Beyond User Acquisition: How to Win with Influencer Marketing

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like a top three tactic for the game marketers while I haven't made a major TV ad in years I spend a lot of time on influencer campaigns so since tracking leaks can only catch about like 30% of the influencer campaign impact I wanted to bring on two experts to give their experience and tips for crafting the best data driven influencer and podcast campaigns and maybe they'll even check me on those numbers so here's what we're going to touch on today and here are the topics so the kinds of influence and podcast marketing there's actually more than you think setting budgets setting okrs objective and key results datadriven methodology and tracking Organics which is incredibly important and they have some good benchmarks for how you look at the organic uplift of your campaigns and then if we have time some creative recommendations how do you work with the influencers to get the best out of creative so with that I'm going to let them introduce themselves I have two amazing experts so first Maran

you want to go first yeah of course thanks for having me Jen H it's a pleasure to be here so hi everyone I'm Maran bov so I'm an INF marketing consultant specializing in mobile games and apps I basically spent the past decade scaling performance driven infer campaigns working with Studios like social point and wuga and before launching my own consultancy and now I help like top gaming companies like supercell byro snow print Studio turn basically creators into a scalable user acquisition Channel yes that would be an expert that I brought in holy crap Marian that's awesome Sara let's hear about you yes so thanks as well Jen to have me today so I'm Chief growth officer at media bodies and influencer marketing and podcast agency but previously I was at Social point I was as well at funlas and bamco where basically I handled uh the growth of less conventional user acquisition channels today becoming AIT a little bit more conventional let's say so yeah it's really a pleasure to be here today I

love that you went to the dark side or the Light Side however you would like to say it so you sat in my seat and you were a marketer a growth marketer and I know that you worked on some pretty big IP as well when you were at bandam I actually ran into you a couple of times you know completely separate for this and I was so impressed with you and what you've done to hear th that you've gone to influencer marketing and podcast marketing I was super interested to talk more about why you made the jump and what you're seeing in this side of things especially being a growth marketer so we'll get we'll get into that but first let's do a little table setting a little definition so influencers podcast marketing there's a lot of ways that people can talk about it I've heard of like performance driven data driven you know creative and brand awareness so you've got kind of the two buckets of things Nano influencers micro influencers verticals so can you break it all down and just do like a little bit of table setting of what we're going to talk about today so there's different

uh conceptions from what people consider micro influencers which can be or Nano influencers this can range like from a thousand Impressions to 500,000 things like that so in the end it's very important that everything is align when we're talking with another person about influencer marketing or podcast marketing so we basically establish all of these definitions beforehand but even like Concepts such as performance right so yeah I want to drive influence marketing because I want to try performance so performance can also vary a lot depending on the the product and the game so there's people that say performance and then you suddenly realize that they are talking about Impressions and brand awareness and there's other people that say performance and it's basically more towards Roi and installs right so yeah I had like plenty of experience I remember like back in the day talking to some Talent managers that were considering giving all the pricing of the influencers by subscribers right which

is another consideration or definition that we should have in mind how do you price this is it by Impressions or is it by subscribers and sometimes the ogs would price themselves through subscribers but then they were bigger back in the day but they're not big today yeah the fierce competition of influencers and so basically there's some stuff that definitely needs to be defined and like how do you want to price this nowadays I would say definitely go by Impressions and not subscribers M and verticals is what that means is like Automotive or food yeah exactly so there's plenty of verticals that can vary from a niche range of topics there's companies that want just to do to go like with fishing channels or like hunting or outdoor CH channels things like that so that would be the verticals or like there's more broad verticals like entertainment which inside there could be like some sub verticals as well and so those verticals are then going to as well give us let's

say a script for when we want to run our campaigns and and try for the first time and try to as well understand and assess what are the verticals that are working or the topics that are working for our product just to find the right lookalikes on the audiences so basically testing for example some of these different type of verticals to see which ones bring the right performance for us and let me just ask you just a little bit about podcast influencer campaigns because I know that's a little bit of your specialty now so there are host red ads which is the host of that's actually what we do at deconstructor of fund we read the ad then there are just the programmatic ads that go inside we can talk about both so in the end it's you know different pricing it's a different setup but definitely when it comes to host red we have more creative freedom let's say we can give some guidelines and everything but at the same time I'd say when it's programmatic of course like there's there's a pre-recorded ad that also you can a test for example having different recordings and you can

