by Game Marketing Genie, on 07-May-2020 13:37:10
Making the most of your marketing budget is essential to a successful launch. To ensure you get the best value, you must choose the correct advertising form to invest in.
While traditional advertising is still a popular way to market a brand, you cannot underestimate the popularity of influencer marketing. The personal, highly targeted, and generally low-cost strategy can provide exceptional results if done correctly.
And with influencer marketing set to reach a global spend of $16.4 billion in 2022, it's clear that this strategy will only grow into the future.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is advertising where a company or brand works directly with an online personality to promote something. It uses targeted social media and content marketing to reach a specific demographic. Targeting the right smaller influencer can provide more cost-effective results than significant endorsements.
Every influencer has a unique personality, and audiences react differently to certain types of content. This is where working with them can be invaluable. The high level of trust that fans and consumers have in the influencer makes their endorsement mean more to their audience. They help create social proof and gain their followers’ trust for your brand, so you can develop high-converting and highly targeted marketing campaigns that work.
Some potential forms of marketing collaboration include media creation (video or audio reviews), social media posts (Instagram, Facebook, etc.), or simple promotion of links or hashtags (retweets, shares, or mentions) that pertain to the collaborative brand.
The collaborative material can either be provided to the influencer or created by them. The right choice for you depends on your budget, their skill set, and the type of ad you’re promoting.
Step 1: Establish your marketing goals
This is the first step of your influencer marketing strategy. There are multiple types of marketing for you to consider as part of your video game marketing campaign. Search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads are just a few, each with different advertising goals.
For example, SEO aims to organically grow search engine authority, creating a fabulous online presence for your game to reach more players. Alternatively, PPC ads are highly targeted for turning clicks into conversions. They have a high conversion rate but are more costly than generalized advertising like SEO.
Influencer marketing allows you to control the result of your campaign based on your goals. It offers the flexibility of both SEO and PPC because you can choose whether you want to target conversions, awareness, or more. You can take advantage of the targeted advertising and try to transform viewers into players. Or, you can use social media shares to grow your brand identity.
Choosing the goal of your influencer marketing campaign will set the course for the rest of the steps. Start by deciding what you want to accomplish so you can tailor the rest of your campaign accordingly.
Step 2: Choose your type of influencer marketing campaign
Once you know what goals you want to accomplish, you can begin crafting your campaign. A comprehensive marketing approach will include multiple campaign styles, so knowing what each can do for your brand is important.
There are a lot of types to choose from for every kind of goal, so here are a few of the most common campaign types to consider:
Sponsored content
Sponsored content often involves the influencer creating and posting unique content that includes a link, reference, or entire ad for your company. These can consist of tactics like posting images on Instagram or a Snapchat story promoting or showing off a product in action on a platform like Twitch (read more about that in our article here).
Sponsored content helps in almost every metric without focusing on any in particular. Posts can increase social media following, build a better brand identity, and improve traffic to your site if crafted correctly.
Co-creation and collaborations
Working alongside an influencer can be a great way to take advantage of their expertise. Influencers know their audience, and collaborating with them allows you to tailor your offer to what they’re looking for. You’ll often see collaborations in gaming, such as featured branded products or co-streaming.
This ad type is suitable for drawing their audience’s attention because it is personalized. This makes it good for converting sales or building hype as unique selling points.
Giveaways
Giveaways are a fan favorite because everyone likes free stuff. A giveaway with an influencer is mutually beneficial because it drives engagement for both parties. They are also highly converting for shares and subscriptions because participants must follow the giveaway rules to qualify for the prize. Try setting up an influencer giveaway for early access to your game pre-launch!
Guest posts and blog posts
Informative posts on gaming blogs or websites like Game Informer are considered valuable and trusted. This makes them a great place to share a highly-targeted message to people reading about the specific post you’ve sponsored.
Posts can be about your brand or product or simply highlight your brand as a recommendation. They are great for building SEO, general industry authority, and growing traffic. If you get a trusted influencer to create a blog for your website or their own, you’ll be able to attract new audiences.
Step 3: Identify your target audience
Knowing who you are marketing to is crucial to creating effective marketing content for your campaign. It’s no secret that different demographics (and even those within the same audience) have their own preferences for advertising formats.
