Jemima Crow has always had a flair for marketing, which helped kick-start her career path working as a Marketing Assistant for the Institute of Physics. Now, years later, and with extensive knowledge behind her, Jemima works as a Marketing Manager for the game studio Auroch Digital.
At the company, she has worked on some big promotions, such as the release of a Lord of The Rings game in association with GAME, as well as Auroch Digital’s own game release – Mars Horizon. With Jemima’s marketing background in the gaming industry, we wanted to know more about her career and her thoughts around content marketing.
As soon as I understood what marketing was I knew it was something I wanted to do. Not only does it have the perfect combination of creativity and organisation, it suits my extrovert personality and drive to reach out to people.
On top of that, marketing serves my need for change, as it is constantly evolving alongside the digital landscape. This demands self-improvement and education, which is something I aim for anyway. I also love that, no matter your interest or expertise, there is an area of marketing that will suit you, whether it’s writing, presenting, video, design, data, or all of the above! There are many exciting and varied opportunities.
My first role in the industry was as a marketing assistant for the Institute of Physics. I’d been trying to get into the industry for about a year when this role came up. It was a perfect introduction. I had brilliant colleagues to learn from and I got to try my hand at many of the different disciplines within marketing.
I quickly progressed to marketing executive and then got a role marketing for Future Plc working on its video game magazines. This was a dream come true as video games are my main passion. I’ve had a few marketing roles since then and now I am the marketing manager for the game studio Auroch Digital, and I absolutely love it. Turns out that making and marketing games with real heart and a head for the issues that affect us in the world is the perfect role for me.
It took me a while to break into the marketing industry but keeping up the pursuit was absolutely worth it.
One of the biggest challenges and this has happened a few times during my career, is when there’s a crisis that has an impact on content/campaigns and how you deliver it.
We’ve all seen those ‘marketing fails’ when a scheduled social post has gone out with poor timing, or should have been cancelled ahead of time. You can plan and perfect a bit of content and the right schedule but there are always external factors you cannot control. It’s how you react to and learn from these that matter, as they’re bound to happen.
The first time it struck me, I was unprepared and had to do crisis management as I went along. This included: pausing all the places the content was going out, making sure we had an official statement from our company, negotiating emotionally charged situations with our community. My team had a crisis plan but it was not detailed enough and we were not ready to implement it smoothly.
What I learned from this was having an in-depth crisis plan and making sure every member of your team is well briefed on this before any crisis happens is very important.
I’m going to pick two as I can’t choose between them.
First, when I was marketing manager at Network N’s agency, we ran a social media campaign for GAME and Warner Brothers for the release of Middle-earth: Shadow of War, a Lord of the Rings game. The game is about warring tribes of orcs so I orchestrated a war between the many local Twitter accounts that GAME has, turning them all into different orc tribes.
Part of this involved making a tutorial for cardboard orc armour for the store staff to use. Check out the hashtag #TheStoresAreGoingToWar to see some of the things people created. Here are some of my favourites: Tweet 1, Tweet 2, Tweet 3. The campaign had huge reach and our client was so happy they followed up with similar campaigns for other titles.
More recently, I managed a launch campaign for Auroch Digital’s space agency management game Mars Horizon, which we created with the support of the European Space Agency. It was a multi-channel campaign with content in all different mediums including email, social media, video, livestreams, press, demos, Discord, and more. Part of this campaign was a livestream of British astronaut Tim Peake livestreaming our game on the Xbox Twitch channel. The game launch has been a big success and my niece was very impressed I got to work with Tim.
I never thought making cardboard armour blueprints and talking to an astronaut would be things I got to do in my career, but the creativity that marketing allows is one of the best things about it.
I follow quite a few on Twitter but two of my favourite marketing influencers are newsletter creators: Simon Carless and his Game Discoverability newsletter, and Chris Zukowski with his How To Market A Game newsletter. Both of these influencers are specifically for indie games and they are both excellent. They use a brilliant combination of data analysis and testing with in-depth breakdowns of their findings. I highly recommend them to any video game marketers.
My three go-to tools are the Adobe Suite, Asana, and Google Docs. The Adobe Suite is vital as we are an indie studio and therefore have a small marketing team, which means having to create all our own graphics and video content. Asana is the perfect tool for organising my team and our workload / projects. It’s great for syncing our schedules with other departments as well.
The majority of our work and documents are handled through Google Docs. It’s particularly great to be able to work on a live document together, which Google Docs allows, especially during COVID as our company has moved entirely to working from home.
Firstly, realise that you’re probably already doing marketing! If you have a social media account, or any kind of audience that you serve somewhere, then you’re marketing yourself to friends, family, or fans. Many of the same skills it takes to run your own TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram account are exactly the same ones we use in marketing. Following trends, analysing statistics, and coming up with creative ways to appeal your audience is marketing at its core.
Aside from that, I would advise young people to give themselves as many opportunities as possible. It took me a few tries to get my first role in marketing but I was persistent through any setbacks and ended up in a great role. A big part of this is getting to know as many people in the industry as possible, as this can help you land roles that may not be available to you otherwise.
I was made redundant from one of my marketing roles due to the company downsizing. When this happened, I messaged an old colleague to ask for some advice on what to do next and they just happened to know of a marketing role that was going at another company, which I ended up taking.
Make sure to network and build relationships with people, and apply for the roles you’re not sure you will get – especially those! Get out there and look for those opportunities as you never know which ones will turn out to be your lucky break.
With all the content I create I always make sure I come back to the question of why we are making it. What are we aiming to do with this content and what does it give to our audience? If it’s a livestream we could be using it to show off new features, or if it’s a forum post it could be a way to let our players know about changes to a game, or a social media post could be a celebration of one of our community members.
The crucial bit is to ensure that the format is the best way to deliver that piece of content in the most effective and suitable way. If it’s not then consider a new format or platform. By always knowing what your aim for the content is you can make sure you’re using the right channel. A good way of checking this is explaining the value of the content and its delivery to other people in your company. If it doesn’t land with them, or it doesn’t sound right to you when you present it, consider if you need to rethink the idea.
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