test across different verticals and so basically it will all depend on the product what's the initial setup that you decide you want to do and at the same time the pricing right because it's going to depend like cpms are not going to be the same either got it cool so let's shift over to talk about budget and setting objectives I think the first thing I would always get pressure on is how much money you going to spend on your influencers what are your measurements how are you going to prove success so Maran do you want to talk a little bit about how you approach setting up budget and how you approach setting up your objectives yeah definitely so the thing is that most of the time when I have clients coming to me and they want to start doing influence marketing they're like well I I have like a Cate budget and I'm going to test it all they're like okay well how much do I need to spend and so the thing is that depending on your app it's going to really vary right there's several things that are going to impact your campaign price and so if you want to run like performance

driven campaign so let's say you want to measure the the performance of your campaign like the AI how many installs for your campaigns your budget is going to all depend on the target markets that you want to Target obviously the daily organic installs of your app and you were pointing it before Jen most of the traffic that you get is going to be organic right so that's why it's really really important for your setup and the budget that you're going to spend to have this in mind because otherwise you're never going to be able to measure your campaign performance right and so for me as a consultant I always advise my client to aim for at least 25% more installs than the daily Organics that they have in the targeted you so if I give you an example let's say we we want to Target un Canada Australia so English speaking countries right our app has a thousand installs per day on average if we aim at 25% more that's 250 additional installs during the campaign period right per day so because we want to do performance I would always advise to do YouTube the reason for that is because you're going to have a link that is

going to be directly in the description of the video and on top of that a qon on screen so that's going to help you track better the performance of your campaign and so if you want your analysis to be as accurate as possible and conservative as possible you want to only look at the campaign for the first seven days because that's where most of the views are going to be made within YouTube I I think it's like around 60% of the views are going to be generated within that that time and then it's going to really spread over time obviously and so what what I usually do for all of my clients is that I calculate the campaign total install that we need so we said don't need 15 installs during a campaign period which is 7 days so that's 1,750 installs that we want for this campaign right and then I make different scenarios pessimistic medium and optimistic based on different conversion rate so giving an average and it will depend from one game to another from one country to another but let's say for this example we're going to be between 0.3 in the pessimistic scenario in terms of conversion rate from views to install

to the optimistic scenario that is going to be 0.7% right and so the the idea is that your pessimistic scenario at least generates the minimum numbers of Insel that you need to be able to see that organic uplift in your installs right in that case we understand that basically we need 600,000 views for those 1,800 installs right now not that you understand how much traffic like how much views you need to generate then you'll be able to translate that into budget right the cost of those RIS is going to vary depending on the influences that you're working with right is going to vary Bas on the social media going to be the same price for YouTube that it is for Tik Tok it's going to depend obviously on the country um or the target audience male AS Plus audience is obviously cheaper than female 35 Plus and obviously the inference of vertical as we were saying before gaming is going to be cheaper than True Crime for example or than family type of vertical and and so if we go back to the example we were saying YouTube targeting English speaking

countries targeting let's say female 35 Plus working in certain verticals like cooking lifestyle DIY and we know like this is going to be $50 CPM on average this CPM you can you can have it obviously working with the different agencies that you work with for infl marketing asking your peers that are also doing campaigns and you can understand what's the average CPM and then it will help you translate that into a minimum spend for your campaign right so uh 600,000 view that's $50 CP that's 30k uh dollar that you will need to spend as a minimum for your compaign to be valuable right love it so if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify video you get to see you know maran's kind of Step through the whole process so it sounds like 25% organic uplift is kind of a minimum for you so look at your organic Baseline factor in that organic lift use a low medium and high conversion percentage so it sounds like you were in your case recommending 3 up to 7 I've done ve something very very similar

