Marketing your game store is crucial to your business’s success but that doesn’t necessarily mean spending thousands of dollars on advertising and cash prize tournaments. There are several ways you can market your game store for free… sort of. You still need to put in your time, but that’s close enough.
The first method is via social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
Be Social on Social Media
Social media has become an essential tool for businesses to reach out to their target audience and connect with them on a personal level. With over 3.6 billion social media users worldwide, it is no surprise that game stores are leveraging social media to promote their products and services.
One of the best ways to leverage social media for marketing purposes is to have a personality and let it show through, while also engaging people in conversations they want to have.
Post Regularly
One of the most important things when it comes to social media marketing is consistency. Posting regularly on your social media platforms can help you stay top-of-mind with your followers and increase engagement rates. However, it’s not just about quantity, but also quality. Your content should be engaging, informative, and relevant to your audience.
Schedule your posts ahead of time using a tool like Hootsuite or Facebook’s Business Manager and fill your feed with posts that don’t necessarily reflect what’s happening right now. Memes are timeless and they make great social media posts any day of the week. Fill your publishing calendar ahead of time and then add in your event promotions, your content that you publish, and other questions, thoughts, or opinions you have as you go to round everything out.
But having that baseline is a good place to start.
Ask Intriguing Questions
Engaging your followers in conversations they want to have is crucial to building a loyal following on social media. Asking intriguing questions can help spark conversations and encourage your followers to share their thoughts and opinions. This can not only increase engagement rates but also help you understand your audience better.
Get people talking and you’ll get increased organic reach too, so bonus points.
Feature Your Employees and Customers
One thing that business owners should emphasize is featuring their employees and customers in their posts. People connect with people, not businesses, and they love seeing themselves or their friends be highlighted. This can help create a sense of community and increase brand loyalty.
I find myself telling this to almost every store owner I talk to because it makes such a difference. If you’re not getting the engagement you want on social media, this might be the reason.
Create Search-Optimized Content
Creating content for your website also counts as free and can net you search traffic from Google if you do it with search in mind. Writing content that helps people make better decisions about what games to buy, answers their questions, and/or what you’re interested in within the games industry can help you establish yourself as an authority in your industry, which impacts the overall rankings of your website.
The more you write, the more your website is seen as an authority both locally and nationally on the subject, and you get rewarded with higher rankings in Google. Bonus points if you do some research beforehand and write content that targets search terms that people are looking for, but just writing great content that people like is excellent.
Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
Google My Business is a powerful tool that businesses can use to increase their online presence and reach more potential customers. Setting up your profile, adding your services, cross-posting things you put up on other social platforms, and making sure your info is accurate are all important steps in optimizing your Google My Business profile. Encouraging reviews and answering them when they happen can also help increase your online visibility.
Word of Mouth is Powerful
Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool that can help businesses reach new customers and increase their brand awareness. If you have a store that delivers a great experience that your customers will want to tell their friends about, you’re on to something. If you don’t, that might be the first place to focus on.
Social media can be a powerful tool for businesses to increase their brand awareness, reach new customers, and engage with their audience, and all for the low, low price of just your time. But as the old adage goes, time is money, and while bootstrapping everything when you’re just getting started is probably the right move, eventually you need to be able to step back and refocus your time on ways to make your game business more efficient, and that means finding other ways to get your marketing done.
That’s where the Manaverse Marketing Agency comes in.
We work specifically with game store owners to grow their business using digital marketing strategies like social media, content creation, email marketing, SEO, and more. You can get a proven digital marketing strategy implemented for your game store in the next 24 hours that generates sales and grows your email list at the same time. Using a powerful combination of Facebook and Google Ads and email automation, we can plug in our proven digital marketing system and start driving sales and growing an email list for your game store almost immediately, all without you having to write a single ad or newsletter.
Find out how we can plug this system into your business in the next 24 hours by booking a quick consultation call. We’ll ask a few questions to see if we’re a good fit and then jump into implementing everything right away. No long set up times, no major commitments, and no tech headaches.
Book your call to find out how we can help make the most of your digital marketing efforts.