Switch On: How to Market Your Nintendo Switch Release

Releasing your game into the vast world of the Nintendo eShop can seem like a daunting to task to begin with, so we here at The Game Marketer have put together this handy guide to help you along the way and give you some much needed tips and tricks to marketing your Nintendo Switch game. There are 3 main areas of game marketing that we will be focussing on in this article: influencer marketing, PR, and paid media campaigns.

There many Nintendo Switch influencers who have a Nintendo Switch focused audience who would be perfect to help you to elevate awareness of your game and will help you to put your game in front of the right sort of people. These influencers vary in content style and fanbase, so picking the right influencers for your specific campaign can be a very important thing.

A good place to start with a Nintendo Switch influencer marketing campaign would be to look at Nintendo Switch list-makers, these are the types of channel who compile lists of the newest games being released on Switch, what is on sale on the Nintendo eShop and top 10 lists. The reason that these types of influencer can be so important when running a Nintendo Switch influencer campaign is the fact that their audience is the perfect demographic for you to be marketing your game to.

They are watching these videos to find about potential new games to purchase, so putting your title in one of these videos is a perfect way to get your game in front of a ready-made captive audience. These sorts of content creators may cover your title in one of their videos for free if they think it fits the bill for one of their videos, or alternatively you may want to look at sponsoring one of their videos. The price of this will vary depending on the size of the influencer and must be looked at on a case-by-case basis.

Another good route to take with Nintendo Switch influencer marketing is to look at Nintendo Switch live-streamers and game reviewers. These influencers are the people who live and breathe Nintendo Switch and are constantly on the lookout for the next big Nintendo Switch game. They have dedicated fanbases who look to them to find out about the latest Switch releases and whether or not they are worth buying. Of course, the best way to approach this type of influencer is to first look at whether they will cover the game for free, this way the content that is made will be more organic and feel less forced to the influencer's audience.

The only downside to this approach is that you will not have any bearing on the content that is produced but instead will be trusting in your game to get over well with the influencer so that they can make some positive content around the game.

Once again, you can also look at paid content with the Nintendo Switch review type of influencer, but when you consider the fact that when making paid content, they must let their fans know that is paid content by marking their videos or streams with #sponsored or #ad, then you can understand that sometimes the paid approach is not the best route to take. If you are looking for someone to simply showcase your Nintendo Switch game to their fans then paid content can be excellent for that, but if you are looking for more organic content, honest reviews and opinions, then looking to push for free content will be the way forward.

When looking at PR for Nintendo Switch, there are a number of websites and blogs who cover Nintendo Switch news on a daily basis, with some focusing on specific Nintendo Switch games. You should differentiate between looking at more general gaming press. With high-tier outlets like IGN, Indie Game Fans cover Nintendo Switch releases as well as all other consoles and platforms, as well mid-tier outlets who do the same. You then have Nintendo Switch-specific press outlets such as Nintendo Life, My Nintendo News as well as Nintendo's own websites and social media platforms.

If you want to look at these Nintendo Switch press outlets as your route for Nintendo Switch PR, then you will come across many different options. There are Nintendo Switch sites that are focused more on Nintendo Switch news and impressions of unreleased games, whilst there are also sites that specialise in covering all Nintendo related content. With the Nintendo Switch-specific outlets, they are often actively on the lookout for games to review and will willing except review keys to try out new games and review them, so your first port of call should be to carry out a campaign to get keys distributed to Nintendo Switch focussed press and news outlets, as well as looking at your more general gaming press too.

Similar to influencer marketing, you can also look to paid content on gaming websites, ranging from paid descriptive articles to highlight your game that will be featured on the front page of the chosen website, or website takeovers, where you can fill the background to a page with an ad for your game (usually accompanied by a descriptive article too). Again, whilst paid content can sometimes feel less authentic than organic content, if you position your paid content in the right place and go about it the right way it can be an incredibly rewarding route to take with your game.

The key things to look at with Nintendo Switch paid media campaigns are; to create engaging and attention-grabbing ads, to ensure that your Nintendo Switch paid media campaign is reaching the right people, and to ensure that your paid media campaign is taking place in the right time period.

Paid media campaigns are an excellent way to get the Nintendo Switch player-base to take notice of your game, but you need to ensure that you are able to get Nintendo Switch gamers engaged with your ads. You need to know how your potential customers consume their information and to do this you must first look to create target audiences. A target audience is a group of people that are linked by something, be it a game that they play, certain accounts that they follow etc. Once you have created a target audience you can go on to create lookalike audiences, algorithmically created groups of people that in some way resemble the original target audience that you created.

Once you have this data you can look to analyse how these groups interact with ads, where you should be placing these ads. For example, if you look at a target audience built from a group of people who play the same game and you notice that this game has a strong community on Facebook, you will know that by running your ads on Facebook you will be able to reach your target audience. By carrying out these processes for your target audience and lookalike audiences you will be able to carry out a successful paid media campaign for your Nintendo Switch game.

A key part of monitoring the performance of Nintendo Switch paid media campaigns is in looking at how much interaction there has been with your ad. For example, by using a data analytics tool like Google Analytics you will be able to track the cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR) and will give you the opportunity to calculate the overall return on investment (ROI) of your campaign. This information can tell you whether your ad was engaging enough, what demographics responded best to your ads, what countries your ads performed best in and so on, all of which will allow you to better target your ads going forward and boost the ROI.

A good ad is only ever really as good as the targeting you can provide for that ad, without carrying out proper data analytics on your target audiences your ad will not be able to perform well, and this is certainly the case when looking at Nintendo Switch paid media campaigns.

When looking to market your Nintendo Switch release, there are many different things that you need to consider, and although this can seem like a daunting task there are some easy steps that you can take to ensure that your paid marketing campaign goes well.

By breaking your marketing campaign down into different areas, you will be able to better understand what is required for a successful Nintendo Switch launch campaign. For example, here we have broken things down into the 3 main categories of influencer marketing, PR, and paid media activities. It is not entirely important which of these angles that you start with, but what is important is that they run in unison to a degree. For example, if you are running a paid media campaign you must be aware that those who see that ad might want to do their research on your game and search the web for reviews; therefore, it becomes important that you have existing review content online, be it from press outlets or from influencers.

The same can be said for those who see PR articles on the game, the next step for that person may be to search the game on YouTube to look at some gameplay footage, so here it would be beneficial to have existing influencer content up around the game. All in all, by looking at your marketing campaign from these three angles and by carrying out each part with dedication and care, you can someway ensure that your Nintendo Switch release campaign is a successful one!

Would you like help in marketing your Nintendo Switch game? If so, contact The Game Marketer down below to see how we can help.