in my past and that's kind of the approach that I use as well is is doing those types of scenarios assuming a percentage it sounds like your cpms can range you know $50 was your example I've seen some as low as like 25 and high as 100 I think it just depends on your vertical the gain that you're looking at and so that's pretty important for you right is to go and kind of get an understanding of what your cpms are because it can be almost in a sense out of budget if it's too high yeah exactly I have seen the craziest CPM out there for like family channels are asking like 200 $300 CPM yes it's really crazy because then the problem is like if you work with an agency and then they work with managing company and then they work with the the Creator obviously all of this adds to the cost and so you end up with creating CPM also because all of those influencers for example Lifestyle Family they work with a lot of brands that are not doing performance and so in

the end they don't really really care how much exactly do they pay because they don't really have to prove at the end of the day that the campaign was a positive so that really complicates but one advice that I can give is that always negotiate prices like there is always room for negotiation and many times I've seen like influences or agent I cut the price in half so yeah yeah so don't hesitate and and go all in nice so sar from your side how do you think about Organics you know how have you approach setting your in a sense budget yeah so for for example like in addition to what Mario mentioned this 25% of uplift it's basically something that I guess it's should be an uplift enough to cut through all the noise that the game is already generating through other activations that are not influencer marketing or anything else so that being like UA spend fluctuation and all of these things but then of course once you want to measure this 25% uplift or whatever that can be it's important

to have all of these things into consideration as I said like what other things are happening in your game at the same time if it's your first influencer campaign or podcast campaign do you want to for example try to isolate that from the rest of the things that you're doing in marketing I would recommend for example a steady user acquisition at least during one week before the campaign and during the campaign to just to make sure that you can compare apples to apples and you're not generating extra noise that are going to complicate your anal is right and at the same time if you want to try other channels at the same time if you want to run influencer marketing or podcast marketing as well as advice for the first time try to isolate these two instead of running everything together once you have like a better understanding on how these type of campaigns perform for your game then you can start potentially running them together because you will have already like a baseline for what's working or not working for your game and that's going to give you confidence to keep running this these campaigns and of

course when it comes to the type of methodology that you can apply to to calculate these Organics there's many questions out there there's there's many people that are saying like oh should we looking to store data or the MMP data or how do we do it right I would say this is also one of the things that would need to be established before running any campaign inside the team to just to make sure that it's not just a test and then we will see what happens but deciding what are the methodologies or how do we want to calculate the performance of the campaign in terms of Organics do we want to account for that do we want to keep only the tracked installs which I would advise there's always much more than tracked so if you want to make the most out of it let's go for Organics as well and then do you have enough resources in house do you have a data scientist that can help you with this etc etc so one of the things for example could be just running like a simple uplift methodology where you're comp ing what happened let's say four

weeks before the campaign and what happens during the campaign and basically if your organic daily installs before the campaign on average were 10 and all of the sudden during the campaign it's 15 well you know that this 10 minus 15 it's five so basically all the aggregated data it's going to be the outcome of this organic uplift but at the same time there other methodologies there's something called Cal impact it's in Google's library for example so it's easy access as well for data scientists where you can compare data across other countries so countries where there's nothing going on like with a a lower Baseline of installs for example and you don't have you don't run any other marketing activities for example is well to see how you can move the needle with these campaigns or for example just to assess H what would have happened if this cultural impact as well tells you what would have happened in your metrics without the campaign and basically it compares what happened during the campaign and what would have happened

without it that Gap it's what then you can you can consider as what is your organic uplift but of course all of these things are it's a previous conversation to have as well with your with your data scientist okay so number one is make sure you align on that with your team like what are we going to use because there are many times I pick something and someone then argues with that methodology so make sure you get alignment with your teams especially whoever's counting the money and giving you the money this is how we're going to measure it and this is how we're going to show it to you then there's multiple ways there's pre-post there which is in a sense a lift analysis I think that's the hardest part right is to the finance person who's like this is like what what do you mean organic uplift oh H how do you how do you convince the unconvince yeah it that's exactly what Sarah mentioned before I think it's really really important that everybody's aligned beforehand and that everybody Embraces the fact that we're not going to be able to measure everything 100%