With influencer marketing, you are taking advantage of the personal relationship the personality shares with their audience. Your content strategy needs to reflect who you want to reach. Are you targeting males or females? What age selection is proper for you? Do you want mobile gamers or PC gamers? A mix of all of these? Understanding your audience is crucial to segmenting them to ensure that you reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.
These are just a few questions you must ask yourself when developing your strategy to ensure you create something that will connect and convert.
Step 4: Find the right influencers
Finding the right influencers to share your message is equally as important as targeting the right demographic. Every person has their own style. They all have a different type of content that they produce, demographic that follows them, and relationships with their audience. This determines how effective they may be for your campaign.
The right influencer should align with your brand and excel at what you are trying to accomplish. For example, if you are trying to sell a new multiplayer video game, working with a famous streamer (or streamers) to showcase the game may be the ideal marketing tool. However, if you’re looking to build hype for the release, a sponsored post or social media promotion may reach more people to create interest.
Ensure that you have a detailed plan that will help you ask the right questions before proceeding with an interview. Learn all the best questions in our blog, 10 Questions Brands Will Ask You As An Influencer. This will help you make sure your goal and target audience align with your influencer for the best results.
For more information, check out our guide over on Atisfyreach, How to Choose the Best Influencer for Your Business, to learn how to make the most out of your campaigns.
Step 5: Certify your influencers and their audience
When you’ve found the influencers you want to use, you must certify them before moving forward. This means looking into past sponsored deals and their success. It also means investigating conflicts of interest with potential competitors. You will want to determine if their user base is receptive to potential advertisements and the type of demographic you want to target.
Contacting the influencer is another important step to certifying the potential deal. You’ll need to determine if the influencer is interested; and their pricing, preferred advertising style, content formats, and more. Not every potential influencer is going to be a home run. Take the time to certify every opportunity to save money in the long run.
Step 6: create valuable content
Creating good content is the most crucial step in crafting any effective digital marketing strategy. Advertising can be a pain point for consumers who don’t like to be sold on things. To improve the odds of your marketing connecting with the target audience, ensure your content provides value.
The content types you produce will depend on a range of things, including your goals, brand, audience, social media platforms, and the influencer. But when it comes to influencer marketing, your content doesn’t just reflect your brand - it also reflects the people you work with. They don’t want to sacrifice their image to attach their name to something that isn’t up to their standards. Influencers are taking a risk working with a sponsor, so it’s best for everyone involved to create valuable content that is unoffensive, noninvasive, provides value to the viewer, and gets your message across.
Find out more in 10 Content Marketing Strategies for Your Game Launch.
Step 7: track your reach and results
In marketing, tracking your results can give crucial insight into your strategy’s effectiveness. Influencer marketing covers a lot of different types of marketing goals and strategies. There are multiple ways to determine if a campaign is working or not, thanks to tracking metrics.
Website traffic, social media metrics, and sales are all excellent indicators of a campaign’s success. Depending on the intention of the collaboration, one aspect may be more important than the others. However, the goal is to see these numbers ultimately increase.
If you are promoting a blog post campaign, traffic to your site over time will be a significant indicator of efficiency. For sponsored and shared posts, your goal is to increase social media reach while others follow. Effective product promotion or sale promotion should result in a better on-site conversion rate and more traffic.
After you’ve collected some data, you can reevaluate your marketing strategy and refine it for better results the next time around.
Making it count with influencer marketing
If your game marketing strategies don’t contain influencer marketing, you’re losing chances to convert. But if you don’t have the expertise, you won’t be able to make your influencer strategy thrive. Get everything you need to know about video game influencer marketing in our top guide here: The Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing!
There’s more to influencer marketing than sending an email to a celebrity or a massive company asking for an endorsement. You need quality - not just quantity - for the potential reach of your campaign. To make it work, you need to know who to ask and target, what kind of results you want, and how you will achieve those results. If you don’t approach it correctly, it can get expensive quickly.
Atisfyreach can help you to craft the right influencer marketing strategies for your brand. Whether you need to build hype, find PC or mobile gaming influencers, or grow your online presence, our platform will connect you with the right people at the correct prices to craft content that will give you a positive ROI. Sign up now!
