Need more gold. How is marketing in GameDev-company?
Alexander Bezobrazov, Social Quantum Marketing Director, spoke at Epic Growth Conference about marketing problems, the reasons for increasing the staff and what specialists are needed today to promote games.
Read the transcript of performances under the cut.
When you come to any new company, you first look at whether you have enough resources (human, financial, temporary) in order to fulfill your goal.
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What did I see when I entered Social Quantum? I saw several divisions that covered one big marketing function. By the way, my personal conviction is that marketing is not a division, it is a function that covers the entire company [meaning “Theory P” - a concept according to which marketing planning should be deployed in a coordinate system divided into four parts : product (product), price (price), promotion (promotion) and place (place) - editor's note].
In any product companies, the product is responsible for coordinating the product’s chief development officer. In the case of a service company, this is a product manager, in game companies, this position is most often called a “producer”. The producer of the game determines what and how will be in the game.
In addition to the producer in Social Quantum, there was a small marketing department, 4-5 people: an analyst, a designer, and a couple of people who were engaged in driving traffic. There was also a fairly large department that drew all the art for games. And, of course, there were those who supported the users.
In addition, there were problems. The brand was not covered, any relationships with key partners for the business were not covered. But the most important thing: the interaction between all these functions was specific.
For example, once I came to the producer of one game, I asked: "And what would you like to improve in interaction with marketing?". He says: "You know, I basically do not know what marketing does for us."
Proceeding from the problems, I took up the changes in the company's marketing processes.
How did we come to the idea of ​​creating a separate department for creatives?
Marketing in a gaming company has several functions. It is important to understand at what level you want to perform each of them. Often this reflects both your professional level and company level.
For example, if you are a so-called indie developer, then, as a rule, you give all the graphics to an outsourcing, everything you have drawn for the game, everything that is launched into an advertisement, is ordered from a freelancer or from a web studio.
When it comes to a normal company, naturally, you already hire a designer, but this designer is a handyman who does absolutely everything you want.
When you start scaling a gaming company, you are confronted with the fact that you are not satisfied with the quality of the work of such a designer, one designer you simply can not cope with the volumes.
Our games are localized in 11 different languages. From quite understandable, like English and Russian, to translation into traditional Chinese and Chinese simplified. And you need creatives for advertising in 11 languages.
We work with several dozen sources of traffic, each of them has its own dimensions. This means that you do not need 11 sets of creatives, but multiply these 11 by the number of your traffic sources. In addition to banners and videos, there are more complex creatives: playable, land card, interactive video and others.
So it turns out that in a pack that a department delivers, not a couple of banners, but several hundred pieces of content. And such packs need to be prepared at least 2-3 times a month, because creatives quickly burn out. The video loses its effectiveness in a month, banners even in less time.
So we came to the idea that we need a full-fledged department, which will be responsible for creatives.
Why did we set about increasing the number of UA-managers?
Next we had to take on attracting users. In the basic version, the producer of the game himself buys some traffic on Facebook. But if we are talking about a normal company, then there are usually 2-3 marketers who buy traffic from different sources, somehow manage the partners, a little bit the producer climbs. So it was with us.
Usually in the case of a small number of marketers, 50-60% of gaming traffic is answered by Facebook, the rest comes from specific gaming sources.
In the event that you want to move to a higher level, you will have to scale the number of traffic sources. Asia has its own ad networks with its own ad inventory, and you will not be able to properly promote your mobile games in Asia if you do not have access to this inventory. In Europe, too, has its inventory, there are specific advertising networks, whose specialization is the game.
These are different approaches that determine the quality of your work with traffic sources and the volume of new users that you will attract. In our case, simply make some kind of conditional empirical formula. Understanding how you should reach a budget and how a budget can be managed by UA-managers on specific channels, you can calculate how much you need them.
I have three levels of UA-manager - this is junior, middle and senior. For me, a junior who cannot effectively manage a budget of $ 100 thousand per month is a person whom I have no right to keep in my company. He takes the place of a stronger person who scales the business better.
So we came to the conclusion that we need a half dozen UA-managers and this is a big problem for us. Now we scored only half.
Path analytics from producer to datascientist
When the toy is small, when the company is small, the producer or product manager is involved in everything. This person keeps track of all metrics. At some point, he hires a product analyst who looks at the processes from a higher level using Excel.
But in general, in the gaming industry, marketing and without the game itself, in which naturally users also do something, generates so much data that it’s banal to work with them at the level “A! It will do! ” Here you need to constantly analyze and see what happens. To do this, you need a few full-fledged marketing analysts. Already at this moment Excel smoothly leaves somewhere in the beautiful past and Piton comes.
At the 80th level, you no longer have analysts, but a data scientist who speaks in some bird language - Tensor Flow, Pit Archer, and so on. They call a bunch of libraries that are already completely incomprehensible to you. They concern machine learning, which allows, according to data scientists, to do wonders of LTV prediction.
