3 Steps to Identify the Right Influencers for Your Game

While influencer marketing continues to grow big, game developers got huge headaches when handling campaigns with ‘real humans’, compared to Facebook ads and other online ad platforms. It is not easy, might not be a cheap option either, to run a successful influencer campaign. At PocketGamer Connects, San Francisco 2017, Boostinsider has launched the world’s first gaming influencer search engine in Beta, trying to help game developers on how to identify the right influencers for their game.

“It is like a matching game. If your target audience has a huge overlap with the influencer followers, there’s big chance of success.” said Heidi Yu, the CEO of Boostinsider. “There are three easy steps to make it happen by using Boostinsider’s gaming influencer search engine.”

Step 1: Relevancy, Relevancy, Relevancy

Do not always look for big influencers for your game. It might not be worth it. Influencers are just like your targeted marketing channels, with much more branding values, but in the end, it is about how relevant this influencer is to your game.

Here are some aspects of relevancy you should consider:

• Target audience demographic data including age, gender, and location
• Target audience’s interests (Music, Sports, Pet, Car and etc.)
• Influencers’ preference of game (Mobile, Console, MOBA, Causal and etc.)
• Influencers’ content style (Comedy, Tutorial, Let’s play)

Open your mind on this. Imagine, if you have a casual game with a featured cat character, a cat lover Instagram account might have a much better ROI than working with Pewdiepie.

Boostinsider has built its search engine platform to make it easy for developers to search by target audience demographics, influencer stats and a variety of keywords, and then sort by relevancy, in order to give the best recommendations on which influencer is the best match of your game. Boostinsider has also worked on their Boost SDK to make the searching process automatically.

Step 2: Performance matters

Then you need to evaluate how effective the influencer is for your upcoming campaign. While follower count can tell you how big the audience size is, it won’t tell you if their audience is active. You have to dig deeper in order to understand how their target audience interacts with the influencer.

A few metrics are very important to a successful campaign, including engagement per views, latest avg. video views, and long-tail effects. Not only it would help you to determine the influencers’ value to your game, but also it could impact your content strategy. For example, if the engagement is high, meaning their followers might actually care about the influencer. Very likely, it will result in a much higher conversion, plus the less negative feedbacks from their fans by advertising to them.

Step 3: How much? And how much for your game?

Pricing influencer cost is another huge part of the game. Influencer marketing can cost from few hundreds to millions of dollars. “Right now, the influencer marketing pricing is just like art. But we try to make it science.” Heidi said.

In the past two years, Boostinsider has worked with more than 300 brands and developers for thousands of campaigns with a real market price. With machine learning and AI technology, Boostinsider is able to identify how much an influencer is worth to your game specifically, based on their relevancy to the product, followers, and past performance. With this pricing structure, it would benefit both sides. Game developers will have a much better idea about their budgeting and ROI, and influencers would know how much their content value is and where to improve.

Influencer marketing is the future for game promotions. By set the focuses in the gaming industry, Boostinsider aims to provide data-driven solutions to help game developers and publishers in delivering successful influencer marketing campaigns.

If you are interested in joining the beta testing of the gaming search engine with Boostinsider, or want to learn more about the Boost SDK, please send an email to [email protected].

If you are a gaming influencer who’d like to know how much you worth, how to get branded deals, or just would like to track your data, please [email protected].

Author: Mia Jiang