Jul 2, 2026

Build Faster, Earn More: Introduction to Growth Hacking Part 2

Part of the Build Faster, Earn More series, this Introduction to Growth Hacking guide helps teams with limited resources optimize their marketing to efficiently grow. See Part 1 if you missed it.

At this point in our growth hacking series, you've defined your audience and figured out what makes your game shareable. The next questions are a bit more tactical: where do you focus your energy on social media, how do you use your accounts to create a funnel, and what do you post? This guide answers those questions, including a look at how GexagonVR built a repeatable content engine for "Hard Bullet" with a small team.

Audience Positioning: Who Is It For?: Defining your game's positioning and USPs

Setting Up Your Accounts: Platform selection, account type, and best practices

Content Strategy: Creating, distributing, and managing your content

Case Study: Hard Bullet Content Strategy Example

Content Types

What's next?: A preview of Part 3

Audience Positioning: Who Is It For?

Now that your target audience is more defined, consider your game's positioning. Some important points to defining your positioning include:

A framework for defining your game's positioning across four key dimensions.

Further defining your game's USPs, memorable moments, tone, and brand allows you to make targeted content experiences with the most information possible.

During a growth hacking campaign, Gexagon VR published a video titled "Welcome to Hard Bullet"⁠ using a competitor release as a point of differentiation – "what we are not." The game was successfully positioned as a no-strings-attached, open sandbox physics-based world, requiring no in-app purchases. It was one of their top 5 most viewed pieces of video content.

🌱 Tips For Small Teams:

Start by asking yourself or your team what they love most about the game. Where do you find the most enjoyment and how is it different from other games you've played?

Setting Up Your Accounts

When it comes to setting up your account, prioritize the platforms where you are most likely to find your primary audience.

It can feel as if you need to be on every platform at once to grow. This is a misconception. You do not need to be everywhere at once. You want to prioritize where your prospective or current community already engages.

It may seem obvious, but the most impactful thing you can do is lead people to your game. Ensure that your account is set up to include a link to the title. Additionally, you will want to use shortened tracking links to measure Click Through Rate (CTR) with tools such as bit.ly⁠ or Linktree⁠.

Consider the following before you start creating an account:

Personal account or studio account? Neither is wrong. What matters is knowing the trade-offs and how each one shapes what your players see.

🌱 Tips For Small Teams:

Consider starting with one or two platforms that best fit your community and begin sharing authentic updates for your game following platform-specific best practices.

With your audience defined, your platforms picked out, and account type identified you are ready to set up your account. Here are some best practices to follow when creating your accounts.

Below is an example from a hypothetical game (Castle Quest!) that we created for our Designing for Live Services 101 article set.

"Castle Quest!" Is our hypothetical game example we will use to walk you through the best practices for account setup.

After creating a bio, profile picture and official branding, you will want to continue to refine your growth hacking techniques. Consider doing the following:

Once the basics are in place, growth hacking success comes down to consistency: dialing in analytics settings, choosing the right toolkit, and keeping every channel speaking with one voice.

Engage your community with clear visuals, responsive comments, and behind-the-scenes content. Ensure profile pages include a short trackable link directly to your game to measure the social page's effectiveness as a game platform funnel.

Platform Best Practices

Each platform rewards different behaviors, but you don't need to be on all of them. Understanding what tactics work best for a given platform can help you invest where it counts.

🌱 Tips For Small Teams:

Growth hacking works on a sustained period of iterative content experiments. Keep an open mind and look for tools that make it easier to produce content such as free apps like Instagram Edits or GenAI tools for voices, or help with planning. Scheduling tools (in-app or 3rd party) may also streamline your process for posting and reading analytics.

Content Strategy

With your account(s) set up you can turn your attention to creating, distributing and managing your posts and live streams across your chosen platforms. Your goal is to engage your target audience at the times they are most active on the high-impact platforms you previously identified.

Remember that consistent engagement and authentic presence will build your brand more than engaging on all possible platforms and spreading yourself too thin.

Optimize your content type according to the platforms you use. When the format fits the platform, it gives your content a better shot at reaching the right players.

To learn more about long form vs. short form content and how you should use each type of content visit here⁠.

🌱 Tips For Small Teams:

Do not feel overwhelmed. Consistency is key so start with platforms where you find most of your target audience. Look for similar titles and observe which of their platforms are getting the most engagement. If you skip a platform as a result of bandwidth issues, consider opening the account just to reserve the handle and add a link to your title.

Case Study: Hard Bullet Content Strategy Example

Hard Bullet⁠ arrived at an "expositionless exposition" strategy to integrate narrative and game exposition, making the protagonist's pitch engaging for all audiences without feeling like a tutorial. This led to successful and repeatable campaigns through commissioned content that emphasized unique selling points (USPs), humor, expectation subversion, and gaming pop culture.

"Weapons of the Week"⁠: A weekly series championing sandbox functions and in-game welding tools. This format evolved to include parody elements, mimicking familiar sales-style archetypes.

"Why we made this game"⁠: An earnest format giving the developers a voice, designed to deepen the relationship between the community and the team. The main character in the game was used as a talking head which allowed the creator to host the video without being on camera.

Comparison videos⁠ aimed to differentiate between Hard Bullet and Call of Duty or similar games. The framing makes fun of strategy based games and free to play monetization. We recommended Gexagon continue to lean into this and challenge other gaming communities in the spirit of fun.

Clip Shows⁠: Compilations of UGC that drove community engagement and encouraged players to post their own content. This was named "Clip Hazard." This format also opened the door to serial content as well as the ability to create a John Wick-inspired "presenter" without the need for a real life talking head.

Some of the examples from the Case Study on Hard Bullet VR's content strategy.

Content Types

Content strategy is important, as knowing what to create for which channel will ensure greater success in growth hacking. Consider using these suggestions to get started:

Three content formats to build your strategy around: Short-form video drives reach, posts and stories keep your audience engaged, and text-led content builds trust.

🌱 Tips For Small Teams:

No need to re-invent the wheel. Keep your audience informed on updates and don't forget to utilize tried and true formats. These can be the classic Rick Roll, or posting gameplay moments with a caption and music that fits the vibe can get you started.

What's next?

With your audience defined, your accounts set up for tracking, and a content strategy tailored to your bandwidth, you're ready to start experimenting. In Part 3, we'll cover how to build a content calendar, run structured content experiments, set measurable goals, and track what's working with KPIs so you can refine your approach week over week.

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