• Brand Voice and Tone
• Social Media
  • Platforms
  • Content
  • Engaging with our Community
  • Developing posts
• Posters and Flyers

It is important that we keep a consistent voice and tone for our brand throughout all of our marketing operations. We want to keep a fun and inviting tone across all public-facing aspects of our project to help bring new people to our game and ensure everyone has a good expeirence with our brand. Our goal is to increase awareness of our game while fostering a strong community that's interested and engaged with our game.

Social media is one of the best ways we can advertise and promote our game throughout the development process. We can reach a large audience of students and easily generate awaress around our project.

After conducting a survey of our primary audience, IGM students, we concluded that there were five platforms where we could most effectively connect with our audience. Instagram and Twitter (X) will be best for building our community and keeping people engaged with our game over time. We will also post to the RIT subreddit with large announcements about the game because that is a great way to reach many RIT students online. We can also use YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels to release short form video content that advertises our game. Short form content is often the best way to reach large audiences but production of this content takes a lot of time so it a stretch goal for this project.

The content that we post will vary each week during development as there will always be newly finished ideas that are ready to be posted. We will post team member introductions, development updates, character and level concept art, and many other announcements, updates, and images.

We want to do our best to keep our community engaged in the development of our project and the best way to do that is through staying engaged with them. We will do this by responding to messages and comments left on our social media accounts as best as possible and keeping note of which of our posts they like and which they don't. We will monitor the engagment and impressions on each of our posts to determine what content resonates well with our audience and what they prefer to see so we can continue to post more of that kind of content. Additionally, we will track demographics and our followers' most active times so we can ensure we're reaching the RIT community and that we're posting at times of day when our followers are more likely to be active.

Ideation

The first step is actually coming up with ideas of how we can market our game. Some of these ideas may include specific aspects or parts of our game that we want to show off to attract interest while others may be as simple as following a social media trend that will allow us to attract more eyes and get people's attention. It's important to focus in on what the rest of the team has been up to and what progress they've been making. We should try to keep our social emdia accounts current and let our followers know what we've actually been working on.

Planning

Once we have an idea of we want to post, we need to build its foundations and plan out where this post will go and what it might look like. We should start by deciding what platforms our post will be published to and we do this by considering each one we're on and what each one is best for. Some platforms are better for still images while others are optimized for videos and some are best for vertical videos. We should also consider the word count limitations on some platforms and what text we'll want to accompany our content. This is when we will also want to plan a more specific idea of how a post will look. How long will videos be and how many images will be posted? How can we communicate the main idea of what we are marketing in the format that we will be posting the information? These are the sorts of questions that we should be able to answer at this stage of developing content.

Content Creation

Now that there is a solid framework for the post, it's time to actually create the content of the post. This is often the largest and most time consuming stage of the developing posts but also allows for the most creativity. This is the stage where we are actually designing the look of the post. Still images are usually best designed in Adobe Photoshop or Canva however other options are always available as well and it's up to the designer to use the platform that they are most comfortable in. Video content can be created in Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro however there are also other options that can be used as well. The design work at this stage of the development may be done by the person planning the rest of the post or may be handed off to a more expereinced designer who can create a professional deisgn in less time. It's important that the deisng matches the aspect ratios of the platform it is intended to be published to and multiple similar iterations of a design may be needed if a post is going to be on multiple platforms.

Writing Captions

While the captions on posts allow us to give more detailed information about whatever it is that we're posting about, it's important to remember that while being informative, they can also be fun and playful. Our audience will engage with both the imagery content and the text content so the text should still convey our fun and inviting brand identity. These captions should ideally start with a quick sentence that explains what the post is while also being quirky and maybe funny. We can also add emojis to help provide a playful tone in this first sentence. After the initial line explaining what the post is, it's okay to have some more detailed information however it should be minimal and easy to read. Finally, at the end of the caption there should be around 5-10 hashtags used that relate to what the post is. It's also important to use common RIT-related hashtags such as "#rittigers" because these help other members of the RIT community find our posts very easily. Hashtags improve out posts discoverability but adding too many looks overwhelming to some viewers and may take away from the actual content of the caption.

Feedback and Critiques

It's very important to receive feedback from other people on both the visual content created and the caption. When looking for feedback on the visual content, one should seek other designers, ideally ones who have experience with social media, and ask them to critique the design. The design should be tweaked, changed, or even restarted if needed and the designer should look for mulitple rounds of feedback before finalizing their design. When looking for feedback on the captions, it's important to show the caption side by side with the visual content becuase that is how it will appear for real viewers. People who review captions should have experience using social media so they have a decent understanding of how captions should be laid out and what content should be present. If time allows, more feedback can be gotten from someone outside the project who has never seen what the post is promoting so we can get a feel for how real viewers will respond to the post.

Final Touches and Scheduling

Once the post has been reviwed and all feedback has been iterated on, the post just needs some final touches before it is ready to go live. Some still image posts may be better with music added on and a platform like Instagram has this feature built in so you can easily add music to accompany a post or story. As the Gizmo Go-Kartz Instagram is a business account, Instagram doesn't allow us to use copyrighted music which helps us avoid accidentally breaking copyright laws. On a platform like Instagram it may also be useful to tag other accounts from time to time such as the RIT Game Dev Club who's mascot is a playable character in our game. Once these final touches are in place, we can choose to either publish or schedule our posts. Scheduling posts allows us to make our posts public at exact times which allows us to post when our audience is most often online and post to multiple platforms at the same time. Twitter for the web has a built-in schedule feature that allows posts to be scheduled, but to schedule posts on Instagram you need to use Meta Business Suite which has the feature. It's also important to note that Meta doesn't allow you to schedule a post to be released in under 20 minutes. Sometimes it may be important to just post something as soon as it's finished and on those occasions, posts can simply be published without being scheduled first.

We plan to create multiple posters and fliers that we can put up around campus to advertise for our game. We can hang posters around Golisano Hall and locations on campus that get a lot of foot traffic such as dining halls, the library, and the SHED. Our posters can help to announce the development of our game, invite people to playtest our game, and announce the completion/launch of our game.