It's $50/mo to put an ad banner on the zuggsoft page. Does anyone think that price is worth it? If so, would people want to chip in for this?

(This would of course wait until we have a new permanent site)

Just throwing out an ad here or an ad there I think would do very little good. If this is the only thing going on, don't waste your money.

You do an ad campaign in concert with other things, to maximize the effect. For example, create a fancy new marketing page designed specifically to entice new players, and give them the info they need to be impressed. Combine that with a blitz on the various community forums to raise exposure, and then finish it off by running well-designed ads in as many places as you can. Make sure the people who are actually interested in MUDs are seeing the name "CF" come up repeatedly. If they just see it flash by on Facebook, you probably get nothing. But if they see it flash by on Facebook and Google and TMS and gaming forums, etc... well then you're getting somewhere.

To do all that it really needs someone on the staff who's not only overseeing it all, but has the power to make day-to-day decisions without going to committee, including changes to the website and all the public info that is out there already (like the blurb on TMS or TMC). Preferably someone with a background in marketing.

Anyway, until there's someone like that to coordinate, running one ad is a waste of money.

Aarn

You sound like you're in marketting, and I understand what you're saying about how to maximize the effectivenes of a marketting campaign.

But here's the thing: That simply isn't going to happen on CF. It just isn't. Period. So let's stop talking about what the best thing to do would be, and let's talk about what might actually be possible. I don't want to ignore the advice of people who really know the industry, but everyone who seems to be into marketing starts making demands that simply will never, ever be met, and it's no surprise when nothing comes of their advice. Face it, we're not getting a fancy new website, not now, probably not ever. So it's a waste of time complaining about that.

You guys seem to be used to a corporate environment where you have some resources to play with. CF does not have those resources. Not monetarily, not skill-wise. So we have to work with what we have, and that's at least a few players willing to put up a few bucks to at least try something once.

When you are saying running one ad is a waste of money do you mean that it will literally do nothing, or just that you'd get more leads per dollar with the multi-pronged approach? Are you saying that it's actually a total waste and is unlikely to get even 1 player?

Assume that $200 is going to be spent on marketing, but there will be no new website or any change whatsoever to the game itself. Assume it's entirely a community thing and the staff takes no part. Ignoring how sad it is not to have the idea ad campaign set up, what would you suggest doing with that tiny amount of money? What if it were $500? $1000? I don't think there's much of any chance of getting more.

I've ran ad campaign for CF in AdWords about a year ago. No any visible affect. I used about 70-100$. Got visitors, yes.

http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=56&topic_id=543&mesg_id=543&page=

That's been up since Feb 5. I don't know if anybody has volunteered to help, but I'm getting the sense that some people that seem interested in marketing aren't aware of Thror's post.

Hadn't seen that. Well I take it back then, I guess a marketing website is a possibility. If I had any website design skills I'd contribute, but I really don't.

I'm not into marketing. But I worked in business for quite a few years where I dealt with it, and I know quite a few people in marketing.

My point was, if no one is going to step up and organize the way I mentioned, buying an ad is simply throwing money down the toilet. I'm sure a marketing person could tell you better than I, but if memory serves the typical response from a targeted direct-marketing campaign is something like 2%. And that's from a campaign like a series of four personalized letters in the mail sent over the span of a month with follow-up phone calls. Random rotating internet ad banner? I have no stats to back this up, but if you do nothing else I would honestly expect that you wouldn't get even one new player out of it.

If you REALLY have $500 burning a hole in your pocket that you are dying to spend on CF marketing, then you should stick it in an interest-bearing account until such time as someone organizes a campaign at every level. And if they don't, you can withdraw your $500+interest instead of having wasted it.

Maybe Thror is going to be that guy, I didn't notice his post about the website before. How 'bout it Thror? :)

Aarn

>And
>that's from a campaign like a series of four personalized
>letters in the mail sent over the span of a month with
>follow-up phone calls. Random rotating internet ad banner? I
>have no stats to back this up, but if you do nothing else I
>would honestly expect that you wouldn't get even one new
>player out of it.

Do people still read letters they get in the mail from companies they don't know? Mine pretty much go right into the recycling bin.

>Do people still read letters they get in the mail from
>companies they don't know? Mine pretty much go right into the
>recycling bin.

Sure, business owners do. Certainly not all business owners, and certainly not all mail though. In fact trying to get your letters to stand out from the crowd and actually get not only opened, but also read beyond the first line, is practically an art form. In the business I was in I only dealt with other businesses, not individuals and families, but I suspect it's much the same there just with entirely different strategies.

But the same way you wouldn't do one rotating internet ad banner, you would never send just one letter. You would send multiple letters, each one carefully designed to target the individual you want to read it, and draw them into your message. And a good mail campaign will be followed up by a personal phone call. And if you have the budget, run some radio or tv at the same time. That way they hear your name on the radio, see your name flash up on tv, then get a letter or two in the mail. Probably no single one of those things will get their interest, but when you combine all of them, then follow up by calling them yourself? Well, then maybe you get in the door.

But even then you're not talking more than a couple percent that will even talk with you. Doing any one of those things in isolation is probably a total waste of money. It's when you do them together that the effects multiply and you actually see a tangible result.

Even though CF is a service that doesn't cost money, I would still argue that it's fundamentally the same. Our goal is to show them that it's worth spending their valuable time hearing our "sales pitch", out of all the other MUDs they could be looking at. At this point we don't even HAVE a sales pitch - we have a game with a fairly steep learning curve, and a website designed for well-versed users instead of potential users.

The only way to accomplish successful marketing here is to have one person with executive authority running it all. CF would benefit more from one imm who was a skilled marketing person with a scanty budget, than it would from an uncoordinated advertising campaign with a budget of thousands.

Aarn

Six months or so ago, I opened up such a letter to find a real 5 dollar bill inside.

Thought it was pretty nifty. Wonder how many ppl saw the envelope and just ripped apart a five dollar bill.

nt

What about targeted ads on Facebook? There are 66,600 people interested in mudding, 13,660 interested in role playing, and 24,160 interested in online gaming. It seems like a cheap and easy way to get CF at least in front of these people's eyes.

nt

How much do targeted ads on facebook cost? My thinking on the cmud thing is that there's a fairly small pool of advertisers and you're definitely targeting mud players. But sure, if the price per mudder is lower on facebook then let's do that. My concern would be that on facebook we'd just be lost in the crowd. Maybe not though, I'm no expert.

Well, it's pay per click, so you set a spending limit and your ad is there until you run out of money (ie, enough people click on it to run out of budget). Its actually a great way to advertise. Right now, the suggested price is about 68 cents per click. I doubt we'd have that many clicks, but we can target a very specific audience, which is what you want.

That means zuggsoft would need to result in 73 clicks per month to be a better deal. Is that likely? Zuggsoft obviously is also a very mud-specific place.

It wouldn't be overkill or anything. They are both pretty specific to mudders.

If we aren't going forwards we are going backwards, people.

nt