Effectively Using TikTok To Market Your Game

How to master Tiktok when marketing your game

With TikTok growing at a staggering rate many game developers are being left behind by not using the platform to its full potential. As social media platforms grow their organic reach diminishes, so right now is prime time to take advantage of that organic reach. We hear from people all the time that they don’t know what to post, let’s get into what you should be posting to seize the full potential of TikTok.

Create Less, Document More

“I have no idea what to create” is a common thought we hear when TikTok is brought up.” Our answer is always “Be authentic and document your journey, don’t put energy into creating.” We hear you thinking “but I am not interesting or what I am doing isn’t interesting.” You have to shift that mindset when trying to reach the gaming community and think about what they are into. Gamers love gaming news, updates, etc. Documenting your development process will allow your fanbase greater connection to you and your game and get your potential customers that much more excited to purchase it at launch. Documenting your game development doesn’t need to be high production or tons of editing. The perfect TikTok has a hook, engaging content, and sometimes a call to action.

Hook Your Audience

Questions make great hooks, something that is visually stimulating is another great hook. You want the viewer to linger on the content. Using text will also help your viewer engage with the video longer which helps boost you in TikTok’s algorithm.

• Do you want to see the newest enemy, power up, ship, weapon, etc?
• Do you want to see a funny or crazy bug in the game?
• If you have a world to explore asking “where would you travel first?”
• Want to meet this team member?

Your hook can become your shtick, allowing you to take the guesswork out of what you’re going to create. With that hurdle out of the way, let’s get into the content.

Create engaging content

After the hook, it’s time to show them what you’ve been working on. This can be very grandiose depending on where you are in your game, or it may be a character model. What may seem uninteresting to you is a peek behind the curtain for those following along. The content could focus on your team, bite-sized updates on who they are and what they are working on, allowing your team’s personality to shine. Keeping things simple avoids the common pitfall of overthinking because all you are doing is documenting your game development journey. Showing as much of the process as you can help teach and inform others about how games are made. Did you finally squash a bug that was driving you crazy? Share how you were able to fix it. The most important thing is creating a connection with your fan base and in some cases may even inspire the next generation of game developers.

An effective call to action

A call to action can be as simple as “hit the follow button for all our updates!” and often does not have to be more complicated than that when first starting out. As you get closer to launch the call to action may be directing your audience to your Steam page so potential buyers can either wishlist or preorder your game. Use a call to action to grow a discord server for your game, your brand, and possible future games as well. You can also let your audience know about your live streams if you decide to stream on Twitch or TikTok.

Live streaming on TikTok

As TikTok grows as a platform live streaming is becoming more prevalent. Streams can be as simple as pointing your phone at your computer screen and hitting the go-live button. If you want to get a little fancier you can build a scene in OBS and set the canvas to 1080 x 1920, then point your phone at OBS. We would go live like that on the regular because we didn’t have a stream key for TikTok. This is a great way to engage with a much broader audience. We’ve had streams where 150,000 have come through in one stream.

Start your TikTok journey

TikTok is no longer just dancing and lipsyncing, it is proving itself as a powerful marketing tool. Take advantage of the organic reach it offers while it’s hot.