The world of mobile games user research (also known as GRUX) is growing fast, and our marketing team here at PlaytestCloud is more than keeping pace thanks to the combined experience of our two marketing gurus, Marketing Lead Gonçalo Trindade and Marketing Manager Jake Rundell. As they say: “We’re not a big group, but we pack a powerful punch.”
And sure, the group may be small, but as you begin your journey with PlaytestCloud you’ll see just how much power they pack into every blog post, webinar, newsletter, and social post to encourage engagement in the mobile GRUX community. In fact, you and your team will likely benefit from their expertise directly as you continue on the front lines of mobile games development–even if you’re not yet a direct user of PlaytestCloud!
But who are these two power-house humans that make strategic marketing look so easy? What successes and challenges have they encountered as they work to proactively educate prospects about games user research? And what are they doing right now that helps set us apart as playtest experts? Recently we sat down with Gonçalo and Jake to explore the recipe for PlaytestCloud’s marketing successes. Here’s what we learned:
What we do
What does the marketing team do? It might be easier to ask what they don’t do! Still, when we asked, Jake had this to say: “I think the essence of our marketing is to plan and orchestrate how we present ourselves as a growing company to our clients, and we achieve this through innovative, engaging, entertaining, hands-on educational and promotional opportunities. We really want to present ourselves well as a growing company to both clients, old and new.”
Truly, our marketing team is a great place to go to get a temperature check on how we’re doing as a business. They are a direct link between our customers and us as a team, which means they not only help acquire qualified leads in a niche (but growing) audience, but curate and create content spanning multiple platforms as well. They are the go-to team for product and feature launches, and help us share service updates and other fun insights to colleagues and throughout our network. They even get involved with conference planning, booth design, and event organization, which enables a more personalized connection with our growing player, client, and audience-base.
Also, in the short time Gonçalo has been with us already, he has come to play such a vital role in shaping our company’s public image. And of course, they are both great lovers of games and games user research themselves, which means they understand how to best translate technical data into fun visuals and messaging that our audience can enjoy. So how does it all work? According to Jake and Gonçalo, it’s about leaning into a marketing approach that emphasizes value as opposed to profit, and education as opposed to sales.
How we work
While most marketing teams are known to work internally to promote their parent company, ours likes to take that promotional vision a little further. That is, they aren’t solely focused on selling our products and services, they also take the time to educate game studios and players about our first love: games user research. “We want to train and educate our customer base, leading by example to actually improve the industry,” says Jake.
As such, our marketing team takes a two-fold approach. First, they proactively produce promotional content for users to spread the word about PlaytestCloud by creating content and generally showing the benefits of using our playtesting services. This has led to a whole library of playtesting resources that act as a kind of encyclopedia for the growing (and still niche) field of GRUX.
Secondly, they react to future launches and other in-company changes to create marketing materials on behalf of other PlaytestCloud teams. “I think we’re a bit like chameleons,” says Gonçalo, “We have to put on different hats throughout the day to make it all work.” Actually, these ‘hats’ are why we think our marketing team has gotten so good at using value-driven, educational content to generate leads in the first place!
Educating games user researchers
We said before that the world of mobile games user research is growing fast, which means that education about this industry is still limited. And because playtesting and user research are still a rather new thing, spreading the word about the value and usefulness of this approach is at the center of our marketing approach at PlaytestCloud. That’s why the marketing team focuses on crafting the kinds of resources that not only get people interested in GRUX, but which truly showcase the versatility and usefulness of playtesting as a whole.
“I often feel I am a bit of a librarian in a way, or a book publisher. I’m not only creating resources, but curating them to help our clients and my colleagues learn more about games user research as a whole.”
- Jake, Marketing Manager at PlaytestCloud
Our marketing team is therefore in the business of promotional education about mobile GRUX, which aims to provide a link between what we see as games user researchers ourselves, and what game studios need to know when setting up playtests on their own. In short, they translate real playtesting data, plus the wisdom we’ve gained over a decade of playtesting, into articles, blog posts, webinars, newsletters, videos, and social posts that build up the conversation about playtesting and games development in general. This sort of content carries a lot of weight in mobile GRUX circles, which is why we’re especially glad we have Jake and Gonçalo on our team!
Showcasing the value of playtesting mobile games
As they work to improve website conversions and transform them into leads, our marketing team is in charge of de-mystifying one of the biggest myths surrounding games user research: that game studios don’t actually need playtesting. The thing is, most studios are already doing it in some form or another, and such practices never fail to provide player insights about games that are pre- or post-launch. So why all the resistance?
Well, we’ve found that a lot of people will make assumptions about their game or their players, only for those assumptions to be disproven when the game goes live.
Thankfully, our marketing team knows that playtesting offers game studios a unique ability to make well-founded decisions at any time during game development. As such, they can equip customer-facing teams with awesome stories and materials that showcase just how valuable playtesting can be!
Supporting product and service launches
One of the stand-out things about PlaytestCloud’s marketing experts is that they provide marketing assets for product launches that are comparable to a company that’s double the size of PlaytestCloud – all with just two people. And because our B2B audiences all have different learning styles, these launches often include illustrations, images, videos, and graphs to loop everyone in on what’s new, and how it all works. As they describe it: “Because our platform can do so much, it can be hard to capture everything in a quick and simple way. The best option we’ve found is to share product launch content organically through blog posts that describe how-tos, research, as well as what we do.”
Although this can be challenging, our marketing team enjoys stepping up to the task. The biggest key? Making sure that collaboration with other teams and good project management are central to coordinating these launches and managing all the moving parts that come with them.
Enhancing PlaytestCloud’s brand identity
Brand management is a huge part of every single piece of content our marketing team puts out. Consistency is key, as well as providing subtle audience cues about the authority behind our marketing. “We always want to make sure we’re presenting information uniformly and deliberately so that everything we publish is recognizable as being from PlaytestCloud, even without our logo,” says Jake when asked about PlaytestCloud’s brand identity. That’s why we consider our specific shade of light blue to be much like Netflix’s iconic red, or Spotify’s recognizable green!
Directing audience communication and retention
As marketing specialists, Jake and Gonçalo admit they love their target audiences and favor email newsletters. While each marketing method improves the funnels that bring customers to PlaytestCloud, email newsletters are in particular important, as they are statistically proven to be the highest-converting outreach method that a marketer can have. “It’s because it allows you to talk directly with gamers and game studios without having to deal with algorithms or anything like that,” says Jake.
Our vision for the future
Ultimately, our goal is to be transparent about everything we do here at PlaytestCloud through awesome content. Not only does this build trust and confidence in our research, but it draws in those who do want a bit of a leg up when it comes to playtesting their games. Looking to the future, then, what are the team’s main goals moving forward?
Here, Jake and Gonçalo say they are exploring new and exciting ways to improve our impact in a niche and specialized community. Most of all, help us stay at the forefront of mobile games research and user testing. All in all, they want to generate more business by writing about what they love (and what we love), all while pushing the envelope in the world of remote mobile playtesting.
Our marketing team is here to help
Although our marketing team’s goal isn't to provide personalized responses to every question we get about games user research – that falls more under the purview of our Customer Success Team. They are however consistently implementing and improving the content they do produce as they receive new questions from users like you. That’s because they’re motivated to share the GRUX insights we’re all learning behind the scenes here at PlaytestCloud! They’re the ones who are going to be behind all the great content we put out there to teach games user researchers more about the trade, and to share with game studios the ins and outs of remote mobile playtesting…and for that, we’re forever grateful to have them both!