accurately right because as we said at the beginning 20 30% of the traffics from the creative campaign are going to be tracked and so the vast majority of the traffic is not going to be so as we said like we're going to have the link and then the qer code which is going to help us track some of the traffic we have different ways of increasing that share of track traffic and we can talk about it a little bit later but when you look at the performance you're going to assume that the behavior of the users that were brought through the tracking link is going to be the same than the the behavior of the users that came organically for each of the influences individually right but the thing is that if if you compare two influences that are on paper are exactly the same in terms of audience demographic in terms of audience location in terms of content in terms of tone of voice Etc you might have one that is a top performer and the other one that is really really bad in terms of performance right so that's why it's really important for you to take a step back and not look at the performance only on a created level but more on a vertical level right and so

basically this is the type of table that I do so we have the vertical we have the numbers of videos per vertical that went live right we cumulated the numbers of views that I've generated each of those videos in each of those verticals and then we look at the numbers of videos that have reached profitability in each of those verticals right to give you an idea only 30% of the influencers that you work with are going to reach profitability right so to me a good performing vertical is a vertical that has 30% of the videos that reach profitability or above right but then you want to have enough data to be able to make this conclusions right so to me like the rule that I tend to follow is that at least have 10 videos in each of the verticals that I want to assess and at least have generated half a million views in each of those verticals because that's going to give me enough confidence to assess whether or not those those verticals are are performing or not right and then what you want to do is for those vertical that might not

have reached the 30% Benchmark you want to look into more detail and see if if there's any way that you can improve the performance for this vertical to actually reach that performance Benchmark so um that's when then you you look at the same vertical at the same numbers of videos per vertical but then you want to look into the the the components of basically the a so how much you pay the influencer the CPM what traffic it's it's generated from those vertical the conversion rate and then obiously the LTV right so the LTV you know it from your game it should be an average between your organic and your truck traffic and your pay traffic sorry the CPM you will know it from the agency that you're working with or from your peers that have launched other campaigns in the same markets with the same vertical the killum and then the conversion rate you can have your benchmark for your game and then also understand like Benchmark from agencies and PE that you're working with right and so the idea is that for example if you take the example of gaming in that table we've tested 12 Vos we have a really good CPM um we have a really good conversion rate but in the end the LTV

is really bad so that's typically the kind of vertical that I would stop working with because only 8% of the videos that were launched in this vertical did reach profitability so it's very far off and I know's going to be able to impact the LTV that much like it just means the quality of the traffic that's uh coming from those gaming channels is not really good contrary if we look at some verticals that might have some potential we see a really good CPM we see a really good LTV but the conversion rate is actually not not there and so that's typically the kind of of Capi that can impact to increase your your compan performance right and there's different ways that we can do that that I can explain obviously so you can have gift WIS and gift codes this is typically the kind of thing that can really really impact your performance I would definitely advise testing different types of gifts uh because what you think might appeal to an audience might not actually actually be something that really works I would really look into besides the aoy look into other metrics such as ention as as

monetization because obviously like some some gift for example starter pack with loads of gems it might actually cannibalize the only monetization and even though conversion might increase because yes it's a it's a start pack that is very generous then maybe your lcv the lcv of the St is not going to be as high right so you want to find the right balance between something that is going to be appealing to new orenes and the way to do that is usually to convert the value of this spack into a currency that they know and let's have the influencers say okay this is worth $15 this is worth $20 right and then obviously have the influencer mention until when this is available create a sense of urgency so people click the link so then they're tracked and so they can get your the reward in order for your campaign performance to improve oh man okay you just dropped a lot so let me break it down so in the first section what was amazing is you were showing a table and I think the takeaway for people is to understand that you have to test different vertical and then as you use your tracking links

