Creating a Marketing Team

[Dominic 135 / 2,013]

I'd imagine the title is pretty self-explanatory. While the community is doing great, there seems to be little movement (at least publicly, from what I can tell) when it comes to marketing activities. Those activities may include but are most definitely not limited to seeking affiliates and managing the community's social platforms. There's a ton of other things that can reasonably fall under the definition of marketing activities, but those two examples are easy to understand. Some of these things are more crucial than others, personally I think reviving and consistently managing our social medias is one of those things which should be prioritized. There's other things that could make it on a priority list besides that, but that's something that anyone can see needs attention as all the social media accounts are dormant.

 

From what I've gathered, the only people who technically have this as a responsibility already would be Directors, as I'd assume they can have their hands in pretty much anything. With no disrespect to the other existing teams as everyone plays a necessary role in making this wheel turn, having dedicated marketers seems much more important in terms of impact. Having a qualified team leader guide a group of dedicated people while they take care of stuff regarding marketing would be very beneficial. I'd even go as far as to say it'd make sense to have a Director dedicated to this area, similar to having a Director dedicated to anything tech related. This suggestion as a whole is something I very briefly touched upon when I responded to the thread below.

 

 

 

Everything in the initial post of this thread would ideally fall to marketers and would already be in progress. This is within reason, as some marketing ideas can be too ambitious, but for the most part you can take a crack at anything. With the right guidance, a team of people like this can make some really big moves for the community. 

[Bae 2,489 / 41,520]

Social platforms are handled by higher ups. We have social platforms, we just don't really use it as much since they're trying to make RSS connect to it. 

For Beatbox's suggestion, we do host tournaments from Event Coordinators.

If it's about merchandise marketing, that's under pending. Meaning it's been suggested multiple times and it's not a good time to start it or resume it.

 

[Cassie 1,226 / 23,060]

Is it 2017/18 again?

 

oh boy

[Dominic 135 / 2,013]

If I can make how this would work, the benefits, the magnitude of those benefits, or anything else about this any clearer / easier to understand, please let me know. I'm not sure how to interpret some of the reactions to be honest with you. I did receive one legitimate response thus far but I don't plan on responding until there's more so as to not clog the thread.

[Akott 34 / 2,052]

I am not sure how to start this but let us be blunt and talk about logistics. I apologize in advance for how long this post will be, and the most likely the responses following it. I also want to nominate myself for kickstarting this if we can make a team and meet regularly to see how this team would even work.

This post details a rough plan of how I think the marketing/PR department would be revived. Not big, but small, and it MUST perform to standards to even be considered. I am obviously not GFL staff, and unfamiliar of internal practices, but think that if this were to be serious, this is a decent starting place.

Phase 1:

I have taken the time to read through the attached posts and I have also thought about this question as I would like to get into marketing/advertising for my career. However, GFL is a gaming network, and deals heavily with social media and fellow internet groups, a classification that is still developing within the business world. This within itself makes things more complicated, because of how quickly things can flip flop and take a 180.

Now I have no idea what happened to previous marketing efforts and the last PR team, from what I gathered and what Joshy described in the attached post is that it “didn’t end well” and was associated with “tarnished reputations”. People are obviously hesitant and directors and fellow higher ups are taking care of the matter. Yet, this begs the question of why members are bringing it up? Why would they care about marketing in the first place?

If this “department” were ever going to be revived, you would need to test it. This would require a game that has a large enough population, reputation, and capability. The first thing to come to mind would be CS:GO-- healthy competitive population, surfing, jailbreak, and other game modes, was titular in the success of internet stars like the Misfits, and can support individual servers along with competitive/casual FPS play. I would say this game is obviously the best choice to start. Now, GFL would not start with the entire game—that is far too much work, and not enough people would volunteer to do the work, despite public opinion. So, we pick a gameplay server and start there. This should not be the most popular GFL server on CS:GO, but rather something that is well known and could compete with other networks in becoming the #1 server worldwide. The goal is to see if marketing/PR would be successful enough to raise the popularity of a server and relieve tasks from those handling them.

