5 Digital marketing tactics to learn from Fortnite

Fortnite is the biggest game currently trending online with many an overnight sensation being made by streaming or Youtubing live gameplay.

Fortnite is a multiplayer battle royale game where your main goal is to outwit your opponent by building complex structures to gain a tactical advantage.

So I know what your thinking here, how in the world could a video game help me with my digital marketing tactics?

To answer this question lets use a fantastic infographic to put things into perspective.

Image sourced from Top gamers centre

The game Fortnite is currently sporting a whopping 1 billion dollars in revenue with 68.8% of all players spending money on in-game purchases such as extra player skins and booster packs.

So breaking these stats down, what is the main thing that really interests us in regards to digital marketing tactics? Well, Fortnite is based entirely on the free to play model or freemium model as it is often called.

The initial download is completely free although if you would like to have extra added features for the game then you need to pay for the desired upgrades.

With this in mind, it is fascinating how effective Fortnite has become at pushing in-game purchases with the average number of in-game purchases per player being at a value of $58.25 for a game that is completely free to play.

This brings us onto our first example, the importance of establishing a freemium model for your product and using it as a core digital marketing tactic.

1#The power of freemium models

The freemium model has become commonplace when it comes to successfully marketing digital products at a rapid rate. Let’s take the business chat giant Slack for example. Today the company boasts over 4 million users a day with a valuation of 2.8 billion dollars.

By offering a freemium model to their customers this allowed Slack to get their customers to have one foot in the door. From here their digital marketing tactics were simple, they focused solely on the user’s experience and created a product that their target market wanted to tell their friends about.

Once their network was established they added a set of premium features to the application to effectively monetise the already increasingly popular user interface.

I have included a list of companies below that have done a fantastic job with creating freemium products as a digital marketing tactic that you may have heard of:

• Spotify: This music platform has revolutionised the way that we access music online with apple now establishing apple music to compete.
• MailChimp: Have you ever got frustrated with managing mailing lists? If you answer is no then its likely that you are using this amazing mail platform to manage your subscriptions.
• One Drive: One Drive allows you to manage all of your files in a cloud-based software so that you have total access on the go.
• Evernote: This note-taking platform has revolutionised the office and field workflow by creating a powerful and simple to use software platform.

How do I implement a freemium model effectively?

The simplest way to implement an effective freemium model is to seek out a potential customers core pain point and simply fix the problem for them.

When you are building out your product it is important to keep the following things in mind:

Feature limitations: Remember at the end of the day you still need to be paid for your efforts in developing the product. This is why you may need to look at making some of the features available to premium versions only.

Make sure that you pick your premium features carefully as you want to provide enough value for your customers to justify paying for the upgrade. A popular example of a premium marketing tactic that didn’t quite go as planned is our friends over at Yoast.

Yoast is one of the most popular SEO services in the world although unfortunately there isn’t enough value in their premium upgrade as all of the features that users are looking for are included within the free plugin. This is a key point to keep in mind when building out your pricing plans.

Usage quotas: You may want to consider adding usage quotas and storage limitations in order to minimise the amount of disk space that freemium users are taking up on your servers.

This can be a handy way to stop storage from getting out of control.

Limited Support: If you have an application that is relatively technical than you may want to add a premium support service to your software or application to add extra value to your customers.

Yoast also tried this within their premium model although their free dashboard was so user effective and widely used that support is rarely needed.

By placing these limitations on your products or services you can effectively create a multi-tiered freemium model that will be capable of driving sales whilst increasing your user base.

This is one of the most effective digital marketing tactics to use when developing out a new product.

2# Don’t wait for perfection

When Fortnite was released the game was nowhere near perfect yet they released a beta version and that early release was pivotal in building hype around the product.

When you are looking to release a digital-based product or service its important that you aren’t constantly striving for perfection. The beauty about the digital realm is that you can always update and upgrade your product as you go especially if you are offering the freemium model.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries covers how important it is to make sure that you are getting your minimum viable product to market as quickly as possible in order to effectively gauge the user’s experience through digital marketing tactics and measuring target audiences.

To quote Bob Dylan “For he who gets hurt is he who has stalled ” and in the age of digital marketing tactics, this couldn’t be truer.

