5 Effective Marketing Strategies We Can Learn from the Gaming Industry

Gaming is big business, and its success isn’t just down to word-of-mouth recommendations from avid fans. This industry has mastered various marketing elements, so there’s a lot that other businesses can glean from strategies used to sell video games. With that in mind, here’s a peek at what tactics and marketing strategies work well when promoting gaming brands and which can apply equally effectively in other niches.

Storytelling Is Seriously Impactful

While on the outside, it might seem like gaming is just about mindless action and instant gratification, the reason that the top titles and indie hits alike rise to prominence is because the interactive entertainment is framed within a narrative. The same rules apply in marketing, where games are teased months or even years before release with trailers and screenshots that hint at the epic adventures players will experience. Marketers are often advised to prioritize storytelling, and gaming has the playbook for this down pat.

Community Feedback Is Key

Game developers rely on players’ communities to hype up and sustain the franchises they launch. So building and managing these communities play a pivotal role in perpetuating top titles. Indeed input from the community can shape games during development or bring about changes to products post-release. This level of involvement and reactivity is useful for all sorts of marketing scenarios, and using customer engagement tools to collect and orchestrate feedback makes sense for this reason.

Rewards and Incentives Influence Spending & User Behavior

Another aspect of modern game marketing strategies from agencies like Upptic is that the entire process of promoting a product can be gamified in its own right. This means incentivizing user engagement and shaping behavior through the use of rewards and other perks that are handed out according to specific criteria being met. This might mean getting people to join in with a hashtag on social media to claim a particular in-game piece of content. Adding tiered unlocks for existing player referrals might encourage new player sign-ups.

Whatever the case, if marketers can gamify their efforts, people will naturally want to get involved rather than needing to be cajoled.

In-game Ads and Cross-promotions Make Waves

Gaming companies have long recognized that they’ve got essentially a captive audience, with players placing their sights on interactive experiences for hours at a time. This brought about the use of in-game ads many years ago, and they are still going strong today. These ads can, in turn, be used to cross-promote other products from the same developer in an already popular experience or even to provide partnerships with other brands, both in-game and in the real world, to significant effect.

It can even stretch to digital product placement, with games leaping over movies in this regard. It should be no surprise that the industry is enjoying record revenues as a result.

Influencer Marketing Is a Major Tool

Influencer marketing is the last marketing strategy in which gaming is leaps and bounds ahead of other industries. And this is largely down to the streaming scene and how the personalities in this space provide the perfect platform for promoting up-and-coming games to the ideal target audience. There are influencers of all sizes in this sphere, from big names that stream to hundreds of thousands of viewers to niche performers with audiences of a few hundred. And the point is that game developer know how to leverage the micro and the macro to get what they need, which is something that other brands need to try.