Influencer—everyone’s already familiar with this word. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, an influencer has the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with their audience and how big their followers are. Brands, including games, benefit from the influence of famous individuals who can attract customers to their products. We often see online or offline ads featuring recognizable individuals; sometimes, some of them becoming brand ambassadors.
What to Prepare
Influencers become a marketing tool that we can use to spread information about a game, in addition to the usual social media marketing.
To make the most of your campaign, you will need to pay attention to these key elements:
Budget — Of course, everything needs to fit a budget. Marketing requires realistic budget preparation as influencer costs vary depending on their audience size and impact.
Audience — Every game has a different audience. Extensive research is required beforehand to ensure you find the right influencers for your niche.
Database — Building a database of the most appropriate influencers helps you refine the list in order to better target.
Your game — You will need to prepare the information about the game for them to try. Is it still in progress? How many hours can they play? Until what point can they show the audience? Can you clearly communicate your game succinctly in as few words as possible?
How Acorn Utilizes Influencer Marketing
As influencer marketing becomes one of the key ways to market games, we’ve looked to prioritize the establishment of a strong database of worldwide influencers and content creators. With key historical data; contact information; previous gameplay information and relationship data across multiple social channels, websites, articles and even podcasts; this database helps us filter the right influencers for different types of games and can adjust the content depending on the influencers. We also use the free tool Sullygnome to manually find streamers playing similar games, a long-winded, but free option for any developer.
When we contact influencers, we make sure to send them a personalized message that suits their interests, language, and background. This is important because influencers, content creators, and journalists receive a huge number of emails on a daily basis, and we want to ensure that ours stand out. We also provide them with a description of the game and a link in their email, which they can follow to receive their game key if they are interested.
The approach is threefold –
Direct messaging to a small number of must-have influencers. These are the ones we know will love our game and we want to make sure they have everything at their disposal in order to play and enjoy it. We can go above and beyond, including assets or making ourselves available for interviews.
Personalized messaging to a wider subset of the audience, typically focused around historical gameplay or niche interest.
Larger audience outreach. Shared from our database, built over years of influencer marketing, we have over 50k names and addresses on file and regularly updated. Here, we select the most appropriate creators and share a bespoke message in order to ensure a good spread of voice.
Keeping Track Of The Keys
Although as a developer, you will be able to request a number of keys for marketing purposes from your platform holder, it’s important to note that it’s unwise to think of giving them away as ‘free’. Each could potentially equate to a lost sale, and delivering thousands of keys into the void should be avoided. Having a database and targeting your influencers is preferred to make the most of the resources at your disposal. It’s wise to measure success, especially from the ultra-targeted or macro influencers by using UTR links and encouraging active promotion or even clickthrough incentives to the influencers themselves.
We aim to limit the number of keys that may be wasted, lost or worse - sold on the web, by setting in place a request-offer for our wider influencer targeting. Each creator is given a personal link to a webpage that then grants them a game key for the platform of their choice. This one-click solution makes things easy for the influencer, and dramatically avoids wastage, as opposed the the larger ‘blast’ tactics used by some agencies or tools.
To learn more about how we approach influencer marketing, or to discuss a no-obligation plan of approach for your game, please send us a message, or add a 30m call to your calendar!