The latest instalment of CasinoBeats’ collaboration with rising slot supplier DreamSpin Studios studies how the team tapped into its established viewership to bolster marketing for its premier release, Buzz Thrill.
We spent some time in our last article looking towards the future; specifically to games two, three and four, discussing our plan for those. After outlining these plans, it’s crucial now to consider how marketing and leveraging our communities will be the key to realising these ambitions and getting the most out of our plans.
For those of you who don’t know, DreamSpin is the brainchild of the founders of two other businesses – Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots. These businesses started out as streaming channels on YouTube, and have since grown to have a presence on nearly all social media platforms and strong websites, grounded in SEO.
When we founded DreamSpin, we knew these communities, which for all intents and purposes have now been forged into one larger community, would be vital in getting our first games out there. At a time when not many slot streamers take themselves into the ‘New Games’ category, and fewer again are prepared to stray away from their favourite studios, we knew our personal platforms would be the very thing to propel Buzz Thrill onto the screens of thousands of players.
Social media is the most important tool at any company’s disposal these days, but this is especially true for us. Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots have 87,621 subscribers on YouTube, 25,254 followers across our social media channels, and an incredible 53,321,028 views on our video uploads.
Players have spent more than 15 million hours watching our YouTube channels, and we have more than 470 million impressions across YouTube and social media as a whole. Those are incredible numbers for us to reflect on as a team, but also a driving force; a spark that lights a passion inside us for what we know DreamSpin could be.
Because of this, we’ve spent a great deal of time discussing how we can utilise this community in line with DreamSpin’s marketing. The good news is that Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots are both marketing businesses, so we’ve tried and tested a number of approaches in the past. We know what our players will respond to, and we know what won’t interest them.
One of the first ways in which we decided to utilise the community was through our ‘Name the Bees’ competition, where we gave five players the chance to name a bee in our flagship release, Buzz Thrill. We walked away from this giveaway with nearly 500 followers on Twitter; already competing with some studios that had been on this platform for much longer than us. We realised at this point just how valuable our community was.
Since then, barely a week goes by without multiple players asking us about our game progress and telling us they can’t wait to play it. This is the longest wait they’ll ever face for a DreamSpin release, and still they’re passionately asking questions at every opportunity. Viewers have tuned into our podcast each time we’ve released it, even submitting questions on our Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots forums to ask our guests. By integrating these communities, we’ve created a powerful platform that uniquely positions DreamSpin for success.
The most recent community tool we’ve made use of has been Discord. Barely a month after launching our Discord, we have over 800 members – chatting daily, sharing memes and taking part in giveaways. What makes Discord so special is that we have a DreamSpin channel, which means those 800 members have not just joined the Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots Community server; they’ve joined the DreamSpin server.
This places us above other studios running something similar to this, and it gives us an opportunity to not just share sneak-peaks with our community, but to also get feedback from what could soon be thousands of players in one place.
As we move forward with the marketing for Buzz Thrill, we’re already looking at the best ways to engage the community, like with exclusive giveaways.
With our Discord, both forums and a huge team behind these businesses, we have ample opportunity to give away exclusive merchandise to players who achieve certain features; like a gold coin hoodie to the first 10 players to send us their gold coin screenshots.
These giveaways will not only encourage camaraderie amongst our community, but also encourage play, with no requirement for large stakes to win prizes.
Of course, it isn’t just about how we can please our community and give back to them; it’s about the power in having this community, and how that can further DreamSpin. Due to the nature of Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots, who are both affiliate businesses, we have strong relationships with a number of operators, both in the UK and beyond.
This means that we can push players directly to certain operators through specific giveaways – allowing players to win prizes and operators to see the numbers they crave. DreamSpin, in turn, gets to move forward knowing Buzz Thrill has been enjoyed by a variety of players in a variety of places. In a scenario like this, everybody wins.
It’s not just about marketing Buzz Thrill though, it’s about DreamSpin as a whole. Speaking as a founder of a business that started on YouTube, it remains one of the best platforms for marketing – especially for our community. As such, we’ll be hosting a live stream on the DreamSpin channel in July 2024; showcasing Buzz Thrill live for the first time to players, and giving away some prizes.
Because of this, we already have over 200 subscribers on our channel and a nice footprint on Linkedin – before the stream has even happened. By the time the stream has finished, our hope would be that this would be close to 1,000 subscribers, positioning DreamSpin as one of the top slot studio channels on YouTube – how exciting would that be?
Through all of this we don’t forget that the Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots businesses are just as important as the communities they represent. The exposure our own channels can bring to our games is invaluable, particularly in helping us to promote giveaways or operators in line with our first release.
This is our USP – and it’s what we’ve made clear from the very beginning, when we were just an idea and didn’t even have a name. We can bring something different to the table, because we don’t just bring ourselves – we bring our communities; thousands of slot enthusiasts eager to play something we’ve made.
As we look towards the future, we often think of how we can use this community to make DreamSpin even better, and even more unique. There are a number of opportunities that could be really special and put DreamSpin on the map – like our consideration to design the first ever community led slot.
We’ve already got five players who can now always say they’ve named a slot character, but it would be incredible to have even more players who could say they’ve had a hand in designing a slot – an opportunity that doesn’t come around often, if at all.
This is just one of a handful of unique ideas that we have available to us, and our community can give us even more. We’re already at the stage where we have players telling us their slot game ideas – ideas they’ve had in their heads for a long time but that they haven’t ever had the opportunity to share.
This is why Fruity Slots, Hideous Slots and DreamSpin are the perfect combination – we don’t just prioritise our business marketing; we consider how we can appeal to the actual customers, how we can give them input and accept their feedback, and how we can give back to them as a thank you for all of their help.
In turn, we know they will continue to support us as time goes on, and we know we will continue to grow these communities far beyond what they are now, with a new branch just for DreamSpin.
Launching a game studio is no mean feat, but launching it off the back of communities made up of tens of thousands of real life players feels a little bit easier, and definitely worthwhile.