you can measure how that vertical is performing against the other kpis right how cpms are performing how conversion is performing and obviously associate your LTV to that so that you can see within your campaign what's working what's not where do you want to just say now that I let's drop that and where do you see potential and where do you want to maybe even double down so I like that methodology of utilizing how the tracking links are actually perform performing to understand that audience so then you can in a sense have a proxy for how your Organics are performing now the second piece is how do you get them to click on that link you know the bane of our existence is it is so so difficult to get people to actually click on the link and I think you gave a bunch of different examples Sara do what have you seen be successful so let's kind of talk about like that tactics of how do you get people to track on the link and and by the way is it the same even for podcast too so what tactics

have you used in the past to incentivize players to click on the links and then how might that be the same or different for podcasts well for podcast it's a little bit more it's a little bit different so it will depend on the type of ads that basically you have so it's so you can basically have a type of ad that it's in an episode dynamically so it means that it it can go to any episode from a podcast show like the first episode to the latest test so basically it's Dynamic it means that this ad it's going to disappear on time so it will have just the length of the campaign so with this type of ads we can rarely put a tracking link but then when it comes to bakedin ads which is basically the ads that stay for a longer period of time and it's usually in the latest episodes of a show then we can ask the host to add an include a tracking link but I would say for the people that are maybe probably more acquainted with the influencer marketing and more scared about podcast because

probably it's a it's a new weere medium I would say there's something in between that it's called simulcast which is basically all the podcast that can also be watched on YouTube right with that we can include a tracking link and it's basically very very similar process than influencer marketing and Mar what Mario just mentioned as well so with that it would be a way to incentivize in a much better way and much organic because people are more used to see tracking links on YouTube for example than what they could do on a podcast website or things like that so it's a really good in between when you know already influencer marketing and you want to start May podcast to try simulcast the podcast on video basically yeah the the idea of a simcast where you know you get the benefits of both exactly and so for podcast marketing I know that listen I I I'm on a podcast I listen to podcasts all the time I know that from a host red ad I I know if a host is going to read something they at least have to believe

in it a little bit or else they wouldn't even do it and so there's an authenticity there's kind of like a a recommendation in a sense that goes with it what have you seen really work in podcast influencer marketing for some of the games that you've worked on has there been something that like has really you know been impressive for you yeah definitely something that we do now at media bodies is we we're starting to do um these creative performance reports that it's purely based on how the ad is and when we say how the ad is it's like all the elements right like from from the length from the tone of voice the talking points call to action all of this Gathering all these insights from different games different clients that we have we've seen that usually when the host is reading it in a very organic way that it's really integrated into the topic of the podcast itself so let's say you are a 35 Plus game that you want to

encourage people to download the game because it's a very it's very relaxing and things like that and then you're advertising on a True Crime podcast right and so basically when the host leaves it in a way where you encourage people to be like like look like for like the personal experience from the host as well right like for me this is super good because like as we know as you know like we spend all day talking about these topics that are like w super heartbreaking we're talking about like True Crime here it's super dark but then like I come here and I relax and I play this game and it's amazing so basically when it feels organic in a way that the host can really share the personal experience it's one of the strongest elements that an ad can have to drive better conversions and to sound like more natural and it's it's really something that we've seen as a common Trend so definitely we see that the the sample size that we have it's it's good enough to say this is something that is really valuable and and like that yeah the authenticity I definitely feel that

way when I personally listen and it's great to hear that that's being successful for [Music] games step into the future of game monetization with exola the premier partner for game developers seeking to expand their reach in Revenue exela provides a robust Suite of tools designed to enhance user acquisition manage subscriptions and streamline Payment Solutions worldwide unlock new markets and maximize profitability through their customize secure payment architecture and dedicated support team exola empowering game developers to achieve Global success this podcast is brought to you by apps flyer in today's Digital World understanding your apps Journey from Discovery to download is more than just insightful it's essential enter apps lier the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar work smarter with apps flyer

that's your new reality dive deep into datadriven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they'll interact with your app apps fer where your app's potential reach [Music] performance I know that you do both podcast marketing and regular influencer marketing and Marian was giving a couple of great examples of gift links QR codes giveaways starter packs have you seen anything else be successful on your side or I mean I know it it depends is usually the answer but what other tactics have you seen to get someone to hit click I feel like there's one very powerful tool that that every marketer could try to do and is basically an integration with the game so something that I've done back in the day at Social Point as well at fun plus for example for example fun plus we had this it was an entertainment influencer and was like basically he was playing a pizza delivery guy in his concept of the video

