For most games, your landing page is the central piece of your marketing efforts. It’s not the only thing you’re going to do to get the word out, but, as the name implies, it’s likely where you want people to land no matter how you find them.
You might run some Facebook ads. Maybe you post about your game on a subreddit. If you’re lucky, a YouTube personality with a million followers might play your game. In all these cases, the new fans you gain will likely be sent back to your landing page.
The temptation is to take a kitchen sink approach to the landing page. Since this is the place everyone is going to land to learn about your game, it needs to have everything, right?
This approach only will only weaken your landing page. It becomes less focused. It’s harder for visitors to decide what to do. Whatever you want people to do on your landing page gets harder meaning fewer of them will actually do it.
Complex Navigation
Your game’s landing page doesn’t share the needs of a complex ecommerce site. It shouldn’t share the navigation of one of those sites either. Take a look at Amazon’s departments menu; you’ll see what I mean.
In fact, I’m going radically in the opposite direction to suggest your landing page should have no navigation at all. Check back in next week if you’d like to learn more about that.
Separate Pages for Everything
Way back in the noughties (that’s the 2000s), web sites were judged by the number of pages they contained. We seem to intuitively believe that if some is good then more must be better. It’s surely not a coincidence that fast food upsizing was doing gangbusters in this same era.
We seem to have matured as a society to now understand this isn’t always the case. In fact, the inverse is often true. When you’re trying to move someone to action — perhaps the action of purchasing a game — complexity and options are the enemy.
Instead of separate pages for press quotes, images, and videos, pick the best two or three of each and put those right up front on the landing page. Don’t make your visitors dig around to find your best stuff, and don’t feel like you have to give them access to the full library of screenshots and videos you have.
Since you won’t have tons of pages to link to, this will make it easier to keep your navigation simple or get rid of it altogether!
Every Social Network Under the Sun
You want your visitors to have the option to follow you on social networks, but, once again, you want to pick a few of the best options and focus on those. The reasons for this are twofold.
First, giving your visitors too many places to follow you will make them likely not to follow you at all. Here’s how that plays out: I’m interested in your game, and I visit your landing page. I’m liking what I see. I want to follow you so I can keep up with the game’s progress. I look for your social network links, and I find them… all 10 of them.
Now, I’m not sure where to follow you. I know you’re a single developer or a small team. I’m savvy enough about social networks to know you probably can’t post native content to all ten of these platforms. I’ll need to either look at each one or try to guess which one is your platform of choice so I can consume the updates in their native environment.
OK, let’s get started. Oh, crap! I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes! I’ll come back to this later.
Maybe I’ll come back, but probably I won’t. You had a chance to capture me. You had my permission to deliver updates to me about your game, but I didn’t have time to pick which one. Now, you’ve lost me.
The second reason for focusing was touched on in the previous one: it’s really hard to deliver content to ten social networks. There’s the idea of native content. The content that works well on Twitter needs to be slightly different for Facebook. It may not work at all on Pinterest and will probably be downvoted to oblivion on reddit.
To do social media right, you need to tailor the message to the platform. This takes time. If you’d also like to finish your game, you probably don’t have the time to keep this up for 10 different networks, and you’ll only alienate viewers on other platforms if you simply cross-post your Twitter posts everywhere. (That concludes the “do as I say, not as I do” portion of the post. ;)
Instead, pick two or three that you understand and that you think would best reach your audience. You can always expand later if you need to.
Simplicity Is the Key
All of these ideas are united by a common thread: keep your landing page simple. If you build your landing page with this guiding principal in mind, you’ll end up with a page that’s far more effective at accomplishing your goals.
But what are these goals? In next week’s post, we’ll learn how to decide what you should have on your page to be sure your visitors have everything they need to make a decision and ultimately pick up a copy.