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I used to panic about putting content on social media, wasting hours a week thinking, filming and editing and was never happy with the results. I wasn't earning attention, I was trying to take it. I've since developed a board game content strategy built around 4 key principles. The early signs suggest it's working.
If you want to catch up on where I'm starting from check out my article What is 40 to 1000, my series about organic marketing that doesn't require an ad budget. Read on for more on my new content strategy specifically or, if you'd prefer to watch, check out the video below.
The numbers since last time
Emails are the key metric for my board game Kickstarter marketing plan and they've seen nearly a 50% increase in 3 weeks, going from 40 to 59. Later in this article I'll highlight some things from the content strategy which I think have helped that.
Kickstarter followers are up too, from 39 to 45. It's unclear how much of this is organic and how much is linked to that email list increase though.
The YouTube channel has grown nicely, up to 24 subscribers from 9. Demos haven't changed and probably won't until 2027 when I'm looking at starting convention demos. We've also had 2 more people join us in the Discord.
Why the old strategy didn't work
Even calling it a strategy might be a stretch. I used to try and think of content on the spot, never looking more than a video or 2 ahead. I'd panic when I missed a post and try and make up for it the following week. It was completely unsustainable.
What was worse though is the effort wasn't doing much. I was forcing out content and it wasn't great, people weren't engaging in a lot of it and looking back it wasn't really providing any value to anyone. Taking a step back I came up with 4 key principles which I wanted to follow for all my content going forward.
The Four Principles
Go where people are and communicate with them in the way they want to be communicated with.
Earn the right to people's attention through value. Don't just try and take it.
It has to be sustainable, both in time/effort and money.
Let the game do the talking.
Why YouTube Long-Form Videos are the Foundation
There are a few reasons why I pivoted away from short-form content and into long-form YouTube videos. I'd never made YouTube videos before so I knew any reasons would have to be worth the effort of learning how.
The primary reason is value (principle 2). It's much easier for me to provide something which could be genuinely interesting and/or helpful to someone in longer form.
YouTube videos also let me gain a bit of credibility as a game designer by giving more insights into my views, work and anything else I'm doing. It's also a great platform for organically reaching new people.
In terms of sustainability (principle 3), I enjoy this process much more than churning out short-form content, and it takes me around 2 hours a week.
How One Video Becomes Five Platforms
While long-form content allows me the time and space to try and get my ideas across and provide value, short-form content is still useful. It can give small insights or direct people to the long form content. With this in mind I take my long-form videos and try and extract 3-5 short clips to post to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube shorts.
When I first started this, I used a free AI tool and quickly realised it wasn't producing anything of value in the clips, so I quickly switched approach. Now I grab a transcript of the YouTube video and put it into an LLM which gives me a handful of sections it thinks:
Provide value on their own
Are short enough to be on that platform
Still make sense without the video context
I then verify which ones meet all those criteria and get chopping using Meta Edits. This adds a bit more time, but isn't too bad.
Going Where People Are - BGG
Principle 1 in practice - I take my long form video and write a BGG blog on the same topic. It gives me a chance to have genuine discussions with people I know will be interested in the topic.
I share the links to my website articles and YouTube videos, but it's not the focus. The focus is getting community engagement.
An example of this where there was a lot of engagement was a blog on quarterbacking and whether it's a player problem or a game design problem. There ended up being 50+ comments with various viewpoints, many disagreeing with each other. It was a great piece of engagement and I really enjoyed reading peoples views - hopefully the people involved did too.
Articles and SEO
Going back to principle 1 and communicating with people how they want to be communicated with, I take my video and post an article version (like the one you're reading). It lets those who prefer reading access the same information and lets people engage with the content how they want to.
It also has a nice side effect of improving my websites SEO ranking. If you're not familiar SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the field of improving the likelihood of certain search engine requests returning links to your site. For example if you search "How to launch a board game kickstarter" in Google, you probably won't find this article. The more posts with clear topics, phrases and links from external sites there are, the more the likelihood of me showing up in those searches.
This is also where AI can help. I input my written articles and get it to highlight opportunities for improving my SEO. It can pick out where I should be using key phrases, where I should be providing links to things and also general readability. I can then make as many or as few of these changes as I want. A caveat here though - I mentioned financial sustainability and I use Google sites as it's free. It's not great for SEO, however and doesn't let you set a lot of things manually which can help you here so might be something I have to move away from in the future.
Email List - Why Health Matters as Much as Size
As well as my public content, I also share a monthly newsletters to everyone on my email list. It includes game updates, new artwork, conventions I've been to, pretty much anything that seems relevant - there's no fixed template. The email itself does a few jobs though.
It keeps people engaged, hopes to gently nudge mildly interested people into potential backers, and gives people a chance to unsubscribe. It might sound odd in a series about getting emails but unsubscribes are really valuable. When someone unsubscribes I get a better understanding of how many potential backers I have. If they stayed subscribed but deleted the emails without reading it'd be an indicator for mail providers that my emails might be spam.
Another way to improve the overall health and quality of the list is the free PNP I give to subscribers. People can play it and if they don't like it unsubscribe, but it also really improves deliverability. When someone subscribes they go digging into their emails to find the PNP. They'll look in their inbox, maybe even their junk, open the email (around 89% open rate) and check out the PNP. This is a great signal to email providers that emails from my domain are important and shouldn't end up in junk folders.
With that in mind why not subscribe below and try out the game for yourself - you can always unsubscribe later!
What's Actually Worked in Month One
As I mentioned at the start the numbers have been ticking along and I think I have a few insights on what's been helping. Early signs things are working for the strategy - Geek Weekly picked up one of my blog posts and got a lot of eyes on it, the Cardboard Edison newsletter then linked the video on designer-publisher speed dating. This is a great example of principles 1 and 2 working together. People found value from the content, in multiple formats, and so shared it wider. Both of these got more views on the content and probably account for a number of the new subscribers.
Not content related but an indicator of principle 4 in action, I sold 12 copies of Station Decimus at the Bastion Indie Market back in May. One of the copies made it to someones table with their friends, and then to a BGG blog where the writer was happy for me to link my PNP. Again I think this helped with the numbers.
What's Coming Next
Next up in the series I'll be talking more about principle 4 and other methods I'm using to get the game in front of more people.
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