Pets Gone Shady with Brian Rauch

In this episode, host Nalin talks with Brian Rauch about marketing for Pets Gone Shady.

With his background in marketing, Brian had the opportunity to try out different strategies to promote the second version of his first game “Shady Pets”. His approach let him create an engaged audience that converted into backers nicely. He talks about the key work with Facebook leads and about collecting phone numbers.

We discuss:

[1:29]: What Shady Pets and its second version, Pets Gone Shady, are all about and how it can be enjoyed by children and adults.
[03:46]: After testing different marketing approaches, Brian started working with Facebook leads, collecting not only email addresses but also phone numbers, which cost more per lead but ended up creating more useful data.
[8:45]: At the end, each backer had a conversion cost of around $12! This might have been because of the timing (the advertising costs probably went up) and the 2020 covid crisis.
[12:20]: 70% of the backers came from the text message strategy. Brian explains what the approach was all about.
[17:12]: The key to getting great leads is to create good audiences on Facebook and let the algorithm do its work. You can choose from many variables including people who are interested in games alike or re-targeting people who have interacted with but not clicked on your first ad.
[21:03]: What’s coming up with Pets Gone Shady and where can you get the games.

Thanks for listening to the Board Game Marketing Podcast!

Final marketing tip from Brian to new board game creators:

“Plan to spend 25-30% of your projected sales on advertising; If you plan to raise $30K, then you should budget around $8K. Use Facebook leads to minimize your acquisition cost per lead, collect email and cell phone then communicate regularly via email and text messaging up to launch time to build excitement.”

Shady Pets website: https://shadypets.com/

Pets Gone Shady Kickstarter: https://bit.ly/3pOydTt

Shady Pets Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/petsshady/?hl=en

Shady Pets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shadypets/

For more information on how to market your game, be sure to check out the Meeple Marketing Blog.