Phase 2:

This step would be crucial, as the team would most likely need expansion, review, and must implement larger plans of growth within the rest of the CS:GO gameplay servers. Not every server would need to influence popularity, but there should be placement growth for every server or maintaining current spots. This would only be part one of this phase, as depending on the task at hand, we would want to try and work with event planning for a server event most likely with a streamer or YouTuber, for the real test. If marketing can prove to work well with bigger clients and create better exposure for GFL, I would not see a reason to cut them for the sole reason that they were not doing their jobs. This would not be easy, but the dedication and resolve would need to be here. In terms of timeframe, this should be longer than phase 1.

Phase 3 and so on:

Well hooray, the department has survived to phase 3, and would start to work on expanding to other GFL games and work more with event planning for promotion. I envision this department would have some more traction and become a part of GFL. Most of these the phases are the same, but on different scales, and if anyone has read this far and intrigued, then I could draw up a more formal plan and details.

People:

This is one of the hardest things to consider, because where would you find people? From my understanding, Director of Communications, Shuruia would ideally lead this department in its baby stages, and if it expands, then there would probably be a team lead and staff below that. I think the goal would have a couple people work on marketing for a few games, a social media coordinator, clientele representative, and perhaps a few people in between. This covers the basics, and everyone can work with each other and event planning to get things going. Those who work on marketing for games, most likely would stick to a couple games they excel in, and have two people per game, with marketers having a maximum of 2-3 games due to workload. Of course, this is more end-game ideology, but the original team would be smaller, and duties shared based on strengths and weaknesses.

Recruitment would hopefully begin with those interested and willing to step up. Then I would recruit to those who play CS:GO as they would be the testing site. These people should be reliable and long-term, not just “oh, look I made a few posts on Twitter and now I’m done”.

Challenges:

This entire thing in all honesty is a challenge and risky. It seems those who are more experienced have not had it easy in the past and are reluctant to start something that they do not remember fondly. Its an interesting idea and the prospects seem fun to tackle (at least for me). GFL would need to work behind the scenes to discuss where to begin and how to address this department, but its not impossible if we work together.

I also do not know if it should even be separate, and not a part of event planning, as the two departments would have to get along. You cannot market nothing if you do not know anything, and exposure outside of the GFL community is trickier without marketing. I am not saying that marketing/PR would take over all of that from event planning, but its something that damages this plan.

Personally, if I am the only one interested, that is all good, because I want to do something like this for my career, but for others it is not the same. I would also be one of the first (if not the first) to sign up for something like this as I would love the experience.

[Dominic 135 / 2,013]

@Bae

 

Social platforms being handled by higher-ups (assuming you mean Directors) is inefficient. I can't imagine they have enough excess time to dedicate to something such as posting tweets to keep the Twitter active. I've heard many different reasons for why they aren't being utilized, so I'm not sure if yours is the actual one. However, it seems odd that the Twitter would not have a post for well over a year due to that. As for the thread I linked, I think you misinterpreted it quite a lot, as Event Coordinators hosting tournaments doesn't equate to what he mentioned. For the merchandise, I don't really believe it'd work well. Aside from maybe mouse pads, I don't foresee people buying a gaming community's merchandise.

 

@Akott

 

I appreciate the detailed post from someone with passion for stuff like this. 

 

The approach you've laid out is convoluted, but also unnecessary. Testing out a team by restricting their area of influence will ultimately end in failure. Focusing on one server or game is close-minded and also a waste of time for a marketer. Server managers and event coordinators can coordinate to populate a server and keep that population consistent, stepping on their toes with a new team is not what I had in mind. The bigger picture is partnering up with other places for shared exposure, slapping our name and logo under some popular streamers, and things even larger than that to really make an impact. Ideally, you'd be pulling people into this team who are interested in discussing and implementing larger marketing plans, not debating about the best way to populate one single GFL server or game. You mention event planning over and over, sounds like a recreation of the Events Team. I'd skip this part entirely to be very honest.