with the integration and so what we did is like we created him as an nft in the game and he was a pizza delivery guy this was for state of survival so it's a zombie game and like basically encourage viewers to download the game because there's something related to their favorite influencer happening inside the game it's definitely the incentive that I've seen that works the best but not only this like you can also try to capitalize like in this case was an nft but at Social point for example we worked with B beast and it was like creating like specific event in the game with his character like a dragon where you know with Mr B schar and all of this and then that people basically could acquire either directly from the store or like completing an event which helps with redention as well things like that and also easy to access this from new game user so basically it's something that you don't have to complete like 50 levels to get to that point so also encourages the firsttime user experience

for early monetization oh awesome so at one end we' have you know very simple please click on the link on this other end is a really deep integration with an influencer inserting them in the game creating a vent around them you know I also have seen that be insanely helpful and beneficial so there's a full range of different kinds of options another option that I've seen as well is one of my last podcasts was with a Creator platform so Creator codes so some games have the ability to have a SDK in the game and Nexus jot GG was the company I was talking to on the podcast a couple podcasts ago and you insert a Creator code and then a player is incentivized when they see the video and the Creator says you know insert Jaden Inferno and they insert Jaden Inferno in the game they want to do that because they want their creator to get a cut of that revenue and then you can easily in a sense track that in the game as well so Maran did did we hit hit the list of all of the tactics and you might have a

slide or some other magic to show us cuz this is this is I think some of the the best advice we can give folks is you you can't just throw it out there right you can't just say click on the link yeah you have to become more and more creative because there's so much noise there and it's so many people doing influen marketing yeah you have to become creative the thing that Sarah was mentioning honestly it's by far my favorite type of campaigns because you get to work really closely with a Creator create something that's going to be tailored for the audience that's going to really blend in in the game or in the app that you're working with and just to give some numbers out of all the sort of Integrations that I've done and it can be really anything like we're talking about sort of characters but it could be like in know word game having like sort of tiles that are personalized it can be a decoration it 10 that is going to be related to the Creator and obviously you you're going to have to sort of test the different methods that people can require those those items either it's uh through playing the game

in an event or directly through the shop or ideally having both ways so then you can really offer both possibilities because you see some people that want to get anything that's related to the same related to their creators and so they they don't mind actually spending money right away to collect something and so that's clearly the kind of uses that you want to also collect but just to give people an idea out of all the collaboration like that that I've done across different types of games different types of creators this can really impact the conversion rate and it can increase it up to 400% on average so from view to install so that's really massive and then AI overall on average was increased by 279 per. so again like it it's really massive it is going to require a lot of time internally first of all to pitch it to your product team because that might not be easy especially if you don't have numbers to begin with but now you do so that's great it's going to be an easier conversation to align with the road map to to to see what can be done what can

we personalize you don't have to go all in at the beginning right you don't have to create an entire event around their creator you don't have to create assets from scratch maybe you can reuse something change some colors change the name of the asset or something like that just to test and see how it can improve the performance to begin with and then once you're more comfortable and you see that I see that's the right direction to go then you can go all in and and work with bigger creators that obviously going to cost a lot more money but then also yeah personalize more more more stuff in your game right so these kinds of really deep Integrations where the influencer becomes a Chase item or an item for sale or part of the event these are the ones that drove the 400% ROI was that yeah so I was actually going to ask you how you pitch your product team but you you did a good job any other tips in pitching your product team yeah so I mean obviously with those numbers to begin with that's going to be a lot easier because when we did this at the

