by in The rapidly evolving digital world has opened limitless opportunities, breaking many barriers and shattering stereotypes. Once viewed as slackers by society, gamers have become celebrities, and gaming has evolved into a career.
With this evolution comes the rise of the gaming industry. In a very competitive industry, marketing your gaming brand is essential to its success and continued existence. The question now is, how?
Below is a list of fool-proof ways to boost your brand awareness, heighten traffic, and of course, convert prospects into buyers.
Gamer Sponsorship
Gamers flock to online streaming platforms. Twitch averages 2 million viewers at a given time. On the other hand, YouTube Gaming has reported that more than a thousand gaming channels hit 5 million subscribers while 350 broke the 10 million record.
Riding on the popularity of gaming influencers with a huge viewership allows you to reach thousands of people instantly. This will boost brand awareness and offers the potential of converting their followers into your buyers.
Affiliate Programs
If you don’t have the funds to hire marketing help or run ads, you can consider affiliate marketing. Here, you partner with stores and sites to promote and market your product. In exchange, you give them a percentage of the total sales they make.
These promoters (a.k.a affiliates) are given a custom URL, called an affiliate link, which they can share on their site, blog, or video. In a way, they are a marketing branch for your gaming brand.
Social Media Marketing
Because the majority of gamers are millennials and Gen Zs, you cannot skip social media marketing! Harness the power and reach of various platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook, Tiktok (yes, even Tiktok!) to market your brand.
But before doing this, it is crucial first to have a target market and audience, since even social media sites vary in demographics.
Aside from using social media to market your gaming brand, it is also an excellent platform to engage with your customers. Stories, visuals, and video snippets are some of the many ways to do this.
Quickly commenting and responding to customers’ posts and queries also gives them the vibe that you care. Moreover, studies show that the primary attribute that leads customers to become loyal to a brand is excellent customer support.
You can also maximize user-generated content to increase traffic and awareness of your brand. In fact, one-fourth of search results of globally known brands consist of user-generated content!
Tap Influencers
Aside from gamers, the Internet is teeming with influencers –from bloggers, vloggers, and entrepreneurs. Many of these influencers have loyal audiences (not to mention a huge following!). Find those who are within the gaming industry or related to it.
Getting a mention or even a few minutes of exposure on their content will not only increase your traffic. The short publicity is also akin to the approval of this “industry expert,” which will ultimately heighten your brand’s perceived status.
Ads
If you have the funds, you can run paid ads across platforms. For example, you can create targeted campaigns on Facebook, which utilizes user analytics to know to whom they should advertise. Facebook Custom Audiences can also advertise to your email subscribers and visitors.
One research has found that gamers are more likely to click on mobile ads than general users. Thus, it could be assumed that gamers streaming or playing online games are more receptive to gaming-related ads.
Content Marketing
Providing valuable and interesting content increases your authority in the gaming industry. Not only that, shareable content in the form of blogs and videos will also boost your brand’s awareness and help you rank a spot on search engines.
Blogs can contain simple guides, product reviews, or other know-how related to your gaming brand. You can also use this avenue to keep your followers informed of new releases and updates.
While viral videos would immediately put your brand in the spotlight, straightforward videos that could go from unboxing videos to walkthroughs, comparisons, and tutorials can be good ways to promote your product.
Creating a channel for your brand provides people who are already looking for your product, that is, people who already intend to buy, a place to go to.
The key to content marketing is consistency. A continuous flow of content will engage your audience and ultimately lead to higher sales.
To ensure your content is optimized for search engines, it’s important to follow SEO best practices. This includes conducting keyword research to find relevant and high-traffic keywords to target, optimizing your meta tags and descriptions, using proper heading tags, and ensuring your website has a fast loading speed and is mobile-friendly.
By incorporating SEO best practices into your content marketing strategy, you can increase your brand’s visibility and ultimately drive more traffic and sales to your gaming website.
Visit Forums
Aside from streaming platforms, gamers also populate gaming forums. Providing relevant tips and help to gamers in online discussion helps build trust and maybe even get you a customer or two.
It is vital to review forum rules since some have restrictions on sharing links and promoting products. Most forums allow some promotions and sharing of links. Just keep it simple and avoid spammy content! Quora and Reddit are good places to start.
Build Partnerships
Reach out and build relationships with businesses that are closely related to yours but are not your competitors. This could include video game developers and eSports organizers.
Run a Contest
Running a contest places your brand in front of many people and allows you to reach your target audience. How? It’s likely that potential customers already lurk on your page. These same people are likely to share and tag (a common strategy in online contests) their friends who have the same interest as theirs.
Conclusion
Marketing your product in a highly competitive gaming industry can seem daunting. The good thing is, many approaches could help you step up your marketing game. And applying even just a handful of these methods should be enough to kickstart your marketing momentum.