The importance of working with ASO
When we talk about any mobile application, its landing page is the app store. At the most basic level, all game makers do two things: they either fulfill the requirements of this store, or follow generally accepted practices.
Do you need separate screenshots for tablets and phones? It is normal to make different screenshots for devices with different screen sizes. Is your game localized into different languages? It will be logical to make the localization of the page as well.
But if you want to grow further, you must multiply increase the efficiency of working with landing pages.
Imagine if we increase the conversion of a page in the app store by 10%, then this will lead to an increase in all advertising traffic without changing the advertising budget. So we can reduce the cost of installation.
This is done with the help of constant experiments with the landing page. A person with a set of experiments is already that more professional level, without which we can not go on. We cannot take and simply ask the producer to change something without experiments.
When you have an application only for Russia, you can probably ask one marketer to do it. When your application is open to all 200-odd countries in the world and at least 20 of them are large sales markets, you want to do experiments in each of them, because in different countries the same content has different effectiveness.
Little funny example. One of the most popular and commercially successful game genres is Match-3. Those simple games where you put three things in a row, and they are removed. In the West, Match-3 is the most attractive for users, in which some apples, rubies and so on act as chips. In Asia, the faces of animals work much better, some cute faces.
That is, you understand that for the landing page in different regions there should be different graphics, different screenshots, a different description.
Challenges to a bright future
From all of the above (as well as the need to build relationships with application stores, the need for advertising monetization, building a brand and relationships with advertising networks), I proceeded by building new marketing processes.
When you want to go from a novice stage to a normal business stage in some sphere, you or those who are at the novice stage do not have enough knowledge. You have to train, you have to deal with a lack of knowledge, if you are a beginner, then you have to get this knowledge. But when you are at a normal level, and we were at a quite good, normal level in many things, you have to overcome resistance, because everyone says: “But everything works well for us, why should we change something?”. This is exactly the case when I, unfortunately, had to part with a part of the marketing staff, because everything was good at the level of 2013-2014. But mobile advertising is an area that changes literally in seconds.
Today we have:
If we talk about marketers, then our staff has grown to a dozen people and we want to grow another two times, because we understand that this will give us a multiple increase in relation to the number of traffic sources that we launch.
Full decoding can be read on App2Top .
Epic Growth Conference is a product marketing conference organized by Mobio , Getloyal and Appsflyer with the support of myTarget , Appnext .
Subscribe to the Epic Growth Channel in the Telegram, and be the first to know about top content in product marketing.
Read the transcript of performances under the cut.
How was the marketing in Social Quantum?
When you come to any new company, you first look at whether you have enough resources (human, financial, temporary) in order to fulfill your goal.
')
What did I see when I entered Social Quantum? I saw several divisions that covered one big marketing function. By the way, my personal conviction is that marketing is not a division, it is a function that covers the entire company [meaning “Theory P” - a concept according to which marketing planning should be deployed in a coordinate system divided into four parts : product (product), price (price), promotion (promotion) and place (place) - editor's note].
In any product companies, the product is responsible for coordinating the product’s chief development officer. In the case of a service company, this is a product manager, in game companies, this position is most often called a “producer”. The producer of the game determines what and how will be in the game.
In addition to the producer in Social Quantum, there was a small marketing department, 4-5 people: an analyst, a designer, and a couple of people who were engaged in driving traffic. There was also a fairly large department that drew all the art for games. And, of course, there were those who supported the users.
In addition, there were problems. The brand was not covered, any relationships with key partners for the business were not covered. But the most important thing: the interaction between all these functions was specific.
For example, once I came to the producer of one game, I asked: "And what would you like to improve in interaction with marketing?". He says: "You know, I basically do not know what marketing does for us."
Proceeding from the problems, I took up the changes in the company's marketing processes.
How did we come to the idea of ​​creating a separate department for creatives?
Marketing in a gaming company has several functions. It is important to understand at what level you want to perform each of them. Often this reflects both your professional level and company level.
For example, if you are a so-called indie developer, then, as a rule, you give all the graphics to an outsourcing, everything you have drawn for the game, everything that is launched into an advertisement, is ordered from a freelancer or from a web studio.
When it comes to a normal company, naturally, you already hire a designer, but this designer is a handyman who does absolutely everything you want.
When you start scaling a gaming company, you are confronted with the fact that you are not satisfied with the quality of the work of such a designer, one designer you simply can not cope with the volumes.
Our games are localized in 11 different languages. From quite understandable, like English and Russian, to translation into traditional Chinese and Chinese simplified. And you need creatives for advertising in 11 languages.
We work with several dozen sources of traffic, each of them has its own dimensions. This means that you do not need 11 sets of creatives, but multiply these 11 by the number of your traffic sources. In addition to banners and videos, there are more complex creatives: playable, land card, interactive video and others.
So it turns out that in a pack that a department delivers, not a couple of banners, but several hundred pieces of content. And such packs need to be prepared at least 2-3 times a month, because creatives quickly burn out. The video loses its effectiveness in a month, banners even in less time.