at the beginning like it was much harder to to justify the cost something that you want to look into is TR to see how much time it's going to require from your team internally and see for which size of creators it's going to make sense first but then it was at least a million views but it could be more it could be less right so that's something that you want to consider one advice I would give and that uh brings back quite bad memories but we were working with Mr Beast and the video was supposed to go live in De around Christmas so we had Creed everything around the influencer seemed around Christmas and then we actually received a call from Reed Mr be manager telling me that basically it was I think 21st of December was almost on holidays everything was R in game and it tells me look like Jimmy so doesn't like the video so it's not going to go live and I'm like okay yes fix figure budget it was really big and in the end I had to postpone everything and so one advice I if I can give to everyone is really don't tie your integration to any seasonal even because you never know

what's going to happen right so make sure that it can be moved around that you have some flexibility that you have a plan B because it will happen right like influences unfortunately are unpredictable it happens so just anticipate and try to see like all the possible scenarios so you can make sure that you have the minimum amount of work in case something changes basically I feel your pain I too have run into that very very problem of even on my side not feeling like the video was accurate or they said something that you know when I was working with Walking Dead I remember doing a campaign and something that they said we had recorded with Robert Kirkman and God this is forever ago and I think they used something that Kirkman didn't want to use and then they didn't want to take it out and I it kind of comes to the brief in the contract is making sure in a sense you have approval rights hopefully get two rounds of approval and you have the final say most influencers

might be okay with that a lot of the bigger ones will be like you know off I you don't you don't get that but I think something we we didn't really talk about maybe we can transition to actually creative is making sure you have a brief making sure that you have things agreed to in your contract so that the creative can be amazing and be what everybody wants it to be so anything in that area you want to touch on and give some tips yeah no I think what you were mentioning about like the cont track is really really important also like beforehand make sure that everybody's aign including obviously the influencer on like how are the items going to be obtainable whether it is through the shop if it's through the shop like how much does it cost like can then people keep it like lifetime do they have it only for a certain time are you able to sell this item again in the future right so all those things that you want to think about like make sure that it's all set up before beforehand obviously and then on the creative side as you were saying like obiously two

runs of approval it's a must sometimes it's kind of hard to get a hold of them and you you don't always manage to have them on the call and so what I did is like create some sort of form for them to feel so we could better understand accept what are you comfortable with what are your favorite colors like so we have like a sit down internally with the creative team with the product team see what's this scoup what can we do what can we offer and then we gather this information through a Google form so to fill in it and give us the right Direction and then obviously before actually putting too much work into the asset itself sending like just a sort of draft confirming that you're in the right direction giving them a little bit of vision making sure that this is all right and then you move on to the next stage but like have a lot of sort of back and forth like this but other timed so you ensure that you yeah you don't end up like at the end of the process having to change some stuff no really smart to I like your Google form idea I like having things structured and templated so that you can really connect and you know we need to have empathy for

them as well as business owners this is their business this is their personality and their tone and their image and listen at the end of the day if the creative isn't authentic and organic so to speak it's not going to resonate with with anybody and so we want to make sure it's the best it could be Sara what advice do you have on this topic of creative or contracts or working with influencers one thing that I lifted recently is like several gaming companies you know like everyone is trying to release a new game this time and basically having early stage conversations with a product that are already developing a game where nothing is set on Stone and basically that and that they already know that they want to work with influencers in the future if this game works right so I'm seeing like a common trend of product teams working towards a game that it's they can easily tailor to influencer marketing and do any type of Integrations that is related to them so

basically anything that requires like short development time for skin and things like that this can be super easy right like skin it's it's something that it can take like one week right and so you can easily activate these things but of course like anything that it's related to include this for example in the contracts one thing that I've seen that it's super important as well is to try to avoid Revenue share because sometimes they might ask for it right I mean I've seen this and I've tried to avoid it like because usually it's that what celebrities do right like celebity when you're working with purely celebrities and not influencers they always want to have a revenue share and that's something you cannot Escape but when it comes with influencers some of them they try but I I would say this comes with like a bigger headache of audits and things like that right so so trying to avoid this and if you're really willing to do it then perfect but otherwise I would say escape from that yeah if you're a product team listening

