Brawl Advertising Strategy

Currently, Brawl’s target market is the entire Minecraft playerbase, offering a wide variety of gamemodes from which new players can choose. While this approach has its advantages – you’re targeting the maximum amount of players, games naturally have to be well-rounded and fun – it does come with its downfalls.

The problem with broad markets
As an all-round server, your competition is similar servers targeting a wide segment of the market. Immediately you’re at a disadvantage to bigger servers: all else being equal, low-commitment players will gravitate towards more populous communities. And of course, we’re not an all-round server – many of our gamemodes require a certain time commitment to be put in. So why should we advertise Brawl as a jack-of-all-trades, when a) we’re not and b) the competition is so steep?

The benefits of niche markets
The solution is to advertise in certain niches: smaller but more targeted segments of the market. Battle Royale, for example, would benefit from direct advertisement to players searching for PUBG servers, rather than the current method of advertising the entire network and hoping that some players leach into BR. This way, rather than competing for players on Brawl, you’re competing for players looking for PUBG – a much more manageable, measurable and realistic goal.

Segmenting Brawl
In reality, though, it’s not particularly cost effective to advertise each server individually: a better idea would be to split the server into two themed chunks. The first would contain every gun gamemode: War, WarZ, Wild West and Battle Royale. Immediately these games are in a much stronger position than they were before: rather than being individual facets of a confused server network, they’re now a solid collection of precisely targeted gun gamemodes. They’re easier to search for, cheaper to market, and easier to beat the (now more limited) competition.

The second themed chunk contains the more casual games: Party, Raid, CTF, Build and Kit. Yes, the problem of competition with bigger servers still exists. A couple of things on that: by removing the high-commitment gun gamemodes from the mix, you’ve already significantly reduced the bounce rate of casual players. And also, Build.

Brawl's hidden ace
The concept of Build is objectively better than any other creative server. I’m not speaking from a position of bias, either: no other server offers enormous plots and unrestricted WorldEdit from the moment a player logs in. No votes, no ranks, no slow aSync either. It’s just better. And believe me, I’ve looked for alternatives. There are none.

I’m mentioning this because I think Build’s an untapped goldmine. It has the ability to attract an enormous number of players if we advertise it properly, and from that, we can funnel players into other gamemodes. Initially Build was a host for gamemode maps. Why not turn that on its head and advertise that you can play fully-fledged, active gamemodes on the maps that you’ve created? We have a better creative gamemode than anyone else can offer – so why not advertise it as such?

Summary
So to wrap this all up, I’m going to suggest a few things. First of all we split Brawl in two: one side for gun gamemodes, and another for casual games. Functionally nothing will change, except for maybe a different lobby layout – this is just how we’d choose to advertise.
Following that, among the casual games segment, we’d advertise in two ways: one from an all-round, casual perspective, the way we’ve always done. And another from a creative perspective, putting our intensely competitive Build server at the forefront.

With this change in advertising strategy, the money we put into it will go a lot further. Rather than throwing all our funds at big youtubers and server list sites, we’ll be able to target players more effectively and more cheaply.

 

I couldn't think of anything else