With the rising popularity of online streaming and gaming personalities, video games have transformed into a mainstream media phenomenon with fans of all ages. A digital media trends survey conducted by Deloitte found that 87% of Generation Z, 83% of millennials, and 79% of Generation X are playing video games at least weekly (if not daily). More and more people are turning their attention to the gaming content of independent streamers, and brands and influencer marketers are taking notice. Some of the most popular Twitch creators have gained enormous followings of 10-15 million people, making the potential impact for influencer partnerships in this space undeniable. Gaming creators hold — and will continue to build — immense audience power, and brands have a big opportunity to tap into these loyal communities and leverage influencers in this growing space.
If you’re an influencer marketer in the gaming industry or work for a gaming-focused brand or agency, your first step is to select the optimal creators for your goals, but with over 8 million active streamers worldwide on Twitch, where do you start? Because the content of gaming creators revolves around the games themselves, you need to know which creators play the specific games related to your brand or campaign. However, typical search methods based on interests, genres, or keywords don’t yield results that are specific enough for your discovery needs.
What brands in the gaming space need is an influencer marketing software solution that will help them search for creators at the game title level for accelerated and accurate results. Finding the ideal gaming creators for your influencer network isn’t impossible, especially if you employ the three key levels of gaming search excellence:
🎮 LEVEL 1: Home in on Authentic Fans
Finding the right influencers for your campaign can be extremely manual, and this process becomes even more challenging when it comes to the gaming space. You may be a gaming brand with a roster of specific titles who is interested in finding authentic fans to sponsor. Or you may be a consumer brand who knows exactly which games your audience plays and you want to find influential gamers who align with your brand. Unlike other verticals, you don’t ask who’s interested in gaming, but rather ‘Who plays Grand Theft Auto’? ‘Who plays Among Us’?
How would you go about identifying these gamers for your campaigns? This level of detail is what makes discovery in the gaming space less straightforward. There isn’t an easy way to pinpoint creators who play specific games without manually sifting through individual videos. What brands need is a data-driven solution that allows them to easily and efficiently identify creators who play their games or games of interest.
💥Here is where CreatorIQ comes in for the assist. With our game-based search function, you can search by game titles and sort through over 40,000 Twitch creators to easily find creators who are authentic fans of specific games. Rather than relying on your existing knowledge of who plays what games or manually reviewing social timelines and profiles, our data-driven approach will ensure that you aren’t missing out on any high-potential influencers simply because you don’t have a good way of identifying them.
How? Just type a game into the search bar to dramatically increase the relevance of your searches and find the perfect gaming creators for your influencer network.
🎮 LEVEL 2: Distinguish Between Intense Vs. Casual Gamers
Nice Job! You’ve completed Level 1 and identified potential partners who play the game you’re interested in. The next challenge involves gauging the level of affinity those creators have for the specific game you’re searching for. When it comes to influencer marketing, audiences are generally much more receptive when influencers promote products that they regularly use and love themselves — this holds true in the gaming space as well. If a creator already enjoys playing a specific game regularly, this authenticity will more likely lead to higher engagement and greater ROI for your campaign.
That being said, for gaming-focused campaigns, it’s crucial to understand where creators fall on the spectrum of intense fans vs. casual players when determining who to partner with so that you can have confidence in your selections. Once you’ve found a group of creators who play the game you are interested in, how do you determine how much they truly like playing that specific game? Frequency and recency are both insightful indicators, but how can you easily determine how many times or how recently a creator has played a game?
💥You can rely on CreatorIQ for a plan of attack. Data-driven insights like frequency and recency of content created are helpful metrics needed to vet creators holistically and measure their enthusiasm for a specific game, but there aren’t many scalable solutions to help you collect and calculate this type of data. Instead of spot checking by scrolling through recent videos, you can instantly review key insights like frequency and recency of games played by a creator. This makes it quick and easy to recognize a long-time fan from a casual player. Having these comprehensive data-driven insights readily available within your influencer marketing platform helps streamline your gaming creator search to ensure you have confidence in your creators and are making informed partnership decisions.
🎮 LEVEL 3: Determine Campaign-Fit
You made it to the final level! You’ve now narrowed your search down to a group of creators who you know are serious fans of the game you’re interested in — the end of your discovery process is near! But before making any final decisions on who to invite into your campaign, you need to complete one last task. It’s time to vet the quality of each creator’s content to ensure that they truly are a good fit for your brand and what you’re trying to achieve. Sounds easy right?
For most people, this level can take a while to complete as assessing a creator’s content can be an extremely time-consuming job. Gamers often play a variety of games and it’s not always easy to pinpoint the videos you are looking for without endlessly scrolling through the hundreds of posts they have. How do you know which videos to watch and which you can ignore? Brands need a faster way to vet content and quality in order to scale their processes and optimize their strategies.
💥Team up with CreatorIQ for the win. Instead of manually searching through each creator’s profile to find the posts featuring the game you’re looking for, you can team up with CreatorIQ for an effortless win. In CreatorIQ’s platform, you can easily view all posted content related to a specific game to determine whether a creator would be the right fit for your campaign. You can also toggle between all the games a creator has streamed to view past content for any specific title, making this a valuable tool for competitive analysis. Now you can efficiently review content quality and length, plus you can evaluate how a creator’s posts tend to perform across the various games that they play to ensure that their content is a good fit for your goals.
The Ultimate Prize
Congrats! You’ve successfully completed all three levels (in record time!) and now have a solid selection of influencers to choose from. Leveling up your search for creators in the gaming space is dependent on the level of specificity you can achieve in discovery searches — for the best results, this needs to be at the game title level.
With CreatorIQ’s game-based search function, you can dramatically increase the relevance of your gaming creator searches to easily identify potential partners. By accelerating your influencer discovery, you’ll be able to save time in your search, build better partnerships with authentic fans, and maximize your ROI. With the right tools and a data-driven approach, finding the ideal gaming creators becomes a much more streamlined process that will allow you to optimize your influencer campaigns and win in the gaming space.