I think you said something really helpful which is how do you build Assets in the game that can quickly be reskinned and used for this kinds of marketing many of the games I worked on they would yell at me they're like Jen it takes us three months to make a skin we can't do that like what's the ROI how much am I going to make in doing this and so you know Mary your earlier example of like you have to come in and show the math of why that deeper integration would work and by the way I know we spent some time on that that that isn't the only way I mean something else you you know you just going back you mentioned GIF links or QR codes or starter packs I mean those are insanely helpful as well I mean I use QR codes a ton especially if you're if you're doing anything in the Eastern Market you have to QR code pretty much pretty much everything we covered a lot any final thoughts Maran from you anything that we might have missed or you want to just end on I would say like for anyone starting influence marketing or trying to scale

it I think it's really important for you to have a sort of framework so you really understand how you testing influenc marketing and what are the the results that you want to get to right so everything starts with the sort sort of like knowledge Gathering phase and this is where you should be working with smaller size creators right because that's when you can test a vast majority of of influencers at a much smaller cost and GA a lot of learning through that phase and then once you're satisfied with the results you move on to your optimization phase you start leveraging you know guest codes guest links giveaways and contest and you work with bigger size creators so if we talk about for example YouTube like let's say up to 250,000 views once you optimize your campaign that's going to give you the reassurance that once you move to the bigger size creators you're going to be more confident in spending a five figure budget six figure Budget on a single Creator and then spending more time and effort like creating some in-game content for them so it's all about like validating the

verticals that are good for your Apple your game before actually moving forward and going straight to the biggest integration and everything oh I like that a step-by-step approach I think is is really really helpful for people just starting off that makes sense Sara for you any final thoughts yeah a bit related to what mariia said but I just to make sure you don't shoot yourself on the foot and like when you want to try these things just to make sure you have the proper setup in house and that you you align with everything that's that's happening in the game avoid any seasonalities avoid any weird movements on marketing budget and just try to make sure that all these initial objectives that you have that you can actually see them at the end of The Campaign and then not realizing things afterwards like oh but we had this at the same time and and now we can we cannot really see if it was successful or not so just making sure like all these steps are very clear and that this includes as well like all the setup and how you're going to observe everything that's going to

happen during the campaign so have a plan get alignment on the plan I do this with by the way with research as well is I have to go to the product teams and I kind of have them read the questions and say what would you do with the answer to this question and they tell me and that way when I come back with the results they don't on it so it's the same the same idea here is have a plan get alignment on the plan and the methodology if we get numbers that say this what are we going to do does do we agree that this is successful or Not that we're going to invest or not and I think you have to map that whole process out with people so that they really understand what it is that you're going for and shooting for so that makes a ton of sense so Marian you are an influencer consultant so where can people reach out and learn more and work with you yeah of course well you can find me on LinkedIn Marin B reach out to me if you have any questions if you're wondering about CPM conversion rent anything like I'm happy

to help just reach out and can help on a on a call amazing and Sara where can people find you at media bodies a influencer and podcast agency yes so either media bodies website or like you can also find me on LinkedIn or at sarahm mediab bod.com it's amazing that you have both sides right I always love to work with agency partners who have people on the inside who have gone to the light or the dark side and who have youve sat in my chair so you understand what I am looking for and I think that's always incredibly important and again what I thought was reason why I wanted to talk to you especially from the agency side was this idea of podcast influencer Marketing in addition to just what we think is traditional is a number of games are doing it I mean I I've heard June's Journey ads like myself I know that it can also go across almost any genre is as well actually do you all work across all different genres like

even PC mobile games in addition to like kind of more casual games yeah for sure like again it all depends on the vertical like podcast uh what we see is that we can go even more Niche so for example there's products that are very very specific where with a very very specific audience like or theme and at the end of the day podcast there are like hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there that fit these criteria and so basically it's a very use for many people because then like you can also find like good quality users right like for very Niche verticals maybe you don't find like the scalability that you're looking for but you might you might find like bigar yeah very like good Wales got it okay well they they'll see that on the website whatever is publicly available EXA exactly I'm sure is okay and and they'll see that on the website but I do appreciate both of you coming on and sharing as much as you could a lot of great data and inside tips and tricks so thank you both and we'll see you next next time thank you very much you did it you made it to the end of the

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