作者：Richard Wood

在2016年8月，我们与来自PlayStation的战略伙伴关系团队合作在PS4上发行了《Brut@l》。PlayStation团队让我们能够面向他们平台创造游戏。而作为一支缺少预算的小型团队并且是在创造自己的第一款主机游戏，我们需要发挥更大的创造性并制定足够现实的目标。

Brut@l (from steamcommunity)

为什么我们要专注于草根营销：

我们很早便清楚，作为一家小型工作室要想被IGN，Gamespot和Giant Bomb等网站推荐是非常困难的，尽管我们愿意去尝试，但事实往往不如人意。对于很多人来说这便标志着失败，但是我们却认为这是一个白日梦一般的目标，所以我们决定面向一些较小的网站和社区去推广我们这款特殊的ASCII风格的冒险游戏。

于是我们便开始制定策略，即以草根营销为基础。草根营销指的是：

“比起发布能够吸引许多人的信息，你将瞄准小部分群体并希望该群体能够将你的信息传递给更多用户。草根营销通常都会使用非传统型方法。”

基于这一定义，我们便决定与电子游戏评论者和影响者领域的全新且具有抱负的人才展开合作。这便意味着我们会与那些拥有不多YouTube订阅者或Podcast听众的人合作。我发现许多工作室似乎在避免使用这一策略而将更多时间花在那些能够带给你100个访问者的人身上。

基于以下原因我便认准这是最适合我们的推广方式：

我们是一支拥有100个YouTube订阅者的团队：我们不能报以太大幻想，毕竟我们只是一支小型团队，我们也清楚一些小型评论者/网站/影响者希望与我们合作。我们觉得去尝试获取“主流”媒体的注意是不现实的。

熟能生巧：在最初的《Brut@l》公告中，我只在脑子里联想了游戏的宣传说辞，但这与在podcast或舞台上亲自宣传游戏是截然不同的。而通过与Roger Pokorny等更小的内容创造者合作，我便能够学到什么是可行的什么是不可行的。这让我能够更好地在访问中推广游戏，与充满热情的个体创造内容并与那些我所共事的人交叉推广游戏（游戏邦注：这么做不仅能够推广我们的游戏也能够推广他们的网站/频道）。

建立持久的关系：发行了游戏后便将其放任不管，这便是一大错误。通过与全新内容创造者和评论者等努力获取职业能力的人合作，你便有可能接触到来自IGN，Gamespot和Kinda Funny等公司的员工。我们便很幸运能够与初露头角的评论家Trevor Starkey，视频编辑师Tom Hawkins，全新IGN社交制作人Sean Pitts，之前提到的Roger Pokorny，Knerds的团队，充满才能的Ally Mushka等人建立起友好的关系。我们从这种关系中收益颇丰，我相信他们也会如此，并且说实话，我们希望能够在下一次游戏发行时再次与这些人进行合作。

我们是如何选择与谁共事：

一旦我们决定与全新且充满热情的评论者，影响者和创造者共事时，我们所面临的下一个问题便是该如何去找到这些人。我们找到了三种方法：

与已建立的社区合作：就我们自己来说，我们是Kinda Funny的忠实粉丝，这既是排名第一的PlayStation播客也是Best Friends社区。因为我们是节目的粉丝所以我们非常清楚哪些人会对这样的合作感兴趣。于是我们便主动接近了这些人并商讨了播客，游戏访问等合作方式，或只是进行简单的聊天。随着内容的播出我会去关注Kinda Funny的论坛并寻找进一步的合作对象。这不仅能够推广我们自己的《Brut@l》，也能够宣传这些全新创造者。我们也将此作为跳板去寻找更多合适的全新创造者。

