PART 1 : Influencer in User acquisition ; how to begin ?

Influencer marketing for performance in gaming, let’s make it REAL. ( PART 1.)

A LOT are speaking about It but this new buzzword of influence marketing seems actually quite mysterious ! In this article I hope this will demystify what is actually the continuity of affiliation marketing but … for apps and on social media. Funny enough when you check 2014 google trend most searched queries on Youtube pewdiepie the influencer everyone knows today is already in : 

Why Brands are working with influencer ? What are they exactly doing ? What is my earned, owned media ? What are my influence marketing challenge? 

What is amazing on the top is the influencer power on Content promotion that show straight how influencer are even further integrated into the brand image strategy. As you can see below if as ROIste app publisher as Epic Games, Take Two Interactive etc. use UGC content, the reason is that the gamer have high expectation on the media consumption. 

 An example of successful content creation from the app publisher social point is definitely the campaign they ran in 2016 with the influencer Markiplier (27,2M subscriber) who openly said he was doing this to give the money to charity:

 “…like many other brand deals that I’ve done in the past it affords me the opportunity to donate to charity. This time around, we’ll be donating $10,000 to the Miracle Foundation.”

In terms of PR the youtuber share a let’s play video who really frame social point as a brand everyone will want to play with. As you can see below, with more than 2 000 000 views and + 9000 commentaries, this is definitely an amazing operation from the game publisher :

Influence marketing is a resource scalable and measurable that allow you to make the best of communities with talented creators pushing your brand to highly engaged and proactive audience. The growth YOY in totally insane +56% on Youtube according to tubular : 

But when you look at ‘influencer’ as a search term, you can see the associated request show people are not sure of what it is “how to become an influencer” “what is an influencer”etc.

An influencer is divided by several tiers who are different depending on the platform if we take Instagram and Youtube the two most used platform you can divide the tiers per :

• Elite influencer 
• MEGA influencer 
• Macro Influencer
• Mid-Tier influencer
• Micro influencer 
• Nano influencer

According to mediakit, 17% of companies will spend over half their marketing budget on influencer marketing. Today, many user acquisition manager, who never worked with brands will never even imagine to use this resource which is actually a big mistake. Even more in a covid context where influencer reach a pic in US. 29% of global viewership are from US creators : 

Creators success is on the rise. According to Nielsen Games Video Game Tracking (VGT), the number of gamers who say they are playing video games more now due to the COVID-19 pandemic has increased since March 23, 2020. The increase was highest in the U.S. (46%), followed by France (41%), the U.K. (28%) and Germany (23%). You can see as well below the impressive Rise of Twitch :

As affiliate marketing is a huge share of the marketing budget on the web because of the high revenues provided, influence marketing is key for brands and especially apps in gaming to drive performances. Calculating earn and own media is key most advertiser are not doing when this is actually directly impacting their CTR / CVR / CPI. 

TIPS : If you are spending less than 10% in influence marketing, you are loosing a huge opportunity. 

How to find the right influencer : 

1. Who follow this influencer ? Audience check.
2. How many follow and view this influencer has on average on each content ? Reach check.
3. Do they have a highly engaged audience who follow, like, share ? Engagement check.
4. Do they already worked with my competitors ? Experience check. 
5. How active is the channel? How often do they post ? Frequency check.
6. How performed their past content in social blade for instance ?

Influencer = speaker = language localisation

Interest “Influencer” Map

If you go a bit deeper into google keyword trend you can also easily get where this term is actually booming – this is actually a good indicator of the localised trends of the search of this term :

1. Singapore – 100
2. Germany – 82
3. Sweden – 74 
4. Italy – 73
5. Switzerland – 71
6. Austria – 71
7. Spain – 69
8. Panama – 64
9. Indonesia – 58
10. Paraguay – 55
11. Norway – 51
12. South africa – 50 

This is actually really important to get to know how influence marketing is doing where your game is the strongest and to sponsor rising influencer that match with your audience if you see the influencer size is low in the country you are the best in and the audience engagement is high. It is really important as well to pick the right audience into the right channel ( social or vlog etc.). Below you can see for instance the langage share of Twitch : 

Then you can wonder what kind of ads you want in gaming you mainly have those format: 

1. How to video 
2. Lets play video 
3. Walkthrough video 
4. Reaction video
5. Reviews video
6. Machinima video

How to do ? 

1. Partner with creators that already share on your brand
2. Spy your competitors influencer and take the one with most successful results
3. Increase strategic partnership localised with where you got your best location audience interest
4. Go long tail ! Invest into micro influencer and those that are in a huge growth – they are the star of tomorrow ! 
5. Always develop long term relationship that can lead to several collabs in time !
6. Be data oriented and let enough time to your content to perform ! 

Want some inspiration ? 

Here is a list of Epic Games influencers : 

1. SSundee- US
2. Jelly – US
3. SypherPK – US
4. TheGrefg- ES
5. Lachlan – AU

Map your goals !

For instance, do you want to generate a lot of clics in a short period of time ? Do you want content that can go viral with time and stay on the social media platform / internet ? Depending on your answer you will use this or this channel and it will for instance make a strategy as below : 

PS : Is the goal immediate ? Consider the live ! 

Not conviced?

TV share of voice is decreasing as spend and during this time time spent and Youtube has +4 billions views per day . As TV time spent decrease WW and the adblocker are rising and iOS 14 LAT rate will soon end behavioural advertising ending personalisation in ads ; reaching the right users in Paid becomes challenging. Having a proper UGC strategy is key to reach and reengage your user, extend your user base and make high performances from it.  
Indeed as you can see according to Mediakix the minimum spend forecast of influencer marketing for 2020 is arround 5b$.  Those budget does not come out of nowhere. If brand invest in influence marketing it is mainly because it is a huge opportunity to spend for relatively not expensive and track results of an highly engaged audience on the new TV channel of our century Youtube.