What are some inexpensive methods for font marketing?

Sujan Sundareswaran

I am an amateur type designer, and have just published a font. I’m not doing this full-time, so it’s more of a side-gig. Now, what are some simple methods of promoting the font online? I don’t have a budget, at least not yet. I’m currently relying on forums and other online communities for promotion, but currently seeing not much of traction, no surprise there.

What are some other methods of driving up the exposure?

Scott Briggs

Without a team to help you drive exposure, you need an external team to do it for you.
Have you checked out MyFonts, or any other reseller? They (as all do) take a cut of your sales, but the exposure can be worth it many times over.

Jasper de Waard

Try posting your work in typography related facebook groups with a decent discount. Facebook's paid advertisements can also be very cheap, but I don't think I've ever gotten much success with them.

Ray Larabie

Consider with Facebook that images with more than 20% "text" are penalized. Typeface specimens and promo graphics are practically invisible and if you want to pay to boost them, you can't. Don't waste your time with Facebook unless you can come up with ways of thwarting their text detector. There's a tool for testing images. Free sites like DaFont and 1001fonts.com get very high traffic. On Dafont my fonts get about 5 million downloads per year, not sure how many page views.

JoyceKetterer

My experience is that customers like to find fonts in lists.  There are various sites that post reviews, like type wolfe and type thursday, which you could contact with a reviewers license of your fonts.  By making it a reviewing license (and not a standard license) you allow them to avoid the appearance that you gave them something in exchange for their coverage.

Additionally, Fonts In Use is very popular with the added benefit that you can self publish features on your font.  You need to find examples of the font being used first - they won't let you publish your own promotional images.  

Just being with a reseller also gets you into lists which I suspect is most of the benefit rather than actual marketing of your specific font.

Oh, and everyone in the font making world loves a microsite.  They can be expensive and I'm not entirely persuaded that they are all that useful but if you have the skill to do it yourself you might as well.

Bhikkhu Pesala

Create a blog to promote your work, or a website. The blog costs me nothing, the website hosting costs about £40 a year, but free-hosting packages are good enough for something like this. 

If you're an amateur, and don't need to make money from your fonts, you could add a PayPal link to make it easy to make donations. 

Rafael "rafaeiro" Ferreira

Ray Larabie said:

Consider with Facebook that images with more than 20% "text" are penalized. Typeface specimens and promo graphics are practically invisible and if you want to pay to boost them, you can't. Don't waste your time with Facebook unless you can come up with ways of thwarting their text detector. There's a tool for testing images. Free sites like DaFont and 1001fonts.com get very high traffic. On Dafont my fonts get about 5 million downloads per year, not sure how many page views.

I believe that all the traffic MyFonts receives from DaFont is due to you.

How does it work???

Ray Larabie

You make a font, include a free commercial use license and submit it to Dafont and other free font sites. A few years ago MyFonts banned free fonts unless they're part of a typeface which includes non-free fonts. But even so, my free single fonts generate embedding license sales through other distributors.

Let's say you have a single font novelty display typeface that perhaps feels too "niche" to chart on MyFonts. You can set a price, submit it to MyFonts and get zero to ten deep discounted sales* until it falls into obscurity. Or you could skip MyFonts, include a free for commercial use Desktop EULA and submit it to free font sites. Also submit it to a distributor that allows free fonts with non-free embedding licenses. In the font description, you can tell people where to get an embedding license. If the Dafont version is free for commercial use, it'll get installed by lots of people and get used in projects all around the world. That increases the chances that someone will need to embed the font on the web or in an app.

However, these embedding license sales from single free fonts only account for about 5% of my sales. This could be due to the fact that I expanded the families of my most successful free fonts. More than half of my income comes from typefaces which include free fonts. But years ago, most of these were popular, free, single fonts. When I decided to expand some of them into a full typefaces, I chose the most popular ones.

The kinds of typefaces that do well of Dafont aren't the same as MyFonts. I don't think a Batman related font is going to top the best sellers chart at MyFonts but it probably will at Dafont. Conversely, a beautiful, workhorse text typeface might go unnoticed at Dafont.