 

Once again, I think having marketers dedicated to specific games is a waste. Overseeing the servers of a game and making sure they do well is a Division Leader's duty and I'd foresee marketers rarely intervening with one specific game. So rarely that it wouldn't require them to be assigned to a game. This is also when you start pulling the wrong type of people into the marketing team and end up having a bunch of avid server players who just want a hand in helping the server. That can be done elsewhere; as a server manager, event coordinator, or admin. Specifying responsibilities akin to the way the Directorate is currently laid out might be a decent idea, but I personally prefer the route of the manager of the team assigning responsibility. It'd be on the manager to assess strengths and weaknesses, areas that are lacking, then act accordingly.

 

I think there's absolutely zero risk factor here, besides maybe wasting a bit of time putting it together. I can't imagine any harm would actually come to the community itself by resurrecting a team and maybe benefiting from it, potentially a lot. It might work, it might not. If it does work, even temporarily, I feel you'd come out of it having gained enough for it to have been worth it.

Edited August 15, 2020 by Dominic

[JGuary55 707 / 14,712]

Iirc I thought  @Roy said something about, he’s going to make it easier and more efficient for “certain” people to get like the social media and also twitch and whatever, It has been awhile since we talked about it maybe Roy will comment and  re say what it was. But yes I do agree, I would love to see the Twitter/Instagram/twitch/YouTube being used and being a marketing thing for GFL, I would also love to see GFL merchandise (this was talked about a lot) completely forget the reason why we haven’t done it. 
 

[Akott 34 / 2,052]

@Dominic

 

I get where you're coming from here. I wrote that mainly to present a potential idea of where to start to get groundwork going, but it was a spur of the moment proposal. I haven't seen a lot of where we would start, but its gonna take a lot of workshop anyways. I would love to hear more about a game plan and see if we can't get the ball rolling. 

 

Of course, the next big step for GFL is to get a clan and create more long-lasting partnerships, but this begs the question of what the PR team would even look like. In regards to roles within this department, I'm guessing Shuruia would act as team lead for now, then designate someone else, and I was having a hard time thinking of roles within the team, but I figured marketeers would either band together or stay separate depending on games, but overall brand would be worked on as a team. I think we're at an impasse until more people are on board and a manager is decided.

 

Again, I don't know what the deal was with the last team, but GFL should really consider sponsoring a team and getting socials running again. I think its a little strange to see ads for socials, but if you visit them, they've been dead for awhile.

 

@JGuary551

 

I'm not a much of a merch person, but if we got it up and running, I know a lot of people who would buy. Perhaps one thing we could start with is merch, print some, and have streamers wear it/ available in stores for when plans go into action. Besides basic clothing items, some pop sockets and other accessories would be on the table.

 

(Frankly, I'm a little shocked there wasn't merch already)

 

 

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

I use to be able to see the future...

 

Now I might only be able to see the past 😅 (these topics come up a lot)

 

 

 

If they have any hidden threads on this topic, then that might be a helpful resource for you.  I would support "declassifying" it should it exist.

 

I don't know what's going on very much anymore although it feels like to me a lot of teams have increasingly strict requirements as for how they accept people and to keep them on their teams if it's not dissolved months after its creation; there also seems to be very little incentive for them to deliver the work.  It becomes a small social clique sometimes excluding people who are not in.  I think if we're going to have very low incentive to have people do this challenging work, then we're playing a numbers and timing game hoping that with some luck we might stumble upon an individual who has the commitment and enough talent to get those wheels rolling.  They should accept a lot of people into the team and give very small achievable deliverables.  We're starting off with square wheels so it doesn't usually roll very far, but with enough friction and effort we might be able to turn them round enough to keep it going.  We should also expect that it will take a long time.  This community does not have a great reputation for its patience.

