How to Improve Your Game Marketing ROI with Video Game Data Analytics

Big data is a must-have for your marketing success. Data is everywhere around us, but it isn't the presence of data that's important. What matters is how you obtain and analyze it for your game. Big data management has done wonders for businesses that have learned how to use it.

A report by McKinsey & Co. showed that a US insurance firm's chief marketing officer used big data to achieve a 15 percent productivity growth rate for 4 years in a row with the same budget each year. By making decisions based on big data, the company could run tailored campaigns that resulted in a higher ROI.

Every organization looking to make a name for itself in the digital age should make data science a key part of its operations. This article will guide you on how to use big data to improve your game's marketing ROI.

What is big data?

Big data is a term and describes a large volume of data – both structured and unstructured – that businesses collect on a day-to-day basis. The amount of data collected isn’t important; it’s what you do with the data that matters. Big data analytics provides insights that help businesses make informed decisions and strategic moves.

The deployment of data science marketing is becoming common these days as companies try to outperform each other. In most industries, competitors and new entrants use strategies arrived at from data analytics to innovate, compete, and capture value.

Data science helps organizations uncover new growth opportunities and develop new categories using industry data. These organizations have enough information about customer preference, competitor information, products, and services that can be captured and processed into useful information.

The term “big data" may be relatively new, but the act of collecting and organizing data for eventual analysis is old. The phrase gained momentum in the early 2000s when analysts Doug Laney articulated its now popular definition and the 3Vs that characterize big data. These are volume, variety, and velocity at which data is generated, stored, and processed.

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Read more about the 3Vs in our blog on Growth Marketing Genie: How to Use Big Data to Improve Your Marketing.

What you need to know about using big data

With 71 percent of marketers saying they’d implement big data analytics solutions in the next three years, there are a few things you need to do before getting started with it.

First, bear in mind that there is an incredible amount of data available to you for your video game marketing. Every customer touchpoint provides you with data you can use to grow your game. Your social media channels, web visits, customer transactions, and online activity contribute to an increasingly large and varied set of data.

But, not all of it is valuable to you. The successful marketer chooses what data sets matter and uses them effectively. To succeed with your data marketing plan, you should identify the data that gives clear indications of your customer reactions, analyze the data and acquire valuable insights to improve your marketing strategy. This is not easy, and that's why you should hire a big data manager who would execute the plan to perfection.

Figure 1: A large number of customers are planning to use big data solutions. Source: My Customer

What do you need to focus on?

These are the data sets you need to focus on to make your marketing successful.

The “who” data

This is the data that describes your target customers. Who are they? What are their unique characteristics and purchasing behavior? It’s important to understand your customers to know how best to connect with them. Data analytics provides you with insights into customer behavior. By checking their browsing behavior, you will know the sites they frequent, when they are online, and the types of content they normally interact with.

Browsing behavior, check email open rates, click-through rates, social media engagement, customer location, and response to loyalty programs. This marketing data describes your customer and helps you improve your marketing strategy to serve them better.

The “how” data

The “how” data examines how you’ve marketed your game to your target customers. How did you market your game, and what were the results? This data examines the overall engagement of your marketing campaigns and your customer’s purchasing behavior.

This type of data is critical since it shows the impact of your campaigns. Tracking your engagement rate reveals the relevance of your marketing efforts. A high engagement shows that your marketing content is effective, and you should continue on the same path. A low engagement rate shows that your marketing is ineffective, and you need to change tact to better connect with your players.

The “value” data

What is the cost versus the return of your marketing efforts? You need to take stock of how much you spent on marketing your game and the returns earned. In this case, the bean-counting is a necessity, highlighting the marketing expenditure, game sales, gross income, profit, and other important metrics that will help you gauge your marketing ROI.

Every gaming studio needs to analyze its “value” data to know if its marketing is working or not. If you spent $1,000 on a marketing channel that generated sales worth $800, that channel doesn't make financial sense, and you should abandon or optimize it. Poor performing marketing channels will bleed you dry, and that's why you should regularly assess your "value" data to know which channels are worth keeping.

How does using big data help you achieve success?

Now that you understand what is big data analytics, let’s now look at the benefits of big data analytics services for your game.

Gives you analysis-based marketing decisions

Big data will help you make the right decisions at the right time. Decision-making is at the center of every organization, and letting data drive the entire process will see you make informed decisions that will take your company forward.

Marketing decisions made with big data are:

• Accurate
• Timely
• Result-oriented
• Proactive
• Productive
• Well-managed

By relying on big data analytics, you will not approve a campaign because it looks attractive but will instead let the data at hand confirm its viability first.

Helps you watch and respond to how your customers’ behavior changes

The performance of an organization is driven by its knowledge of consumer trends. Whether the consumer is a business or an end-user, the knowledge of consumer trends plays an important role in determining how you will engage the end-user.

Consumer trends keep changing, and businesses that can adapt their operations to the change perform better than the organizations that do otherwise. Big data allows you to monitor your consumers' evolving behavior and modify your operations to adapt to the change, as stated here.

Shows you a true picture of your player base

Big data will help you understand your target players better. This will make it easy to create effective buyer personas and customer profiles.

Figure 2: Buyer persona examples. Source: Smart Data Collective

You can combine customer data from several sources such as online, offline, and mobile. When you gain complete access to your customers’ data, creating highly-targeted marketing campaigns becomes easier.

Netflix is a great example of organizations using data to get a true picture of their customers. Netflix analyzes view patterns and habits across cities, countries, and continents. As a result, it's able to buy TV programs that customers will fall in love with.

Helps you find opportunities and tools for growth

You will need certain tools for collecting and managing data. Some of these important tools include:

• CRM tools: CRM software is for communicating with customers and managing those relationships.
• Social media tools: You need social media tools to automate your social communications across the channels you’re active on. They will also help you track user engagement and your social reach.
• Analytic tools: These tools will help you make sense of all the data you collect. They provide detailed reports that evaluate your past and inform future decision-making.

Allows you to engage your customers using techniques they want to see

One of the reasons marketing campaigns fail is because the marketing messages aren't relevant to the audience. Modern-day customers want personalized content, and your marketing campaign will fail if you don't provide that.

Big data allows you to create highly-specific marketing campaigns with personalized ads and offers on the right channels. This increases the chances your potential players will interact with your campaign, resulting in more sales for your game.

Start tracking like a pro

If game marketing wasn’t hard enough, add analytics into the fray! This is a crucial part of your campaign, and something you’ll need to master if you want to get results. But it’s dangerous to go alone! Take this: The Game Dev's Complete Guide to Game Marketing Analytics.

Big data requires a lot of management, but it can bring great benefits to your game. It will help you make informed decisions and understand your customers better.

Before getting started with data marketing, you need to understand how and what data you need to fuel your marketing. This is a complex exercise, but the team at Game Marketing Genie can help. We are a game marketing agency that uses data-driven marketing to reach our clients' goals every time.

Are you ready to boost your game marketing ROI with big data? Take a look at our marketing strategy for inspiration.