CCH Convention Recap - Help me Create a Quick Sales Pitch! (see Post #49)

I know I’m talking about a concept that’s practically unheard of these days, but why not rent a couple computers or iPads for the day of the convention? It still wouldn’t be cheap, but it sure’d beat buying the equipment to use it. This is an old article, but all of the sites listed there are still up (and thankfully alot better looking than in their pictures):

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I would suggest you don’t even need 3 tables, you can height-stagger the ipads (they won’t hide anything below them) or even just sub-divide the one table (my original thought) …

Here’s a site where you can buy some golf pencils in bulk with your game and website on them as giveaways.

Thanks for the awesome ideas, everyone!

I’m trying to limit any additional spending for this convention, but depending on how it goes, I might add an element or two for the next one (in late July). I just don’t want to blow $500 on this and earn back $50. :anguished:

I did score some $1 plastic stands for my small prints yesterday so they are vertical now.

I also scored some graphic design help so I should have a better horizontal banner soon.

Finally, I’m working on a board with the interactive fiction “hook” and “talking points.” I think that will be it for now.

But I’ll take another pic of my finished booth which will hopefully look a little better, and if anyone’s interested, I’m willing to provide details about what went wrong, what went right, sales numbers, lessons for next time, etc.

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Ain’t that the truth! Balancing the risk of upfront expenditures versus long-term payoff is delicate work. Gets expensive fast, especially when you already have to pay a good chunk upfront just to reserve a con table in the first place (and those prices and experiences can vary widely between different venues and sponsors, as well). Good luck! Sounds like you got some really constructive feedback. Looking forward to October, hopefully we will all have some more sage wisdom to share by then. :sweat_smile:

Two words: cardboard standie. You could do it yourself with a bit of care - just plot out Dirty Girl on some life-sized cardboard and paint her in (get fans to help if you can) and let people take pictures with her. It’ll be eye-catching, awesome, and emblematic of the entire Speck Community College experience.

p.s.: I can’t make Kentucky in July but if you end up traveling more, say to the West coast, Vegas or someplace glamorous I can pitch to a business partner or traveling companion, I could see about meeting up. :slight_smile:

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Okay standing up the prints, adding the iPad, and using colored paper for the signs added some pop for $3. I should have a new banner soon too to add more color.

EDITED TO ADD: So you’re implying Kentucky is not glamorous, eh, @Sashira? Rest assured if I can ever justify a Vegas trip, you will be the first to know! (well, second to know. My wife and I have a “if it’s more than $100, we need to talk about it first” rule)

And yeah I’d love to add some sort of character cut-out, vertical sign, something like that to add interest. Baby steps. Plus I don’t have any images of any of the characters just standing up by themselves. Wait, maybe I have some good fan art that fits that description.

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I want to give a shoutout to @Yippie for quickly (and significantly) upgrading my banner situation. We have so many talented people on the forums!

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That looks fantastic! Brilliantly done @Yippie. (:

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Oh, wow!!! Love it! Definite upgrade, that will look fabulous!

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Actual physical banner. Local print shop is 1000% better than using cheap online sites with horrible quality and nonexistent customer service. Nice and thick with grommets and reenforced edges. Less than $30 too! About 2 feet by 3 feet.

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LOVE it!!

…with 20 chars of love!!!

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I don’t really know anything about advertisement, but I was wondering if it might be a good idea to also maybe mention the CoG website, maybe draw in some new people :smile:

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The website is down on the bottom left. The shine sorta hides it. Click the pic and you’ll see it better.

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Came out really great!!! This would definitely catch my attention at a con.

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Sign guy did me a favor and turned this around today. I wanted to add more color to the booth. This is foam board so my girls can be sign holders or we can put it on the easel

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IWell, here’s an honest convention recap:

I’ll use letter grades to keep things concise:

Crowd Size: C

I expected more foot traffic, especially for a two-day event. I saw the same people over and over and over again, circling around.

Vibe: C

The artists/writers in my area were all cool and tried to stay positive even as sales for everyone seemed pretty slow. I had decent ‘engagements’ re: CCH with about 50 convention-goers, but I doubt many, if any, of these translate to sales (see below)

Sales: D-

A grand total of 2 people purchased CCH on the spot. Another person said he was buying it on his Steam app in “just a sec” as he walked away. About 20 people said they would get it later (these are the ones I doubt actually translate into sales). Going into the convention, I aimed for 50 sales. That still wouldn’t have been enough to turn a profit, but I was hoping that maybe 20-25 iTunes App Store sales over a weekend might bump CCH up the RPG charts a bit. That isn’t going to happen.

I checked AppAnnie for yesterday and there was NO sales bump at all. Apple stats in sales (last four Saturdays, including yesterday) June 4: 5 sales, June 11: 2 sales, June 18: 4 sales, June 25: 5 sales. Then on Android: June 4: 20 sales, June 11: 13 sales, June 18: 30 sales, June 25: 19 sales. See, no jump at all.

Overall: D

Not many people at the convention seemed to be readers. It was probably not a good fit for my app, but I thought with CCH’s comic book theme, that maybe it would work. I did meet two guys who had read CCH before and I gave them postcards and one of them took a pic with me, so that was cool. I also enjoyed talking with my artist neighbors and I saw some friends so there’s that.

I honestly don’t know what I could have done differently to entice people. I had the iPad front and center. I pitched the game using the “Hey did you ever play those cool Choose your Own Adventure games?” question, and I had lengthy back-and-forths with about 50 folks who seemed interested, but again I just don’t think those will translate into sales.

I have another con for late July, and since I have all my booth pieces, I can go without spending another dime other than parking, so I guess I’ll go and work on my pitch. The table money is already spent.

If I notice any uptick this week, I’ll update this post.

Comments, questions, tips, etc., are all welcome!!!

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You need Booth Girls dressed as your characters. That always helps. I bought this as soon as it went up for sale on the CoG site so I can’t really say/guess why it doesn’t sell.

How about downloads as apposed to sales? (Do you have those stats?) Is it possible that people have downloaded it but haven’t had a chance to read it/decided whether to buy it yet? Regardless, better luck next convention, hopefully there will be more people around interested in interactive novels.

Pardon the marketing jargon, but in general, about only 1%-3% of cold leads actually go ahead and buy even on a low priced product, where most of the sales actually come from is from warmed leads, that is people who are already interested or have been warmed up to the idea over a period of time (prime example, a grocery store, people only go there because they’re already “warm” or interested, when was the last time you went to a grocery store for something you didn’t actually need or thought you needed? And people buy from the grocery store like mad). You should rarely be expecting a decent ROI just from initial sales unless you’re already talking to “warm” leads, therefore, one ought to have a way to “warm up” cold leads, which is what you were doing by talking to the people at your booth, but you’ll agree with me that it ain’t exactly very efficient to talk to everyone one on one and hope you get a sale from that, it’s also very likely that they will soon forget who you are and what CCH is, and thereby sans near miracle level chance or aggressive marketing, will likely never look at CCH again. Therefore, my suggestion, set up a free demo somehow (you may be able to get COG to co-operate on that with you or just use the webpage on their site) that you can “bait” with, however in exchange for the demo (you can give the excuse that the demo link will be sent to their email) they need to put their email into a form and “opt-in” to your list so that you can warm them up over time later and send them an email whenever you release something new, or go to a convention.

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