The Hidden Gold Mine How Gaming Communities Can Drive Monetization - Izaac Fouladi, Dynamo.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] like to welcome to the stage please uh to talk about the hidden gold mine how gaming communities can Drive monetization Isaac Fadi from Dynamo so please welcome to the stage Isaac for the next Talk of the uh the afternoon thank you very much uh thank you all for being here thank you for attending and thank you pocket Gamers for hosting such an amazing event my name is Isaac Fadi I'm the head of new sales for Dynamo we're the first AI powered social Community OS we help games Drive business through their social media today we're going to talk monetization we're going to talk monetization specifically as it relates to your

social communities which we believe are hidden gold mines underutilized full of potential ready to be mined if only you guys had the tools to mine it let's get started okay so what's the status today the industry is bleeding Dow monetization teams are tasked with raising the LTV with raising revenues at the same time Community is up or Community potential or as we like to say organic Community potential there are a few reasons for this one of the reason is many gamers are now considering themselves as community members not just Gamers anymore there's also a lot of interesting things happening with the use of DMS which we'll get to in a few minutes but it's the hardest time to acquire new customers customer acquisition costs are high uh daily active uses are down communities up okay still many gaming communities and many gaming companies still view their communities as Revenue blackboxes what do I mean by blackboxes they view

them as a place where they don't want to invest much time much energy they feel like they're not going to get a lot out of it why do they think this it's pretty simple most of the tools most of the processes that many people in this room I'm sure are using in order to glean and get all the actionable data out of your Social communities today are manual they're manual and opportunistic there's a lot of guess work there's lack of visibility who are these people hanging out in my social communities anyway or they might paying customers are they my VIPs are they my non-paying customers there's a lack of visibility uh many CL many companies come to us and they say everyone that's hanging out on my social communities are not my paying Gamers we've actually found out that's not the case uh it's very time and labor intensive let's say you wanted to enhance your social communities and bring players back in game you have to manually reply to people manually send DMS and with links to bring them back in game it takes a lot of work it takes Manpower and there's always this gap

between uh Impressions and results like what's the ROI on my time on my time on my effort uh and will my social metrics even match up with my business metrics basically long story short manual opportunistic is not the way of the future it's not the way to go it's not efficient it's not C it's not timely it's not scalable there's risk for human error there's no quality control all of these manual processes there's risk for human error when you transmit them from Team to team internally there's risk for human error when you transmit them from an outgoing employee to an incoming employee I'm here to tell you that we at Dynamo think otherwise Community is not a black box Community is gold underutilized full of potential waiting to be actualized if only you had the tools to mine effectively if only you had the technology to completely transform your social channels into something meaningful into something actionable into gold so the real question then becomes okay how do I dig this gold how

do I transform my social channels and use them in a scalable and sustainable way not manual and opportunistic after speaking with hundreds of social Community managers and after streaming over a billion interactions for our clients themselves we think we've come up with the three best strategies best ways of thinking best Concepts call them what you want on how to effectively mine this gold and effectively transform your social communities into to Gold not black boxes the first is going to be automation automation is it retains to your current retention tools basically what you guys are doing on your social media already the second strategy is going to be segmentation segmentation as it relates to personalization which you'll see then relates to monetization and the last one is going to be re-engagement this is a new exciting channel uh re-engagement meaning retargeting which many gaming companies are having a lot of challenges with today let's start with automation

the way we see it today social teams have two options you could put up post and you could broadcast post is pretty simple everyone in this room knows what post is you think of creative content and you put up a post and it goes out into your social following and random people then reply and engage with you it kind of ends there broadcast is a new thing that meta introduced last year it was called recurring notifications now it's called marketing messages the doesn't matter what matters is you guys now have the ability to send out scheduled DMS to your players on a daily monthly weekly basis uh or on demand if you want just like you could post on demand or with a scheduler all schedulers by the way Dynamo works with and that's about it it's a new channel that they're trying to push I'm going to focus today on the posts part and I'm going to f focus on posts um but when you add a layer of gamification in the posts you should gamify your posts what do I mean by gamifying posts one