Our minds are programmed to procrastinate so make sure that if you are becoming a slight perfectionist that you ensure the level of perfectionism is for all the right reasons and that it is with your customers best interests at heart.

Perfectionism usually leads to procrastination because of one simple reason.

The very thought of making your project absolutely perfect for your customer becomes too daunting. The key to breaking free of this cycle is to let go and simply settle for the best that you can do.

3# Channel based digital marketing tactics

Fortnite has recently been released into Android-based devices, which has seen a shift in the marketing strategy for epic games towards mobile.

The key message here is to focus your marketing efforts on channels that your customers frequently use.

This allows you to provide targeted digital marketing tactics to your customers as well as allowing yourself to be seen as a leader within the space by truly understanding your target audience.

It’s important to keep in mind the importance of understanding the platform of your target audience or you may very well risk a media disaster similar to that of Blizzard entertainment.

To sum up the disaster a new mobile-only game idea was pitched to an audience of strictly PC gamers at Blizzcon. This saw a huge online backlash towards the company and Blizzard is still cleaning up the PR disaster.

To make things much worse, what followed was a tsunami of memes about the event.

So when you are looking to refocus your marketing efforts make sure that you truly understand your target customer and the platform that best suits the user experience.

If you are looking to move users away from PC and onto a more mobile-based platform then it is essential you proceed with caution and that change doesn’t occur too quickly.

4# Allow for cross-platform functionality

There is nothing more frustrating than investing time into software then when you go to take the leap over to its mobile version the two don’t communicate with one another.

In this day and age, cross-platform integration is an essential component of software development. The usability and functionality will need to completely transfer over.

This provides a uniform user experience across all platforms which is essential for a brand. Fortnite has done a fantastic job when it comes to integrating gameplay across multiple platforms so users can play on the go.

We should keep in mind as well that this process is definitely not an easy thing to do as players can become easily frustrated if they can’t perform to the same level on a mobile device when compared to a PC.

In this case digital marketing tactics such as content marketing can be used to aid in the educational process. If history has taught us anything is that within the digital realm communication is key.

5# Leverage your influencers in your digital marketing strategy

Fortnite has a highly developed following and so does a lot of the key Fortnite influencers that stream and create digital content.

Fortnite streamers such as Ninja are making over $500,000 per month playing Fortnite from his army of over 12 million followers.

When developing out digital marketing tactics these devoted followers will play a crucial role in being advocates for your brand.

Popular ways that brands have recruited advocates include conducting consumer based case studies and customer video reviews.

Let’s cover a few ways that you can build advocates for your brand:

• Build out relationships: The most effective way to build out advocate relationships is to continue to provide great informative content across a variety of mediums. Now I know what your thinking here how will that help me reach people? By applying this method you can begin to narrow down mediums of focus that have the highest level of engagement. From here you can focus down your marketing strategy and really refine your process. Now within those platforms sift through the comments sections and start answering comments. This allows your users to feel like their opinions matter and let’s be honest here their opinions do matter as they are your target customer.  Once you establish a rapport don’t be afraid to craft a few personal emails following up on any comments made. This should get you well underway on your journey to search for brand advocates.
• Following up on reviews: Reviews are another way to strike up a rapport with your customers. When they have left a review make sure that you always follow up with a comment to thank the person for the review and to cover any questions that they may have. For any positive reviews, you can ask your customers if it is ok for them to be displayed on the website with a direct quote and perhaps a link through to their website. This is a fantastic way to establish a level of authority within your area of business.
• Provide exclusive beta tests: Fortnite and other gaming platforms are notorious for offering exclusive beta testing sessions for dedicated users This is a fantastic way to build up hype for an exclusive product release by drip feeding new exclusive content to your advocates. Games like League of legends, Diablo and Hearthstone have all done a fantastic job when it comes to providing exclusive beta prototypes and testing realms for their devoted followers.

That wraps up our list for the 5 digital tactics that you can learn from Fortnite.

If you are about to launch a new product or digital marketing strategy these examples will provide some great ideas around how to best grow out your audience.

Who knows you may even be able to find a few advocates of your own within your devoted following. For more information on digital marketing make sure that you jump over to Neil Patel’s blog.

Neil does a fantastic job with content and is one of the digital rockstars for the industry. If you need a hand with some of your content for your content strategy we run a small business copywriter service and we would be more than happy to lend a hand.