About 9 months ago I launched a crowdfunding campaign for my game I had been developing and, though the campaign wasn't successfully funded, I learned a lot from the experience and feel like the experience itself was a success. (Link for reference https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ravengengames/never-lost-our-story?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=never%20lost%20our%20story)

I now find my game at a state where I feel like it is much more polished and ready for another go, however, I wonder if I should spend more time preparing for the “sell” of my game. For example, last time I ran ads on FB and YouTube, while also producing my own promotional material (videos, art, etc..), which at the time felt like a mountain of material.

But I wonder, should I invest externally, like having social media influencers playtest and review the game to get attention/traffic to the site before launching? Or would it be more prudent / sensible to invest in the crowdfunding campaign trailer / pitch and maybe have someone that does it for a living create it? Or even, split the resources and invest a bit in both? Essentially, I'm trying to gauge the best way to “sell” my new campaign, while not emptying the coffers, so to speak.

Thank you for taking the time to read, any suggestions are most certainly welcome!

**Note: I realized I had spelled crowdsource wrong in the title after I submitted the post lol. It wasn't even supposed to be the final title to this topic, but alas, it has been posted and shall be wrong.

Have you seen this old three-part article? It is nearly two decades old so you'll need to translate some terms, but you should be able to find how it fits. That applies almost perfectly to most projects today just as it did back then. It looks like it applies.

Breaking down a few of your questions:

Sceisce said:
should I invest externally, like having social media influencers playtest and review the game to get attention/traffic to the site before launching?

In the professional world those are questions are part of market research. That is usually a continuous process that starts before the first line of code is written. You need to plan for how the product will be marketed and distributed as it can affect so much overall, and fine-tune it as the system develops.

Even your wording tells about decisions you've already made. For example, having your own web site and selling off your own web site means you've excluded other markets like Steam, Epic, Itch, Discord, and all the other entries in distribution. That was common in ages past, but these days it makes a lot of sense to leverage those massive systems rather than relying on your own obscure web site.

Sceisce said:
I wonder if I should spend more time preparing for the “sell” of my game. For example, last time I ran ads on FB and YouTube, while also producing my own promotional material (videos, art, etc..), which at the time felt like a mountain of material.

In the professional world, usually advertising and marketing has a similar budget to development, and both represent about a third of the total budget. That is, if a game costs about 20M on development, the studio will also typically spend about 20M on advertising. There would also be another roughly $20M in pre-production, post-production, administration, operations, and post-launch support.

Considering that, if you invested 2000 hours of your time in developing a game, you could expect to same roughly the same amount of time marketing and pushing your game.

As you have said and experienced, marketing takes a lot of time and resources. At an early stage I would focus on one channel at a time and do it right, rather than trying to do everything at once. Which channel worked best for you during your previous marketing tests, or which do you think could perform even better? You could start with that channel, and if the channel starts losing momentum or doesn't work as anticipated, go to the second-best one.

I can recommend you to read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It's a short and straight-forward book on startup marketing, with many practical examples from other companies.

And of course it's best to be methodical about your marketing plan, like @frob recommends.

@frob That's a healthy article and I'm grateful for your response!

Though I have my site for marketing/information, ultimately the plan is to sell on Steam/Other platforms, because of the very point you made that my website is obscure, especially when compared against giants like Steam, Epic, Itch etc. From what I see/hear, I definitely need to put a lot more into the marketing/promo than I did last time (and not in any small amount either). Again, thank you very much for the response, it was quite helpful and gives me solid grounds to move forward!

@benediktloe I have some honest reviewing to do regarding my last campaign and definitely need to do some planning before I launch any future campaign. I will check out Traction as you recommended, thank you for your recommendation and response!