example could be Q&A uh answer correctly in the comment below and receive a prize in the DM and then you have to again manually copy paste put the link in the DM and bring players back in game another example of how you can gamify your posts is using Raffles uh answer correctly in the comment section and tag two friends by Friday and we will pick three random winners to receive a big in-game reward these are all examples of gamifying post everyone could and should do them but again it takes a lot of manual time and labor in order to manage that content which is why we at Dynamo came up with dozens of game oriented templates and game oriented automations to handle the heavy lifting for you you're going to see two examples in a couple slides soon with Advanced intelligent automations you save time because we handle all of the boring repetitive manual tasks that come with with each post such as replying to

people such as sending those DMS with the links to bring them back in game such as liking comments or deleting span comments things of that nature we automate it we help you scale in a way where you don't need to add any additional headcount or processes you set it and forget it and you're able to scale uh with the current team that you have with the current uh community that you have and you do so by keeping your tone of voice your Brand's tonality your Brand's Vibe intact we call it scalable authenticity scalable authenticity is a motto amongst the Dynamo family of Brands it's very very important to keep your brand intact authenticity and automations do not contradict each other people think go automations are bad because it misses that human touch if set up the right way automations simply accelerate what you would do anyway and it saves you tons of time it helps you scale in an authentic way take a look at these two examples these are two clients of ours if you look on the left our client got 11,000

shares having your users share your post is a dream but the steps you need to take and the work that goes into incentivizing them to share and having that happen is very manual time intensive and people tend to not do it which is why they view communities as a revenue blackbox but if you have advanced intelligent automations to help you out with that you could scale people will share for a reward in return those rewards should be automated they get what they want you get what you want it's a giveaway which in this case you get what you want in this case you're having your organic social community market for you if you look at the other example here one of our clients got 64,000 comments in 20 minutes that's tens of thousands of comments every few minutes fully automated fully attended to every comment was attended to based on player type every comment was attended to based on keywords there was no human

intervention it was a live game show this was a very very successful event an event that they would not have been able to have and manage without advanced automations this brings us to our next strategy or concept of how you should be leveraging your social communities and turning the channels into gold funny enough uh there's no personalization in Social it's a one to many kind of Channel like we've been going over you put up a post it goes out to your following and people recomment they comment on your post and they engage you hope that you're paying players maybe some random people would be good too but you really don't know who those people are that are engaging with you in your social channels you don't know the breakout of who are your VIPs versus your dormant versus just random people that are commenting segmentation if you if you implement some segmentation technology you could segment the people in your social channels and gain insight into who those people are and if you were able to do do so if you knew who was

engaging with you on your social channels you could then have targeted specific personalized messages and DMS based on those people based on those player type segmentation leads to personalization leads to monetization and if you had insight into who was commenting on your social channels it would transform your social channels from one to many to one Dynamo is the only company in the world that takes your users business ID and ties them to to the social ID giving you insights into your social communities like never before we show you information such as of all the comments that you receive and all the people engaging with you in your communities how many of them are your VIPs how many of them are your dormant how many are just random people that are commenting and with this visibility with this actionable data you transform your social Community into what was once thought of as a revenue blackbox into gold take a look at this information this information is of course anonymized beachbum is one of our clients we work with five of their Studios Beach buom

ran a segmentation with Dynamo so again we tied their users's business ID with their social ID and gave them visibility into who's engaging with them on their social channels and they now have access to this type of information they know how many of their social users are their paying players are their VIPs are their whales they know they they know by player type based on last login based on churn based on active we have clients that have done segmentation with us that found out that 60% 60 of the people engaging with them on their social channels are their paying customers we also have a few clients that ran segmentation and they found out that 100% of their VIPs all engag with them on social data that they had absolutely no idea about and now they've completely pivoted their entire social media efforts in order to Target them more personally more specifically and monetize them here's two more examples of how powerful segmentation could be if you look on the left we have a client where