 

edit:

 

I didn't notice that you were a Server Manager, and maybe you weren't at the time of the post.  It shouldn't matter, but what does matter is that as a Server Manager you are more capable than you believe.  Even if everyone disagrees with you...  you can still do something about it.  Start off with something unofficial; prove the concept, then make it official.  You can make your own marketing team for the server you're responsible.  It'll certainly be more manageable than a marketing and social media team meant for the entire community, and since it's something that is not totally official there would be low risk against your reputation while you try to find which knobs to turn and how to optimize your outcome.  You're also more in control of the server you work on and you can certainly determine what kind of incentive your team members can have on your server.  You will win in so many ways if you can succeed; there's still a lot of value and different ways of succeeding even if you fail the baseline plan.

 

This doesn't have to be a suggestion anymore.  You can make it happen.

Edited August 15, 2020 by Joshy

[JGuary55 707 / 14,712]

@Akott

A lot of people would buy merch but also it takes time a lot of time tbh, there’s so much back end to merch that’s disgusting lol, you gotta make sure all the sizes fit right you gotta get the location of the buyer if the merch doesn’t get to the place you gotta go through all that and if they got the wrong shirt or whatever there’s so much stuff that need to be finalized and made 100% I wouldn’t doubt they won’t make merch but it’ll be awhile if we see it 

[Reverb 273 / 4,902]

Touching on just the social platforms Idea I think it could be cool for a team such as writers to handle. Then again how many people are honestly going to follow these social platforms. Personally I wouldn't as theres no need since when I want information on updates I get it through discord and forums. And I dont think a small twitter page is going to influence many new players to play on Gfl servers. Just my opinion though, Im not against social media I just dont know if its worth the effort. 

[Bae 2,489 / 41,520]

@Dominic

 

I was the original creator for most of the social media accounts & the one in charge of social media before I transferred the ownership to the founder. The founder, himself, told me that he's trying to make RSS connect. And I was also the original person who started the merchandise test years ago, that is also on pending because the founder said it's not an important thing to work on. There are many things on the community and server that is way more important than social media and merchandise. So I don't think I have the wrong information.

Edited August 15, 2020 by Bae

[TheJitFace 699 / 18,162]

Social Media stuff never really worked out. When I was apart of the media and PR team, I tried to do some stuff relating to the GFL Youtube Channel. It never really worked out, you need a lot of dedication to get that stuff done.

@GrumpyR3aperused to upload videos on the channel. I still have access to the channel, but there's really no point. I think just working on the servers and being active on discord/forums will keep the community thriving. 

Also trying to find people to work on the social media aspect is a bit hard. Like I said, you need a lot of dedication to do that stuff, and trust me I tried. I was a manager like you as well, but trying to manage my server and do stuff with social media was just too much. I like your vision, but I don't think it will work out, sorry bud. 

 

Edited August 15, 2020 by TheJitFace

[Dominic 135 / 2,013]

Lots of people seem to be quite hopeless when the topic of social media is brought up, fair enough. It's not easy by any means. If it failed in the past, it's not unfair to assume it'd fail now. At the very least, I'd say an attempt at something regarding Twitch is worth it for sure. Some of the attempts that were explained to me sounded like they could be improved upon and I think Twitch is something worth taking another shot at. However, you can really set all of that aside and still reap many benefits from a team like this. It's good to see that people at least understand how great successful social medias can be, but it's also not the only thing that would the team would be doing.

 

That aside, as mentioned by @Joshy (appreciate it by the way), I do believe I can still make attempts at doing similar activities on my own and maybe even prove the worth of something like this. Though, I do still hope the Council ends up giving this a chance.

