The client came to us with two stages of work. First, promoting a finished, established game. Then they came back with their own design: original rules, unique miniatures, their own branding. If the first stage was about testing the channel, the second was about building a full audience for a new product.
The niche is specific but large: strategy tabletop games like Warhammer have over 8 million active players in the US, mostly men aged 30–55. This is an audience with money, experience and a very clear sense of what interests them and what doesn't.
The task: attract Kickstarter followers who will later become backers. The more of them and the cheaper, the better the campaign's start.
The main difficulty in this niche isn't finding the audience — it's communicating with it correctly. Strategy game fans instantly recognize “outsider” visuals: if the style doesn't match the niche's aesthetics, the ad simply won't work, no matter the offer.
The second difficulty is predicting which followers will actually buy. A Kickstarter follow isn't money yet. So you need a tool to single out the most loyal part of the audience before the campaign starts.
The solution to the first problem: visuals focused on the game's physical components — detailed miniatures, game cards, material textures. This is exactly what resonates with an audience used to paying for quality and detail.
The solution to the second: a $1 deposit. This is a proven mechanism in this niche — a person who leaves even a symbolic amount converts into a purchase in 60–70% of cases. Over the past 5–10 years, the market has accumulated enough data to use this tool as a reliable predictive marker.
Process
A landing page funnel
For the client's own game, we created a separate landing page for lead collection. This let us control the messaging, test offers and not depend on interface limitations during the warm-up stage.
Two levels of qualification
The audience was split into two streams: those who simply subscribe to updates and those who leave a $1 deposit. The second segment is much smaller in volume but far more valuable — it forms the basis for forecasting sales and prioritizing communication before launch.
Creatives that speak the niche's language
No experiments with style. Color palette, typography, photography — everything matched the visual language the audience already knows from Warhammer, D&D and similar products. Within this code, we tested different offers: a focus on the mechanics, on miniature details and on the game's branding.
Scaling without pausing
As soon as the combination showed results in the US, we immediately scaled to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The audience in these countries has a similar profile, the algorithm is already trained, and the campaign is at peak effectiveness. Waiting and testing more means losing time before creative fatigue sets in.
Results
- Cost per lead: In the first stage, the cost was $1.5–2. After launching the client's own game, the cost per lead has stayed consistently within the KPI of $3.
- Budgets: During active scaling, ad spend reached up to $500 a day (or $3–4 thousand a week at peak times).
- Volume: The plan is to attract 1,000 leads by the end of the current month, working with different audience segments.
Conclusions
- Campaign cycles: In this niche, ad campaigns can “burn out” within a week. An effective solution is relaunching successful combinations to reach new people within the same segment.
- The importance of authenticity: For the board game audience, it's critical to use visuals that match the niche's “code.” Bold style experiments may be unnecessary; a focus on the game's physical components (miniatures) works better.
- Fast scaling: If a combination has shown results in the US market, it's worth scaling it right away to other countries with a similar audience, without wasting time on extra waiting.
- Using benchmarks: A $1 deposit is a proven tool in the Kickstarter niche that lets you forecast future sales based on the market's experience over the past 5–10 years.
