How to Market Gaming to Consumers in New Markets
Over the course of the past few decades, gaming has been steadily growing to become one of the world's biggest industries. No longer a niche hobby, gaming has become a sustainable industry with many livelihoods and careers stemming from playing them alone. In fact, with the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic causing many in-person events and sports to be canceled for a bit, online competitive video gaming, also known as esports, rapidly took off due to its safe and distanced nature. Now, with the established upward trend of the industry experiencing more growth thanks to the lockdown's increase of PC and device usage, marketing gaming to consumers in new markets is more effective than ever.
Change In Gaming Demographics
The stigma of only certain younger demographics play video games is long a thing of the past. Thanks to the past decade's increase of our reliance on smart devices, more people of every age are gaming through smart device apps, with the wide popularity of games such as Candy Crush, Pokémon Go, and Clash of Clans to prove it. This idea that people of all ages now game in one way or another provides the gaming industry with the upper hand of marketing to mass audiences. No longer needing to funnel down to young adults and certain niches, gaming marketing has found amazing reach with digital marketing specifically, with tons of developers moving downloads and products based on social ads and influencer ad reads.
In fact, over the past few years, a lot of smaller game developers have found relative success and brand growth by sponsoring YouTube content creators for the ad reads about their games or products, even if the creators themselves are not explicitly game consumers themselves. By specifically focusing on digital marketing due to the online traffic smart device users bring to sites/apps like YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, gaming companies increase their chances of driving sales and downloads since audience members are already on their devices.
Creating Engaging Gaming Content
In terms of creating engaging gaming ad content, the most popular strategy to entice potential customers is limited-time offers. EB Games and GameStop specifically have adopted this strategy in convincing customers to buy games at their locations due to the limited-time bonus products consumers get for shopping at their stores exclusively. For game developers and game-related industries, this has also been adapted.
Most YouTube video pre-roll digital advertisements for games mention something as a limited-time in-game item for downloading the game within a certain time window. This not only entices potential consumers based on the limited time offer but also plays true to the idea of gaining an upper hand in-game, tapping into human competitive nature. With the limited-time offers, marketers in the gaming industry driving any sales and downloads by tapping into the idea of exclusivity.
As a full-service marketing company and Canada's #1 media buying agency, Kingstar Media has all the digital expertise to efficiently plan and market your gaming brand, putting your game or product in front of the most important audiences. With many years of experience in marketing emerging and newly popular industries, contact Kingstar today and find out what we can do for your company.