Here is a guide to a successful influencer marketing strategy for game promotion.
With millions of social media followers, influencers play a major role in the decision-making process of the masses including which games to play. Whether it's promoting products or posting honest reviews, followers trust and believe what influencers have to say. Therefore, it's important to leverage influencer marketing for all products and services including marketing your game.
Some numbers to back these claims:
- About 50% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations for their purchases
- 3 out of 4 marketers say influencer marketing is effective
- Optimized influencer marketing strategy generates 8 times the ROI
- About 71% of marketers say that the traffic sources have a high chance of conversions
This extensive influencer marketing guide will help you create a high impactful influencer marketing strategy that will provide more returns than what you invest! So, let's get started.
Types of Influencers
While social media gurus name influencer groups differently, they are generally divided up into the following groups:
1. Nano influencers
These are influencers with less than 10,000 followers on their social media channels. While the numbers are not huge some of them may be highly influential especially in their niche categories or better even growing followers every day.
2. Micro-Influencers
Micro-influencers have more than 10,000 followers but less than 100,000 followers. They are highly trustworthy among their followers and can be a good way to start influencer marketing with. They generally have a high engagement rate.
3. Macro influencers
They are influencers with more than 100,000 followers but less than 1 Million followers. They have a huge reach and impact on a huge audience.
4. Mega Influencers
Also known as celebrity influencers, they have more than 1 Million followers on their channels. They are one of the highly influential people who can attract the masses.
How to choose influencers to promote your game?
Decide a budget
One of the first steps to selecting an influencer is deciding a budget for your game influencer campaign. If done right, influencer marketing campaigns generally provide 8 times the ROI.
Relevant influencers
One of the most critical factors to consider while selecting influencers is their relevance to your game. Of course, all game companies would select gaming influencers but within this broad group, it is important to select the right influencers. To ensure you make the right decision is to check out a few videos, posts to check if it matches your brand. This could be in terms of the quality of content, the opinion, and the category of your game.
Quality over quantity
While an influencer with a huge number of followers could be attractive to promote your game, it's important to consider their engagement rate. This includes likes, comments, link clicks, and shares they get on their posts. Generally, influencers would provide this information themselves or you can ask them to send their analytics reports to justify the pay they are demanding. Influencers with high engagement rates would mean you get the maximum buzz on social media and thereby maximum downloads of your game.
Payment system
Generally, influencers would ask for a fixed cost for a post/ campaign, however, an effective way is to opt for performance pay. This means payment based on the number of download link clicks or visit your website. This provides direct insights into how effective the influencer marketing strategy is.
Where to find Gaming influencers?
There are many ways to find game influencers including the following:
Google search
One simple way to find influencers is using Google. There are hundreds of blogs featuring top influencers in various categories whom you can directly contact.
Influencer Software’s
Several platforms allow collaborating with influencers. Generally, influencers make profiles on these platforms and you can easily search them. These platforms provide deeper analytics of performance, enable easier payment and communications.
Some top influencer software’s include:
Social Media Search
You can directly search for influencers on social media channels with the relevant keywords or hashtags and get the top list of accounts to contact. This is a very straightforward way, however, it’s not suggested to use this method and it won’t provide optimum results.
Steps for a successful influencer marketing for your game
Step 1: Determine goals
The first step is to define your influencer marketing goals. These goals should be Specific (S), Measurable (M), Attainable (A), Relevant ( R) Time-Based (T) – SMART.
For example, Get 1000+ game downloads within a month of implanting the influencer marketing strategy.
This could be anything from game downloads to positive reviews on the play store.
Step 2: Define your audience
It's important to identify the exact audience of your marketing campaign. This would be very similar to the target audience of your game. Being specific in terms of demographic, behavioral, and psychographic factors helps identify which influencers to select for your game marketing.
Step 3: Select your budget
Based on your campaign's goals, it's important to determine the budget to be allocated to achieve the results.
Generally, costs per piece of content are as follows:
- Nano influencers: $20 to $ 200
- Micro Influencers: $ 80 to $ 500
- Macro influencers: $500 to $ 10000
- Mega influencers: $ 3000 to $ 500,000
Step 4: select the right influencers bases
As mentioned, before it’s important to select the right influencers to promote your game. Using the factors mentioned above, choose an influencer that would resonate with your target market and get the desired results – game downloads!
Step 5: Develop the campaigning messaging
Once the influencer has been selected the next time is to collaborate with them to care about the right type of content. This would be based on your campaign goals, brand guidelines, tone of voice, and what message you want to promote the most. Think of using the best feature/ aspect of your game that will compel users to download. Communicate this with the influencer and give a few suggestions or post ideas.
Step 6: Review and approve
Once the influencer has sent content for approval, review it to look for errors including typos, quality of the post, messaging, and overall aesthetic. If approved, give them a few dates and times to post the content as part of your large marketing strategy.
Step 7: Analyse performance
As suggested above, always use pay as per performance to ensure the higher effectiveness of your influencer campaign. As per the timeline, measure the results against your goals of the campaign and record any learning lessons for the future.
Hope this guide helped you get started with your influencer strategy to promote your game on social media.