Experience in using a telegram channel to increase recognition and revenue growth of a gaming studio

Telegram channels, and even about game dev, not so much. Nevertheless, it is a good tool to attract partners and customers. Sometimes even workers. We share our personal experience with what difficulties you may encounter and what results have been received.

Initial data

We are a small studio from Nizhny Novgorod, we have been developing games for almost 10 years. Last year we decided to start a channel - then there were even fewer of them. At first, we just wanted to share what we were doing, and at the same time increase the recognition of the company at conferences. The logic is simple: you read the channel, you know who its authors are - implicit trust in these guys appears. No sooner said than done, they called the channel "Weekdays gamedev" (@devmygame). At the time of creation, there were about 20 people in the channel.

Audience search and interaction with thematic services

There are no special tricks - at first the traffic purchase works. You can buy advertising in broad-based channels (for example, those that write about cinema, news, and sports) for relatively little money. Or concentrate on more narrowly targeted channels, advertising in which is slightly more expensive. The purchase of advertising allowed us to bring the number of subscribers to 1300.

We tried to buy advertising both in small channels for the appropriate money (300-400 rubles per post for 2-3 days in the feed + 1 day in the top), and in large ones. Working with the latter is, in a way, roulette: you need to deposit a large sum one-time, and the result is unpredictable. For example, after advertising in one large channel, we got 440 subscribers, a post cost 9,000 rubles: each subscriber cost us 20.5 rubles. And from another large channel we received only 50 subscribers for 10,000 rubles, the price of 1 subscriber in this case was 200 rubles. The optimal cost to us seems to be 1 subscriber to 30 rubles.

After some time, you can connect a mutual PR. When you recruit the first 1000+ subscribers, they begin to offer you a partnership. And not only fellow developers, but also services. So, we got a service that deals with ASO.

His services are not cheap, and a couple of months of subscription is not lying on the road, we decided to cooperate. Bottom line: two posts in our channel + two months of subscription for us.

Such services can even share statistics on how many customers we brought. If this did not happen (as in our case), but they turn to you again, then the result has pleased. You can cooperate with specialized services not only at the initial stage. This will allow you to receive discounts, a free subscription or other goodies.

Conferencing

Want to go to the conference for free? Collaborate with her organizing committee. If you have a resource (for example, a channel in Telegram), you can suggest making several posts about the upcoming conference (event program, cool speakers, price increases). The organizers will generate a promotional code, which must be placed at the end of each thematic material. To get to the conference for free, you will need to sell a certain number of tickets with a promotional code. Therefore, calculate your strength and take into account the untwisted channel / group / forum, etc.

We had experience working with two conferences: DevGAMM and White Nights. Both times successful, we managed to get tickets of a higher price category compared to what we usually buy. Therefore, partnership with conferences is a very profitable thing. At DevGAMM we sold 7 tickets, and at White Nights 6. At DevGamm we were promised 2 business tickets for us for 7 tickets sold, and on WN every two tickets sold were equated to one business class ticket for us.

Some nuances of cooperation with conferences

You need to prepare in advance for cooperation and specific activities. For example, as part of our interaction with White Nights, in addition to selling tickets using a promotional code, we also played two tickets to the Talents in Games mini-conference. But the conditions were not carefully thought out. We needed to get the maximum coverage of the post with the draw and get interesting questions from the participants on the given topics. We would give the prize to the author of the best question. For maximum coverage, reposts of the rally record were needed, but, unfortunately, there is no such possibility in Telegram. Therefore, the contest itself we held in our group in VK, and in the Telegram we just wrote that the drawing was held in VK.

It turned out that we had changed the platform for the rally in vain, because our main audience is concentrated in the Telegram channel. In the VKontakte group, in fact, we duplicate posts from there, there are much fewer participants. The coverage turned out to be small: a post with the conditions of the drawing gained only 1000 views (at that time there were 2000 subscribers in the channel). In addition, we laid very little time for the draw, only 5 days. As a result, a small number of participants. Perhaps the active audience of Telegram simply did not want to follow the link to the social network. Either the tickets were in everyone's hands. The result - we received questions from just 5 people.

Using the Telegram channel to sell ads

Another option for using the channel is partnership on a commercial basis. Many use this as an additional way to earn money. There are a lot of schemes for selling and buying advertising.

You can sell advertising posts for only one channel, make its description and put a picture. Such a post will cost more. Or selling the so-called “Mega” is a post with advertising of several channels at once. In this post, the descriptions of each channel will be smaller, but the cost of such advertising for channel owners will also decrease. For example, if advertising for a particular channel can cost 3,000 rubles, then Mega out of five participants costs 700 rubles.
When you have a lot of subscribers, you can offer placement to smaller channels. In this case, it is important to maintain a balance between revenue and editorial content: you should not “overfeed” the audience with advertising. Otherwise, she will gradually begin to unsubscribe.

Choose the optimal post release frequency: one channel posts a few posts per day. One advertising post for 5-6 editorial articles is unlikely to annoy subscribers. But if you have articles published once every few days, advertising is worth dosing. In case of mutual PR, correlate the number of subscribers of your channel and the partner channel: with a difference of 1000 subscribers, additional 300-500 rubles may be added in addition to PR.

Subscriber Engagement

Make it a rule to schedule publications a month in advance. For example, we cook it in the middle of the month, the frequency of posts is once every 2-3 days. And we try to do at least one interview with industry leaders - surveys in the channel show that it is interesting to our subscribers.

In addition, when planning, we rely on three things:

• what we are doing at the current time;
• what we did recently (we have the first statistics);
• what has been done long ago, but has practical value today due to the fact that a lot of statistics have been accumulated.

When creating content, decide what is the difference between your channel and other similar ones. Our chip is an exclusively personal experience. We never publish just industry news, other people's articles, etc. In this case, you need to keep a balance and “not overfeed” readers with information about the same game: therefore, we dilute the posts about what we are working on now with theoretical materials. Of course, we represent them through the prism of our own experience.

The Telegram channel can be used to do polls, post vacancies, and conduct interactive activities. Want to get a third-party opinion on the new art? Find a cool specialist? Take a survey or share a job search ad. For example, at one time we wanted to do an online course for developers. To understand which game genre to focus on, we asked subscribers in which genre they would be interested in making the game. The genre we never worked with got the most votes. Therefore, they decided to postpone the development of an online school. Otherwise, we would have to hurriedly study an unfamiliar genre. According to our own experience, it’s quite possible to increase the number of subscribers per 500 people per month if you actively engage in the channel.

Do you have a telegram channel? How do you use it?