Here's a another technique. I took a non-free typeface that was selling approximately zero. It had 1 or 2 MyFonts sales from 2013 to 2015...headed for permanent obscurity. In 2015, I made all caps versions (it included 10 fonts), appended the name with Titling and released it on free font sites. Now it's become a regular seller. The full version of the typeface, with lowercase is now selling reasonably well and people often buy embedding licenses for the all caps version. As Bob Dylan said, "When a font's selling nothing, you got nothing to lose." But this doesn't always work. I tried this with a typeface that was a complete flop on MyFonts and the Titling version was a complete flop on free sites as well.

* I'm assuming from the title of the thread that we're not putting much money into marketing.

ValKalinic

@Ray Larabie and @JoyceKetterer
Those tips are extremely insightful, thanks.

Henning von Vogelsang

I am not saying this is the case here, but I have the impression that a lot of people who’re referring to “free marketing” also mean “free of work”, not just free, as in no money.

Marketing your font is a lot of work. I am still at the very beginnings of my own little boutique type foundry. But from experiences in other industries, I learned that marketing is never ever really free. You need to invest a lot of time, and unless your time is worth nothing, you are investing your own money.

But that’s how it should be: marketing is an investment in your future economy. So building up your brand (for your type label) and building trust with customers is mandatory. The value people are looking for in a product or service – anything really – transcends the pure function of the product (or service). If you are selling a pair of jeans, it is expected that these jeans won’t fall apart the moment you put them on. That’s basic functionality. What isn’t expected is that extra mile the company goes in providing access to themselves, to provide room for feedback, to listen to customers and to respect your boundaries.

In direct relation to fonts, I think the first hurdle is to make your font discoverable, and virtually all recommendations above do that. The “more free ones”, like a Medium blog entry describing your design journey, are doing the same as a Facebook ad, in the sense of “discovery”.

Choosing the right marketplace is probably the easiest way to quickly gain broad exposure. Marketplaces are the shopping malls online: everything can be found in one place, hence a lot of customers are browsing there. Chances to be discovered are pretty high on MyFonts, but I heard they are bogged down by a high demand of new font applications and apparently every type designer is waiting for several weeks to get in (with their first submission). Nevertheless, it’s a reliable market place, especially if you are introducing your font with a 50% to 70% discount rate. I see this is always boosting popularity on MyFonts and it is presumably leading to not only quick sales (in the beginning) but also a lot of exposure.

Henning von Vogelsang

By the way, check out how FontFabric markets their fonts on both, Dribbble and Behance:

https://dribbble.com/fontfabric

https://www.behance.net/gallery/75886011/Noah

They often announce 75% rebates on these sites, and these are not paid ads—but in effect they are ads.

Rob Barba

This one might sound strange, but it's worked for me: Work with indie game developers (you'll find them all the time on places like itch.io).  Helping them with unique fonts for visual flair helps them sell their games and serves as advertising for you.  Worst comes to, you're out a few bucks because you gave them a free license...but you just got yourself a ton of advertising for free and potential clients as well.

As an example, I proffer a screenshot from one of my latest font sales, helped along by a deal with the makers of a game called Lotus Reverie:

ValKalinic

Rob Barba said:

This one might sound strange, but it's worked for me: Work with indie game developers

To build on this approach, has anyone here tried selling some of your fonts directly to game developers, by listing them on sites that specialize in selling game development resources in general (such as GameDevMarket)? If so, is it worth the additional effort, and would you recommend some sites to the rest of us?

Chris Lozos

I did have one gamer buy a font from me just out of the blue.

ValKalinic

Chris Lozos said:

I did have one gamer buy a font from me just out of the blue.

It definitely happens - a relatively known studio did once buy one of mine (from Fontspring, with a standard application license if I'm not mistaken) but sadly I don't think they ended up using it in the game they were working on at the time.

While these bigger game developers buy fonts from MyFonts/Fontspring/FontShop as any other company would, the sites that sell general game development resources (such as GameDevMarket) are actually aiming at a different customer base; that of the hobby and indie devs. So the smaller developers who do use these specialized sites, I assume, aren't really looking for fully professional fonts and the typical application prices that go along with them.

That's why I'm wondering if it's even conceivable to have any success with targeting the developer market directly; the bigger developers will do it through MyFonts(&similar) and the small ones through DaFont(&similar) - there might not be much middle ground.