发送电子邮件：我们创建了一份excel文件，其中包含了1000多个网站，内容创造者和podcast，我们将基于该文件去匹配网站与联系细节。我们会给每个网站，podcast和内容创造者发送不同的邮件并向他们解释《Brut@l》是怎样的游戏，我们想要怎么做以及会如何提供适合他们用户的合作方式。虽然这种方法的回报率较低，但却能让我们建立良好的关系并提高我们的邮件使用率。这还能创造出一些有趣的结果，就像我们出现在了巴西的无线广播站，获得了意大利杂志的推荐，并接受了PlayStation Universe和PlayStation Lifestyle的采访，出现在意大利的MTV上，但最酷的还是我们创造了自己的Giant Bomb Quick页面。而一个一个地发邮件需要花费许多时间，就像我在伦敦度假的第一天便将未婚妻拖进网吧帮我发邮件，但不管怎样我还是觉得这么做是值得的。

不断更新内容：4月份的时候，我们持续数周时间每天都在更新一些特殊内容去吸引人们的注意。这些内容让我们能够始终留在社区成员的印象中并通过社交分享而接触到全新用户，说实话，很多人都很相信我们并愿意帮助我们推广这些宣传内容。

结果

我说了许多我们会去使用草根营销的原因以及我们如何寻找合作对象，但最终这一切是否值得呢？对于我们来说，作为一支来自苏格兰且只有8个人的小型团队，并且没有市场营销预算，能够获得Giant Bomb和Kinda Funny的宣传，并获得美国以及意大利的所有PlayStation网站的关注，还能获得来自Twitter和YouTube的无数推广与反馈，我们真的非常满足了。

因为我们在游戏发行前便不断进行推广，所以在游戏发行时我们获得了来自小但却充满热情的社区成员的大力宣传并因此吸引到更大型的网站的注意。尽管我们从未收到IGN的评论，但是我也坚信我们的其它所得足以帮助我们这支小型团队实现第一款PlayStation 4游戏的成功。

草根营销帮助我们明确了适合自己的推广方式并让我们能够交到可以每天交流的宝贵朋友，同时也确保《Brut@l》能在发行时与发行后从众多竞争者中脱颖而出。如果说我在《Brut@l》的发行中学到了什么，那便是除了需要做好内容与推广外，你还需要一个强大坚实的基础，而对于我们来说这一基础便是草根营销。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The importance of grassroots marketing as small studio

by Richard Wood

The Importance of Grassroots Marketing as Small Studio.

In August (2016) we launched Brut@l on PS4 in collaboration with the Strategic Partnership team from PlayStation. The team at PlayStation allowed us to create the game for their platform, however we were on the hook for making the game succeed and find an audience on the PlayStation Network. As a small team making our first console title and with no budget, we had to get creative and realistic with our goals.

Why we focussed heavily on Grassroots:

We knew very early on that being featured on sites such as IGN, Gamespot and Giant Bomb, while important, would be very difficult for us as a small studio and that, while we would try, we assumed we’d get no coverage here. For a lot of people this is an immediate sign of failure, however we decided that while this was a dream goal, we wanted to focus on smaller and more focussed sites, communities and personalities for promoting our unique ASCII style adventure.

At this point we started building our strategy, with grassroots marketing a key focus. Grassroots marketing is often defined as:

“Instead of launching a message you hope will appeal to many people, you target your efforts to a small group and hope the group will spread your message to a much larger audience. Grassroots marketing often uses unconventional or non-traditional methods”

We latched onto this definition, with a strong focus being our goal to work with new and aspiring talent in the video game review and influencer space. This meant working with people with sometimes less than 100 YouTube Subscribers or Podcast listeners. We’d seen a lot of studios avoid this strategy, deciding that spending an hour with someone who would get you 100 viewers / listeners a waste.

For the following reasons, we decided this was an important method of approaching promotion for us:

We were a 100 YouTube subscriber team: We were under no illusions we were a small team, and much like us trying to target IGN, we knew a bunch of smaller reviewers / sites / influencers would love to work with us. We felt it made no sense for us to reach for the stars with our attempts to achieve “main stream” coverage if we weren’t willing to help those trying to get coverage for their platforms / sites / channels.

