Beyond User Acquisition: How to Win with Influencer Marketing
Written by Marion Balinoff, an influencer marketing consultant with over a decade of experience, including six years in mobile gaming.
She has worked with top gaming companies like Wooga, Supercell, Bytro and Huuuge Games, running performance-driven campaigns with budgets ranging from micro-influencers to MrBeast. Known for her data-driven approach, Marion specializes in making influencer marketing measurable, scalable, and profitable for user acquisition.
Gaming marketing is going through an interesting transformation. More marketers are looking to diversify their mixes with alternative channels and with good reason. Increasing competition, soaring CPIs, and changing privacy regulations & consumer habits have made reducing pure reliance on traditional performance channels more important than ever.
Influencer Marketing is now arguably one of the more mainstream ‘alternative’ channels, but there’s still relatively less information on best practices to extract profitable outcomes.
If you’re new to Influencer Marketing or looking to step up your strategy with a more strategic, data-driven approach here are some fundamental best practices to help you set up for success.
How Do You Calculate Your Influencer Marketing Budget?
The cost of running an Influencer Marketing campaign can vary a lot from one app to another. So how do you calculate how much you need to spend?
If you’re looking to work towards performance goals like ROI and installs, keep 2 key things in mind -
Over 70% of traffic from influencer campaigns will be organic.
Several things can affect prices - including target markets and audience profiles, platforms, your daily organic installs, and your install goals
Since most of the traffic is organic, aim to generate at least a 25% uplift from your organic baseline so you can visibly see the impact. This baseline is the typical number of organic conversions you’re drawing before the campaign, in a period that matches the campaign flight (typically 7 days for YouTube - which is when about 60% of the lifetime views occur).
Examining this installs goal against typical industry standard Conversion Rates helps calculate the number of views needed to hit those figures. I typically conduct some scenario mapping to account for fluctuating CVRs- mapping out pessimistic, medium, and optimistic scenarios. It’s key to ensure the minimum required views are calculated against the pessimistic CVR so you’re setting up for realistic and profitable results from the outset.
Your CPMs are where your target markets and audience profiles come into the equation - Male 18+ audiences, for instance, are cheaper to reach than 35+ females. So with the required view targets and target markets at hand, simply applying industry-standard CPMs will help calculate how much you need to spend.
Analysing Campaign Performance
When it comes to the set-up, I always advise starting with YouTube for performance campaigns. The content format allows the inclusion of tracking links at multiple touchpoints to maximise tracked traffic and it is generally better at driving long-term impact as it doesn’t depend on instant virality.
Another key part of the set-up, as Sara Guerola points out, is preventing any fluctuations in other marketing spend during the campaign.
That 25% organic uplift we discussed can only reliably be attributed to the influencer campaign if there are no other changes in your UA landscape.
Speaking of, make sure you’ve agreed upon the organic attribution methodology with your internal teams before the campaign - whether it's a simple uplift methodology, a causal impact study, or something else.
The bottom line is, that you want to ideally ensure you are, in fact, taking organic traffic into account, because tracked traffic only gives you half the picture. That said, tracked traffic is still critical - you model the performance and behaviours of organically converted users based on your tracked traffic.
When it comes to performance analysis, you need to look at this at a vertical level, not purely a creator level. One key thing to note is that only about 30% of influencers you work with will be profitable. So looking at the percentage of videos reaching profitability per vertical, anything above 30% can be classed as a high-performing vertical, particularly if you’ve had at least 10 live videos and generated over 500K+ views. Anything below these may not be enough data to make reliable conclusions, so you may want to test these verticals a little further.
For verticals that fail to reach performance benchmarks, you should analyse the CPM, CVR, and LTV further to identify if and where you can make improvements to get closer to your benchmarks. A low LTV would likely indicate low-quality users, so you can stop investing in such verticals. On the other hand, if LTV and CPMs seem promising but CVR appears low, there are several measures you can take to improve campaign performance.
Tactics to Improve Influencer Campaign Performance
On a very fundamental level, adding QR codes to YouTube integrations is a great way to maximise tracked conversions. They simplify the user journey and drive conversions amongst TV YouTube viewers and second-screen users.
Gift codes and gift links are always worth testing. However, it’s important to test variations to understand what works best and analyse them against different metrics to ensure you aren’t trading long-term revenue for short-term conversions.
Contests and giveaways work similarly, providing an additional incentive and sense of urgency to drive tracked conversions. But one of the most impactful means to drive conversions is using custom in-game assets.
This involves creating an in-game item based on an Influencer. This could be a custom character, skin, weapon, decoration item, word tile, or even an entire challenge.
Naturally, this requires actual involvement from the product team, but is absolutely worth it. It can increase the conversion rate from views to installs by up to 400% and ROI by up to 279% on average.
That said, the sign-off from the product team can be difficult. So start small - alter little things in existing assets - like colour, names, and so on. Once you’re confident in the tactic, you can look at creating something truly custom with a bigger influencer.
But two key things to remember with custom assets? First, avoid seasonal themes, as there could be unpredictable delays or setbacks. Second, ensure everyone’s aligned on the creative from the outset and the terms around the asset’s availability and usage are clearly outlined in the influencer contract.
Emerging Influence and Final Tips
If you’re new to Influencer Marketing and looking to scale, it’s key to start with a framework that strategically outlines how you’ll go about testing and analysing your campaigns.
Start out with a knowledge-gathering phase, working with smaller creators and testing wider verticals at scale. Once you’re confident in your insights and have narrowed your vertical focus somewhat, you can move on to optimising with mid-sized creators, testing iterations like gift codes. Finally, when you’ve validated your top-performing verticals, you can work with bigger creators, leveraging tactics like custom assets.
There are also some very interesting opportunities emerging with Podcast Influencers, something Sara and her team at Media Bodies are helping more games tap into too - and much like traditional Influencer Marketing, success is underscored by comprehensive data-led frameworks and tactics.
Ultimately, success across most of these alternative channels comes down to having a clear objective, framework, methodology, and roadmap laid out at the outset and these tips and tactics are a great place to start.