So we came to the idea that we need a full-fledged department, which will be responsible for creatives.
Why did we set about increasing the number of UA-managers?
Next we had to take on attracting users. In the basic version, the producer of the game himself buys some traffic on Facebook. But if we are talking about a normal company, then there are usually 2-3 marketers who buy traffic from different sources, somehow manage the partners, a little bit the producer climbs. So it was with us.
Usually in the case of a small number of marketers, 50-60% of gaming traffic is answered by Facebook, the rest comes from specific gaming sources.
In the event that you want to move to a higher level, you will have to scale the number of traffic sources. Asia has its own ad networks with its own ad inventory, and you will not be able to properly promote your mobile games in Asia if you do not have access to this inventory. In Europe, too, has its inventory, there are specific advertising networks, whose specialization is the game.
These are different approaches that determine the quality of your work with traffic sources and the volume of new users that you will attract. In our case, simply make some kind of conditional empirical formula. Understanding how you should reach a budget and how a budget can be managed by UA-managers on specific channels, you can calculate how much you need them.
I have three levels of UA-manager - this is junior, middle and senior. For me, a junior who cannot effectively manage a budget of $ 100 thousand per month is a person whom I have no right to keep in my company. He takes the place of a stronger person who scales the business better.
So we came to the conclusion that we need a half dozen UA-managers and this is a big problem for us. Now we scored only half.
Path analytics from producer to datascientist
When the toy is small, when the company is small, the producer or product manager is involved in everything. This person keeps track of all metrics. At some point, he hires a product analyst who looks at the processes from a higher level using Excel.
But in general, in the gaming industry, marketing and without the game itself, in which naturally users also do something, generates so much data that it’s banal to work with them at the level “A! It will do! ” Here you need to constantly analyze and see what happens. To do this, you need a few full-fledged marketing analysts. Already at this moment Excel smoothly leaves somewhere in the beautiful past and Piton comes.
At the 80th level, you no longer have analysts, but a data scientist who speaks in some bird language - Tensor Flow, Pit Archer, and so on. They call a bunch of libraries that are already completely incomprehensible to you. They concern machine learning, which allows, according to data scientists, to do wonders of LTV prediction.
The importance of working with ASO
When we talk about any mobile application, its landing page is the app store. At the most basic level, all game makers do two things: they either fulfill the requirements of this store, or follow generally accepted practices.
Do you need separate screenshots for tablets and phones? It is normal to make different screenshots for devices with different screen sizes. Is your game localized into different languages? It will be logical to make the localization of the page as well.
But if you want to grow further, you must multiply increase the efficiency of working with landing pages.
Imagine if we increase the conversion of a page in the app store by 10%, then this will lead to an increase in all advertising traffic without changing the advertising budget. So we can reduce the cost of installation.
This is done with the help of constant experiments with the landing page. A person with a set of experiments is already that more professional level, without which we can not go on. We cannot take and simply ask the producer to change something without experiments.
When you have an application only for Russia, you can probably ask one marketer to do it. When your application is open to all 200-odd countries in the world and at least 20 of them are large sales markets, you want to do experiments in each of them, because in different countries the same content has different effectiveness.
Little funny example. One of the most popular and commercially successful game genres is Match-3. Those simple games where you put three things in a row, and they are removed. In the West, Match-3 is the most attractive for users, in which some apples, rubies and so on act as chips. In Asia, the faces of animals work much better, some cute faces.
That is, you understand that for the landing page in different regions there should be different graphics, different screenshots, a different description.
Challenges to a bright future
From all of the above (as well as the need to build relationships with application stores, the need for advertising monetization, building a brand and relationships with advertising networks), I proceeded by building new marketing processes.
When you want to go from a novice stage to a normal business stage in some sphere, you or those who are at the novice stage do not have enough knowledge. You have to train, you have to deal with a lack of knowledge, if you are a beginner, then you have to get this knowledge. But when you are at a normal level, and we were at a quite good, normal level in many things, you have to overcome resistance, because everyone says: “But everything works well for us, why should we change something?”. This is exactly the case when I, unfortunately, had to part with a part of the marketing staff, because everything was good at the level of 2013-2014. But mobile advertising is an area that changes literally in seconds.
Today we have:
- UA-managers team in Moscow;
- a team of UA-managers in Petersburg;
- automation team;
- a staff of analysts inside the products, which smoothly goes to various automated systems with machine learning;
- Several dozen people in St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, engaged in creativity.
If we talk about marketers, then our staff has grown to a dozen people and we want to grow another two times, because we understand that this will give us a multiple increase in relation to the number of traffic sources that we launch.
Full decoding can be read on App2Top .
Epic Growth Conference is a product marketing conference organized by Mobio , Getloyal and Appsflyer with the support of myTarget , Appnext .
Subscribe to the Epic Growth Channel in the Telegram, and be the first to know about top content in product marketing.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/358758/
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