Why You Need Buyer Personas For Your Game Marketing Strategy

by Game Marketing Genie, on 09-Mar-2021 11:11:45

Understanding your gaming target audience requires a decent amount of research. Whether you're a big-name studio or an indie dev, putting yourself in your players' shoes is the first step to selling your game to your audience.

One of the main reasons games fail is that they target the wrong audiences with irrelevant messaging and content. This is where buyer personas come into play to help businesses understand their audiences and, in turn, generate a higher return on investment.

What is a buyer persona?

Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters that represent specific micro-segments of your target audience. These personalities describe your target audience and highlight their challenges, needs, and preferences based on certain types of people your game might be attractive to. This helps you segregate your target audience into groups with similar interests and characteristics. Hey - even our gaming marketing agency has them!

But why do you need them? 

Buyer personas help you identify qualified leads and retain existing customers. Micro-segmenting your audience enables you to attract high-value customers, foster customer loyalty, improve conversions and customer retention, create personalized content, and develop targeted marketing campaigns. 

Let’s look at what a gaming buyer persona may look like:

  • Buyer persona name: The Extremist 
  • Age: 26- 30 years
  • Early adopter group: Likely to purchase the latest gaming consoles when released in the market, or purchase the latest game releases online
  • Interests: Knows about the trends and changes in the gaming industry, familiar with esports. 
  • Bottom line: Wants to watch, play, and own everything. 

You might have a similar set of buyer personas, but every company and their target audiences are different. Let's look into why knowing what your buyer personas look like is important.

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Why are they important? 

To help you target the right people at the right time with the right message

Buyer personas give you an idea of what messages each audience segment will respond to and assist you in catering to their needs and concerns by creating tailored marketing messages. This helps you create specific marketing strategies for different customer micro-segments. 

To help you understand what your buyers look like, and why they would be willing to play your game 

With an infinite number of games at their disposal, gamers have a wide range of options, and sometimes they don’t know what they want. Researching your target audience will help you understand their behavioral patterns, preferences and tastes, and concerns, if they have any. This critical information is only obtained by careful observation and research that helps you incorporate those insights into your game, giving you an edge over your competitors. 

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To establish your brand authority

Authority is the trust your business has earned over time from your target market, where they see you as a thought leader in your industry.

The more trust you gain, the more your customers will recommend you to others. You will also witness an increase in customer loyalty and customer retention, which is vital as the gaming industry is one of the most crowded global markets. 

Buyer personas help you make informed, data-backed decisions to assist your customers through purchasing and post-sales.  This will allow you to boost customer loyalty, drawing them to purchase from your business instead of your competitors.

To help tailor your messages, products, services and business as a whole to meet your customers’ needs 

The more you know about your target players, the better you can serve them. Understanding their preferences, needs, and concerns will help you create customized content that will be valuable to them. 

Creating different content for your buyer personas will help you nail your content strategy. An excellent content marketing strategy should maintain your brand’s style and tone of voice but vary depending on your target audience.

And tailored content boosts business revenue by 18 percent more than generic media. This is why you must make exclusive content plans to help you gain visibility in the online marketplace and establish yourself as a thought leader. 

We cover more about content marketing and how it will help you scale up your game in our blog, The Relevance of Content Marketing for a Successful Video Game Launch

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What’s required to craft a buyer persona?

Personal information

The information you gather to create buyer personas must be based on data to generate a realistic picture of your audience segments. Collect details like their age, geographic location, spending habits, and stage of life by creating online surveys, forms and giveaways, and more. Online surveys are among the best methods to collect information, as most people like to remain anonymous. 

Professional details

Knowing your target audience’s professional details is of prime importance as it gives you an understanding of their spending power, tentative income, and specific interests. Including this section in your survey will help you understand who to spend your time on reaching. 

Goals and challenges

Knowing your target audience’s professional details is key as it gives you an understanding of their spending power, rough income, and interests. Including this section in your survey will help you understand who to spend your time reaching. 

There are two great ways to collect this information. The first is social listening, a technique used to monitor social media for mentions of your brand, competitors, and more. The other approach is to collect inputs from your sales team. After all, they're the ones who interact with your players each day. They know what your players want to accomplish by purchasing your products or subscribing to your services. 

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Where they are

Where do your players spend most of their time? Gaining insights on this is a great way to discover how to reach them. Check the gaming platforms they use, the social media sites they spend most of their time on, the content they consume the most, and more. 

For instance, if your target audience spends most of their time on Twitch, then that's a great place for you to reach out to them. Considering these factors will help you launch your marketing plan in the right place. 

Negative information

Negative buyer personas represent potential customers you don’t want to sell to, which are as important as those you do. For instance, these could be students researching your product for educational purposes, potential customers who are too expensive to acquire, or anyone who doesn’t fall in your category of business interest. Knowing your negative buyer personas helps you save time and direct your efforts to the right customers. 

Values and fears

The essence of great marketing lies in understanding what your audience wants and what they don't. Knowing these elements helps you get a psychographic view of your target market and shape your marketing strategy. With these insights, you can create a narrative that appeals to your target audience, improves lead generation, and fosters brand trust. 

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How to create a buyer persona

Add your personas’ basic demographic information

The basic demographic information of your audience allows you to understand what kind of people your audience are. 

This includes basic information like your personas’ nationality, age, geographic location, as well as other critical information such as:

  • If they have a car: if not, then the possibility of making an online purchase makes more sense to them
  • If they would rather interact through email rather than a phone call: if so, then you should focus on these channels
  • If they use their smartphones to research and make purchases rather than computers: if so, then you must mobile optimize

This information helps you narrow down your messaging and connect with your audience more effectively.

Discover your personas’ goals

To discover your personas’ goals, you need to ask yourself questions including: 

  • What is their motivation factor?
  • Do they want to save money or save time?
  • Is your product or service a necessity or a luxury for them?
  • Do they want to become better with your help? 

Finding the answers to these questions will help you shape your overall marketing strategy. 

Train your team to respond to your personas’ common questions

Your sales, marketing, and customer service teams are at the forefront of your customer dealings. Training them to respond to questions that your audience commonly asks is a great way to alleviate your personas’ doubts and build their trust in your game. 

Create detailed messaging for each persona

No two personas are the same, so you need to create content that caters to each of them. Summarize either in one or two sentences the pain points and goals of each persona and how your company can use this information to determine what content to produce for each.

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Get your gamers playing!

Your players aren't gonna find your game themselves... unless your targeting strategies hit the mark and show them exactly what they want to see. Find out how to do this in Marketing to Gamers and the Gaming Community: The Complete Handbook.


Buyer personas are representations of your target players, and to ensure that you provide the best possible game and experience, you need to understand them in detail. However, isolating the correct information to create your personas can be difficult, and many game devs fail to do so at all. 

Partnering with an established game marketing agency can help you create buyer personas that resonate with your game. Game Marketing Genie has a team of seasoned marketers who can help you create buyer personas from end-to-end.

Target the right players with our team today!

Topics:Gaming CommunitiesVideo Game Marketing StrategyVideo Game MarketingTargeted AudiencesDigital Marketing

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