Practice makes perfect: At the initial announcement of Brut@l I had practiced, in my head, our pitch for the game, but practicing in your head and doing it on a podcast, on a stage, on a video or in person is completely different. By working with smaller content creators such as Roger Pokorny I could work on my promotion for Brut@l and learn what worked and didn’t work. This allowed me to better perfect how I promoted Brut@l in interviews, create content with passionate individuals, and cross promote with whoever I worked with – promoting both our game and their site / channel.

Build Lasting Connections: Promoting your game as a “one off launch”, a fire and forget style of campaign, is a huge mistake. By working with new content creators and reviewers, those working to push themselves into a professional capacity, you get to work with the next wave of IGN, Gamespot and Kinda Funny employees. By being genuine, honest and upfront with what you’re trying to achieve you can build lasting relationships. We’ve been very lucky to build friendships with budding reviewer Trevor Starkey, video editor Tom Hawkins, new IGN Social Producer Sean Pitts, the aforementioned Roger Pokorny, the team at Knerds, the talented Ally Mushka, and countless others. We gained a lot from these relationships, and we believe they did too, and quite honestly, we hope to work with all of them again on our next release.

How we found who to work with:

Once we established we wanted to work with upcoming and passionate new reviewers, influencers and creators the next problem was finding them. We broke this down in three ways:

Working with established communities: Internally we were big fans of Kinda Funny, home of the number one PlayStation podcast and the Best Friends community. Because we were genuine listers of the show we knew a select group of folks would be interested in collaborating immediately. We reached out to this group and set up podcast appearances, game previews or simple chats. With this content going live we then followed up on the Kinda Funny forums and looked for further collaborations. This resulted in several more content pieces and allowed us to share a host of content that both promoted Brut@l and promoted these new creators. We used this as a platform to extend our reach and find new creators to work with

Cold emailing: We created a mega excel document that had 1000s of websites, content creators and podcasts and from here we began matching up the sites with contact details. We emailed each site, podcast and content creator a unique email and explained to them what Brut@l was, what we were looking to do as well as offering to collaborate with them in any way that suited their audience. This had a low % return, but again it allowed us to establish a host of connections as well as improve our use of email for outreach. This yielded some interesting results, we appeared on a radio station in Brazil, were featured in an Italian print magazine, conducted interviews with PlayStation Universe and PlayStation Lifestyle, appeared on MTV in Italy, but most notably, we had our very own Giant Bomb Quick look created. Emailing everyone individually, with unique emails, took days, infact on the first day of a holiday in London I dragged my fiancée into an internet café to help me finish the emails, it was an interesting moment, but overall I think it was worthwhile.

Constant Content: We took a page out of the upcoming content creators book and made content constantly over 2016. For a few weeks in April we were even putting out unique and weighty content every day to drive interest and interaction. This stream of quality content (we think so anyway!) allowed us to stay in the minds of our current community and reach a new one via social sharing and, quite honestly, a lot of people believing in us and being willing to go above and beyond to promote our message.

Results, Results, Results!

I’ve spoken a lot about why we used grassroots marketing and how we found who to work with, but in the end, was it all worth it? To us, a small 8-person team from Scotland with no marketing budget, yes! We got coverage from Giant Bomb and Kinda Funny, we were picked up by every PlayStation focused website from the US to Italy. We received a tremendous amount of coverage and feedback from Twitter and YouTube.

Due to our on-going efforts to promote the game on the run up to launch we felt we had a real buzz about the game at launch from our small, but passionate, community that resulted in much larger sites picking up on us. While we never received our IGN preview or review, I do believe that all our other content was more than enough to help us achieve success as a small team doing our first PlayStation 4 game.

Grassroots marketing helped us refine our approach to promotion, allowed us to make incredible friends that we talk to even today, and ensured Brut@l stood out from the crowd on and after launch. If there’s one thing I learned in launching Brut@l it’s that you need to reach for the stars with your content and promotion, but you also need a strong foundation and for us that was grassroots marketing.（source：gamasutra）