Muramasa – Digital Campaign Beating Sales Expectations

Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a niche title for the Nintendo Wii. It received a multitude of awards from the gaming press, but like many titles, had the difficulty of meeting sales expectations amidst a very limited marketing budget. Ignition proposed that I work on this title and see what I could do with no marketing budget social, and solely having swag and the time of those at Ignition. Wonderful.:)

The results, we reached launch sales expectations, trended to number 4 on Twitter Trends (curse you Miley Cyrus!), won several reader review awards (beating Wii Fit and New Super Mario Bros), and have a strong Facebook community that continues to push sales every month.

I worked with Ignition to develop a social strategy and the appropriate tactics to exact that strategy to completion, while adhering to there budgetary and logistical contraints.

Muramasa hit over 10,000 fans within 2 months of my involvement. We empowered the community with several user generated initiatives that assisted in gaining a viral presence and gaining ground in organic search of Wii titles. We also made sure to embrace and give adulation to key members of the community to create an environment where they can lead and the community can be self sustaining for the most part.

The overall atmosphere has stayed positive, with community members to this day pushing out there own content with a community manager now acting in a limited capacity. Overall, a tremendous success.

With Twitter, were able to quickly build a following that consisted of many influencers within the Wii and anime community. We also utilized the successful Twitter accounts created with ing of Fighters XII to assist and give personality and life to the newly created characters of Momohime and Kisuke. Fan were frequently involved in the quarreling and lives of Momohime and Kisuke on Twitter, and at the same time paying attention to link and product driving contests pushed by the corporate Muramasa Twitter account.

In addition Twitter parties, hashtagging tactics, and retweet initiatives pushed 1,000s of clicks towards Muramasa, and trneding Muramasa to #4 on Twitter.

With Muramasa , I created wallpapers for Iphone, Desktop, and Android, and deployed, tracked, and tagged them to increase the Muramasa’s presence in the market across several social platforms and generate sales.

To assist building up a database of leads to market the game to, landing pages and email creatives were designed and built to work in association with social based contests. The contests drove participants with a landing page that collected the lead, rewarded them with exclusive content on sign up, and resulted in open rates of over 95% and click rates of over 90% from each signup event.

With every social project it’s important to be able to track and measure the impact of the work. With Muramasa, I was able to track and measuer the performance of link distribution, the market share of voice that Muramasa was capturing, measure what aspects of the game the audience was more interested in, and show a definite ROI on Ignition’s investment.

With Muramasa, we had a much firmer grasp on the logistics of the company and established relationships with several bloggers and web site owners who had their own audiences, to assist in marketing the game. We created several sustaining relationships, created fulfillment procedures, and created protocol for how to conduct business with other influencers.

Not bad for not having a social budget?