Edited August 17, 2020 by Dominic

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

16 hours ago, Dominic said:

Lots of people seem to be quite hopeless when the topic of social media is brought up, fair enough. It's not easy by any means. If it failed in the past, it's not unfair to assume it'd fail now. At the very least, I'd say an attempt at something regarding Twitch is worth it for sure. Some of the attempts that were explained to me sounded like they could be improved upon and I think Twitch is something worth taking another shot at. However, you can really set all of that aside and still reap many benefits from a team like this. It's good to see that people at least understand how great successful social medias can be, but it's also not the only thing that would the team would be doing.

 

That aside, as mentioned by @Joshy (appreciate it by the way), I do believe I can still make attempts at doing similar activities on my own and maybe even prove the worth of something like this. Though, I do still hope the Council ends up giving this a chance.

 

No problem.

 

I'll make a few suggestions.  It might sound superficial.  It is.  You'll only have general "right" directions, but in reality there's no right direction or golden rule you'll have to take a few steps out and turn a few knobs until you get something that works for you.

 

Something I see happening a lot is a lot of people will either try to do all the of the work by their self.  It's too much.  They will fail.  The other problem I see is people try to delegate a lot of the work.  People will fail you.  It will fail.  The solution is to do both.  What does that mean?  Get people excited about your work and delegate the tasks, but...  do the work on your own in parallel with their work.  If they deliver or get a lot of it done then you can use their work and reward them for it (and make sure they take all of the credit and glory of successful outcomes even if you helped them a lot on it); if they fail you or it's not as good as yours, then you've got something redundant a backup plan to keep it moving forward.

 

Don't work on any "big" ideas.  Work on small ideas.  Don't have like 7 social media accounts to get started and all of this fancy art and marketing...  start off with one idea like an unofficial Twitch or Youtube account and get that one going.  You want to isolate your ideas so that it's easier to see what is working and what isn't working.  You're trying to discover which knobs you can turn in order to improve your efforts.  It's true that maybe to have that idea work or to substantially improve it, that it'll require two or more knobs simultaneously, but start with just one so that you know with confidence which ones they are.

• Personally I recommend the Youtube approach because it'll be easier for collaboration and can be done without you being online all the time.
• Yourself and ask your players to record small demos of their game play that they'd be willing to share.  You can ask for small tutorials such as how to play the game, a particular or popular strategy, or simply to show off a few maps or a few rounds.
• Keep the videos small I would say 2-3 minutes or less.
• It doesn't need to be fancy (yet).

I recommend posting the progress once a week.  No details.  If for example you do the Youtube approach post a new video every week and share it on the forums here too.  This is just to make sure that there's progress and you're keeping at it.  Perfect is the enemy of good; so just get good work done (it doesn't need to be perfect).

 

All of this will likely take a lot of time.  It's going to be hard to see if you're working on an idea that needs a little more nurturing... or if it's a total flop.  You'll have to be persistent to find out.

[TheJitFace 699 / 18,162]

If you need access to the YouTube channel, let me know. 

[JGuary55 707 / 14,712]

I 100% agree with @Joshy the videos dont need to be perfect (obviously we would want it to be good and "professional" or whatever but if its fun and entertaining then fuck) it but it literally could be anything, from like playing with a bunch of GFL guys on one of our servers or how Ben Roy Coven Bae Rival K2 me we all hop on and play COD like if we just recorded our gameplay and what we talked about like just fun entertainment. 

Edited August 18, 2020 by JGuary551

[williampickthall12 25 / 1,602]

commas needed ^^^^

[Smrize 20 / 662]

Well yeah. Making contact with people isn't hard actually. People tend to stick to one platform and work from there and nothing works out. Why... When you have tons of platforms to promote yourself on. I market my own business and we're trying to cover every single social platform and we've made a huge step forward.

 

And you never should administer them all yourself. Need people for it and I bet there's alot of people here in this community that would like to help out. Why make it complicated when you can make easy steps. Don't act stupid, act smart and effortlessly.

[Liloz01 1,256 / 19,825]

This has kind of been done with our current PR team, going to move topic to implemented.

 

Please create a new suggestion thread if you feel like there's anything to be added/changed to our PR team!