so much content being released on an almost daily basis, will that one day of visibility be enough? It will most definitely be enough for a very small amount of content - The Phoenix Armory for Females is one such example. An extremely well-crafted, beautiful armor set that doesn't look out of place in the Dragon Age world and it's already garnered over 200 endorsements in the past 2 weeks.

It will also quite likely be enough for any content related to sex, as the BSN project page shows.

How can we modders then ensure our modules - which have had hundreds of hours sunk into them - are given that visibility? How can we keep them in the public eye even during development so that we will have an eager audience waiting to play it upon release?

One obvious method is to use signatures. Almost every module creator I've seen for Dragon Age has the project link in his/her signature bar. Signatures, however, are only effective if the module creator takes the time to post in a variety of forums - not just the DA Toolset forum, which is frequented only by other module makers and it is a reasonable assumption that they are already aware of your work. The task here is not only to maintain visibility to those who know about your project but also to pull in new people.

The other option that works well in the BSN forums is the 'What's New' feed. Everything you post in your project page (be it private or not, hehe) and status updates are visible to your friends. Making regular updates to your project discussion pages and friends posting in groups/discussions related to that propagates those posts to the 'What's New' feed of their friends. It's a fragile chain to be sure but a chain, nonetheless.

Blogs, I've found out, are really good tools for marketing. For one, there is the cross-promotion that happens as the "mod-blogger" community evolves - modders link to or follow other people's mods and this is usually reciprocated, resulting in increased traffic which translates into increased visibility. The other advantage is that visitors know that you are working on the module - especially when you post screenshots and provide regular updates on where development is at. Of course, stagnant blogs quickly lose the edge so you have to keep posting and updating your blog to keep the interest up.

One common denomination among all the above methods is that you have to keep working on the PR front as well as doing the actual modding if you want to ensure your module is consumed by a large portion of the community.
What do you think - is marketing necessary or are we over-burdening ourselves? Are there alternate means of promoting our content?

More on this in the next post...