Need Help Marketing my Gaming Product

Neat product, and it looks like you have a bunch of happy customers.

I'm sure most 'average' gamers would appreciate these grips but, like you said, the challenge is finding a message that will help them realize it. (And also compel them to buy.)

I don't know enough about your market, but here are some ways to think about your angle:

The benefits that appeal to parents and casual gamers might not be related to in-game performance. In other words, "improving grip" might be very low on their list of priorities, but "reducing wrist pain" might be very high.

For example, most parents wouldn't buy grips to help little Johnny get more head-shots in Call of Duty. But they MIGHT buy grips that prevent their precious little Johnny from getting finger and joint pain from holding the controller too tightly.

Another example. What about gamers with small hands? Again, I'm speculating, but perhaps people with smaller hands (e.g. younger children? girls? imps?) are more susceptible to pain from having to grip the control too tightly. What if instead they had some grips that meant they no longer needed to grip it so tightly?

One more. What about blisters? Do people ever get blisters or things from controllers? Would a grip help out?

(Note: I'm just speculating, and if these issues don't exist then obviously what I've written is a moot point. But they might give you ideas for more angles to explore.)

Cheers,

Michael

Have you tried looking for forums where non-competitive gamers hang out? You can find gaming blogs with decent PR which should imply decent traffic. Look at past posts and see how many comments they have. If the comment count is good, then start making good comments.

Another possibility is doing media buys on sites where moms frequent. For banner copy, you can say something about protecting their kids' hands, fingers and wrists from repetitive stress injuries.

You can do guest posting on relevant blogs about the importance of avoiding repetitive stress injuries. Look for blogs that attract the casual or average gamer.

Reading your site copy, I suggest being more specific about the "benefits" of your grips and not just the features.

Read the above and ask yourself "how" and "so what"? Then express the answers in terms of benefiting the user.

Also, if possible, give the name of the rubber resin and explain why it's so high quality. That lends a little more credibility to the claim. Anyone can say their product is high quality. There's nothing to wrap your head around because it's vague. Explain a little more about why it's so great. Use specifics and it will be even better to find some hard data to support your claims.

Then explain how all that benefits not only hardcore gamers but also non-hardcore gamers.

I'm sure Facebook has a combination of gamers and parents of gamers. So make a FB page and learn how to do effective FB marketing. There's lots of resources here about FB marketing. And there's a sub-forum for social marketing. I bet there are FB groups about gaming. And if not, then create one.

=>> Contact manufacturers, distributors and affiliates of laterally relevant XBox gaming products (both digital and physical products) who operate heavily trafficked websites with top ranking pages in Google for directly and laterally relevant keywords.

• Strike a mutually beneficial arrangement with them, such as paying them a fixed monthly advertising rate (or CPM/CPC rates) on top of affiliate commissions per sale for exclusively promoting your product on the pages of their sites via banners and links, for them to test your product by giving them sample units, and for offering your product to their customers as a recommended add-on product before, during and after checkout.

=>> Contact owners of heavily trafficked, top Google ranking, directly and laterally relevant XBox gaming-related sites like Web forums, blog networks, social communities and so on.

• Strike a mutually beneficial arrangement with them, such as paying them decent CPC/CPM prices (or fixed monthly prices) for promoting your product on the pages of their sites via banners and links, for them to test out your product by giving them sample units, and for them to earn good commissions per sale generated by those banners and links.

I used to do a bit of blog commenting and forum posting but just for SEO, how would blog commenting and forum posting help drive traffic to my site other than by increasing SERPs and such things?

I am going to go ahead and get some banners made so we can advertise them on gaming related sites (blogs,forums).

What do you guys think about us adding a blog to our site? We are fairly active in the gaming community and would be able to post blogs about the competitive scene and about gaming in general.

Have you tried putting your product on Amazon or Ebay for some traffic? Also you could start using some paid PPC/PPV traffic targeting keywords like xbox360 controller skins or urls like gamefaqs.com

Sent you a PM - look for it and check my signature below... there is a reason why many of the big gaming companies have been mentioning us on social media and as a gamer I think you will get it.

Let's talk as we might be able to help each other.

It's not often I suggest video but this is one product that would do well with it. I'd make a few videos with some very popular games and then mention the grips. Though the traffic will come from the popular game you use to show off your grips. Of course, there will be a link to your site available.

Someone mentioned eBay. I agree. But don't go for an auction or buy it now listing. For $10 you can get a 30-day listing on eBay Classifieds. I'm not talking about their regional classifieds like CraigsList.

eBay has a section where you can pretty much do anything you want in your listing. Unlike auctions, you can put in an unlimited number of images and you can also link to your site. The cool thing is an eBay classified ad shows up in the regular eBay search engine alongside the regular listings so you've got access to their whole marketplace. Do a search on eBay classifieds. Good luck.

We are on ebay and amazon. When i first put it up on ebay we were getting a lot of sales from it and getting a sale for every 25 views of the listing or so. Then one person gave us bad feedback and we have gotten maybe 3 sales on it since then and a substantially less amount of views to it. Our rating is still 96% but it killed the amount of views we get. Amazon probably brings a sale a month or so.

We have not tried any adwords campaigns although i plan on starting one up soon

I'd say start getting in contact with dev studios or even publishers, convince them of your products value. Having worked in the industry for 5 years, I can tell you that the vast majority of people working at a game studio are themselves big gamers. This is the type of product I can see easily being branded and decked out for a specific game (like the xbox faceplates, or controllers, etc..).

You could also hit up comic/hobby shops, a lot of their customer base will be casual gamers. Not sure where you're based out of, but check around for gaming events and conventions - try and get a presence in those.

I'd also recommend getting into live streaming, brand out a twitch page - host contests, build a following, sponsor tournaments, etc. This is probably the quickest way to spread word of your product to the general gaming community !

Have you considered doing SMS Mobile Marketing to better reach your prospective customers?