Maximizing the Impact of an Influencer Marketing Campaign
Wehype
It’s important to track and analyze many different data points before, during and after a campaign for gaming brands to take advantage of influencer marketing in order to achieve their goals. This can include changes in viewership during the sponsored content, social engagement and viewer sentiment.
This blog post is the second part of a series discussing how to measure the success of a campaign with Wehype’s Director of Gaming Partnerships Nils Gustavson. We’re particularly taking a look here at the analytics to study in the aftermath of a sponsored campaign.
Earned Media
One of the most important metrics to track is earned media, or additional content from a creator after they’ve fulfilled the minimum amount of time or content required. This can be seen through the percentage of creators who create unsponsored content within a week of the campaign ending. Brands should also monitor the number of creators who revisit the game within 6 months. That shows they’re coming back with genuine interest in the game to create more content.
Why is this important? These data points can show the game resonates well with a creator and their audience. It assures you that you’re picking the best influencers, who are passionate about their experience within the game (and not just playing it for monetary reasons). It also helps highlight a high demand for the title.
We track all of this through the Wehype platform, monitoring any changes in viewership before, during and after sponsored content is streamed.
Organic Content Creation
One of your main target audiences should be other content creators who aren’t directly involved in the sponsored campaign. Why? Influencing other influencers helps to spark organic content creation. We make sure to track the number of videos uploaded to YouTube or the hours live-streamed organically after a campaign has wrapped up.
You can sometimes directly attribute organic content creation to influencers who were involved in a campaign. You might hear comments in published content along the lines of “I saw this game from (streamer with sponsorship), so I decided to try it out for myself.”
This metric can be hard to track because of attribution challenges, but you can watch the averages during the first week of the campaign launch. This can be as simple as “X percentage of total content is organic.” An example target you might set for this goal could be 85% organic content published after a campaign, to 15% sponsored content during the campaign.
Virality
A final metric to track throughout a campaign is virality. This is the part where you can really give creators a chance to shine. If you standardize the influencer campaign too much, you aren’t allowing for the true creative freedom that has the ability to create amazing viral moments in your campaign. You should enable ways for the content creators within a campaign to put their unique individual spin on the content — which likely won’t happen if there are too many requirements or obstacles for the creator to abide by.
This plays into authenticity. The goal of influencer marketing is to help generate content that doesn’t have the feel of a boilerplate advertisement; which brands can derail if they require every content creator in a campaign to follow dozens of very specific rules and parrot the same talking points. Our customers can analyze this metric through the number of community-generated clips on Twitch and the views & comments on YouTube.There are many ways to measure the success of a gaming influencer marketing campaign, and it’s important to set clear achievable goals beforehand. At Wehype, we understand reaching new audiences and keeping them engaged through a solid set of content creators can be complex and hard to execute. Get in contact with Wehype to make your gaming influencer marketing campaigns effortless.
