Marketing Insights (?) (Patreon)

If you're interested in following this Patreon for a behind-the-scenes look at how a small business in wargames gets off the ground (or doesn't, as the case may turn out to be) then this is an article for you.

If you're only here for the rules and game content, you can move along.

Last November I committed to a series of adverts in Miniature Wargames magazine on an experimental basis.  I had a little leeway in my budget and thought it would be interesting to see what an impact it made.  To assess that impact more objectively, I also cancelled or allowed to lapse all my other marketing content at that time.  I had an ad running on DakkaDakka that came to a natural conclusion.  I stopped Tweeting.  I ran no Facebook or Google ads.  And I watched carefully.

The result was, as I've previously mentioned, dramatic.  I had drawn a graph based on the trajectory of sales from August to the end of November, projecting what they would look like in December and January.  Up to the middle of December, that trajectory was as predicted.  Then, pretty much from the day my ad was published, my books sales increased 300%+ over my projections.  Although I am loath to talk specific numbers even with my patrons, I am happy to say that the resulting additional revenue more than covered the cost of the advert.  Now, obviously it's possible that a combination of the Christmas holidays and a new lockdown contributed to that sudden reversal, so I continued to monitor things in January.

This month has seen the largest single month of sales since April 2020, when Zero Dark was first released.

However, good business can't sit around staring at an experiment.  This is, after all, a business not an academic study.  And a principle of warfare that I have lived by for many years is "reinforce success, not failure".  So having made a significant boost on my revenue, in the second half of January I committed to a short FB ad campaign, doubling my usual budget.

Now, I have to say that giving the Zuckerberg Monster money never sits well with me, but business is often a matter of compromise.

I have been fine-tuning my FB audience parameters for the last couple of years and I have a saved set of parameters I call "Those Who Are One Of Us", and it seems to deliver pretty well.  It delivered particularly well, this time, because I released the ad not only to FB but also to Instagram.

The long and the short of it is that advertising works if you focus your effort on a receptive audience.

I've never really been a marketing guy.  As long-time followers will know, my focus has always been on people strategy.  I'm not a great salesman or naturally comfortable with talking up my work.  But just as I've had to teach myself to use new software, to understand business accounts, to self-publish and run a company, so I've had to teach myself to do other things that a one-person company has no other option but to do or to fail.  Perhaps this is yet another reason why I've found Para Bellum Wargames so endlessly fascinating.  I've talked before about their "brute force" approach to marketing, and I can't deny that it did, to some extent, inspire me to try harder in my own marketing strategy.  And having done it, I can see their perspective.

It works.

In my case, modest success is sufficient because I have modest expenses compared to PBW.  In their case, of course, they need spectacular success to offset their spectacular expenses.  But if I turned a >300% increase in projected sales from just a quarter-page ad in a single magazine, it's reasonable to believe that feature articles and full-page ads in multiple niche magazines and a full-on, worldwide charm offensive targeting independent retailers and distributors is going to have had a significant impact upon their market penetration.

This has been a radical insight for me and given me a new respect for the role of strategic thinking in marketing and a fresh appreciation for the work of those who create value for their brand through effective campaigning.