Marketing Your SL Product

Okay, so you have the product that everyone's going to want. Now what? Now you market the heck out of it so you can roll in the $Lindens, right?

Conventional SL "Find" Marketing Sucks

I swear, every time I actually go shopping for something (which is rare for me) it takes forever for me to find what I'm looking for. I search in "Find", and it's pretty obvious that everyone will slap in the same keywords. No matter what I look for, it seems that I'm getting a slew of listings of malls and clubs that may have one or two items and no way of me to locate them in the slew of items they have for sale. This is not a good way to find products.

The online websites help. SL Boutique, Second Server, and SLEX are organized into Yahoo-like categories, and it's a good start. They aren't very widely used, but as HTML comes to SL, I think webpage-driven stores will take over many stores and the majority of malls. I was talking with FlipperPA Peregrine, proprietor of SL Boutique; he and I agree that malls switching to HTML will mean a much more pleasant experience. It also may take much of the stigma from having stores in the same sim as your home / club / park, because the processing that is currently done by vendors in game can be offloaded to websites. Of course, mono-bytecode is supposed to be "100 times faster" than current Linden Scripting Language, so that alone may be a lag-slayer in malls sims, itself.

But, regardless, I'm doing my part and upgrading my open-source vendor kit, which I will be looking at making website-store friendly.

Brand Names Are King

When it comes to why people get business in SL, brand names and word of mouth are king. From conversations I've had with major power sellers in SL, I have found that customers are very loyal. Once they find a brand they like, they will keep coming back, ask for updates, and tell their friends. So, if you are looking to seriously establish a SL business, I suggest you choose a name that's easy to remember, catchy, and get that name out!

Location Isn't All That

It's clear that location is far overrated. I'll check sales in my shops, and by far my shop in Varney is the most popular. People want my products, they know where to find them, so why bother elsewhere? Now, to those who say that I have a pretty small product base, I may add that friends of mine with broader lines (clothing, shoes, etc) have told me that they experience the same thing - most sales come from their main shop. (This is unscientific observations, and I would love for someone to do a more formal study.)

And back to malls ... If your products are on a website, then who cares if it's at a popular mall or club? The only way I can see that location might help is if you've either plopped your store right next to heavily-used Telehub, or if you have a group of stores with related products as one mall. (Such as Red Dragon Asian-theme market in Tehama, or the Transylvania sim mall.)

Advertising

The forum has an area to advertise products. It's a big mess, though recent additions of sub-categories have helped. I've seen far too much gratuitous bumping of threads for it to be remotely accurate or fair. Still, it's a free way to post your products, and I'd recommend taking the two minutes it takes.

Metadverse is a neat venture. It claims to connect advertisers with people providing ad space. The site is run as a quasi-free-market of sites, and what I like best is their insistence of adhering to guidelines to prevent abuse and ugliness of in-world ads. It's no Google, though, who has perfected the art of embedded, relevant advertising. I'm wondering how long it will be until Google starts looking at Second Life as a feasible way to advertise to gamers.

Embedded Advertising

SL Future Salon had a great in-world presentation a couple weeks ago with Keith Halper, CEO of Kuma Reality Games. Among other things, Keith spoke about embedded advertising in video games becoming mainstream. The idea is that the advertising community is waking up to the fact that gamers have money to spend, and a lot are in that precious 18-30 demographic. While more and more people turn off their televisions and move to the Internet, the advertising industry has been turned upside down.

While sports games have traditionally had these embedded ads - replicating ads in stadiums, on NASCAR tracks and cars, on Tiger Woods' clothing, etc. But while playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, I ran across some ads for upcoming movies integrated to a New York city street scene. As Keith pointed out, the ads were balanced between being visible and not interfering much with the actual game play.

This kind of advertising is the future. And as with TV, which TiVo, DVR, and on-demand is killing advertisers, embedded ads is rapidly becoming an industry standard. It's nothing really new; tobacco companies used to be able to pay actors and actresses money to smoke in X number of movies. Look in any big movie, and you'll see name brands littered throughout. (I still chuckle at how obvious it was when Heineken premiered their new "keg can" in a Die Another Day.)

What does that mean for SL? Well, billboards are one thing, and national / global product placement is still perhaps a year or three off (36k users is still a small market). However, consider product placement by SL developers. Who's got their items shown on SL front page? Or on the banner of the forums? Who gets mentioned in New World Notes? What products get featured in SL machinema?

My Secrets

Now, I have my own sort of advertising scheme. First, I make an open source product that everyone will use. Second, I sneak into it ads for my own products. Ever pick up a Hiro vendor kit? Those demo pictures in the kit are none other than my products. :)

Another secret is knowing a few good, underused keywords for your land. You get 255 characters to describe your plot of land. You can also do something devious, like cutting up your land into 16x16m parcels each with their own descriptions. At the ridiculously low $30L/week cost to list your land, it's feasible. I won't say what specific keywords work for me, but I will say that you should think about what most people will search for, and add those words as they are relevant to your products.

Oh, and I suppose the bottom line is quality. If you have something that no one else provides, or no one else makes / does as well, you're pretty much golden. That's the overall real secret to marketing, and don't forget it!