with his game more so than typical he needs to treat each one of his player types very differently more so than typical so he ran a segmentation he now knows on his social channels what the breakout is of his VIP players versus dormant versus churn versus last log and so on and so forth the keys are Limitless and now he has specific targeted messages and DMS that get sent out to each of them they're very personalized so again you could hopefully see the uh Concepts starting to stack up he has automatic messages sent out that are personalized because he ran segmentation he now has access to this data if you look on the right this is actually a very interesting use case of how segmentation could help you we have a client that found out that on that when his players reached a certain level in his game that was difficult to pass they churned and he wanted to fix this so he ran a segmentation with Dynamo and he ran the segmentation he segmented his user base based on what level they were

on his game and now anytime one of his players that's on that difficult level engages with him on his social channels an automatic personalized DM gets sent to them with helpful links to help them P to help them pass that to help them pass that level thus decreasing the chance they churn thus monetizing them thus increasing LTV it's another very very interesting use case of the power of segmentation and why every game should be gamifying building a community and the implementing segmentation technology and this brings us to our last our final uh concept way of thinking uh this brings us from engagement to re-engagement and by re-engagement I'm talking about retargeting capabilities which many gaming companies are having a lot of challenges with today let's go over some of today's challenges uh I don't need to harp really on the first one we all have scars ever since Apple cut the idfa cord retargeting has been kind of impossible customer acquisition costs are extremely high which makes retargeting even more

important because you really need to retain your current base you need to raise their their LTV because it's expensive to acquire new users antique channels have seen better days what I mean by antique channels is email ands These are obsolete they have very low success rates very low opt-in rates push notifications have seen better days as well first of all it's app dependent so if your users delete the app they will no longer receive push notifications what was once by default opt in push notifications are now by default opt out and even if you get push notifications I'm sure you guys noticed Apple obviously Stacks them on the home page so the visibility is down and last but not least the biggest challenge is you cannot retarget Boutique segments with the current retargeting capabilities if you retarget through Google or something like that you really the way the structure is set up today you have to Target like 5 to 10,000 people you can't Target a hyp specific Boutique little segment of people and make it get personalized what does all this mean

this means that re-engagement and retargeting capabilities today are hard and you reach less than 50% of your audience at scale or do you we went from automations to help build your community at scale in a scalable authentic way then we have engagement and segmentation to make it personalized and the mix of those two with the challenges that we just went over a new retargeting channel was born a new re-engagement channel you should be re engaging with with Dynamo we can help you re-engage and retarget your users through your social communities and when you do it through your social communities and yes your organic social communities it helps combat all of the challenges and limitations that we just went over if you retarget through your social communities it is platform and device agnostic it doesn't matter if it's Apple or Android because you're riding on the social channels you're doing it through Facebook it's perfect for the Post idfa world because there's no more user level data but again we tie your users business ID with their social

ID and so you know exactly who they are and you could be Harper targeted this is your data this is your traffic it's much more affordable than other retargeting avenues it has much higher click-through rates much higher success rates it is app independent so even if your users delete your app they will still receive your retargeting uh messages because it goes through Facebook and no one's going to delete the Facebook app and most importantly is the bottom one you can retarget Boutique segments specific little custom Boutique segments so what's a boutique segment let's say you guys wanted to retarget uh only the 500 Players whose balance in game is low and if they had an uptick in their balance it would increase the LTV and maybe they would convert to a VIP that's a little Boutique segment that you could Target in a very personalized and effective way another example of a boutique segment is let's say you guys wanted to retarget only your VIPs that haven't logged in in 3 days you could do so because you could

do so through Dynamo you could do so through this new retargeting and re-engagement channels that handles all of the challenges for retargeting in the past and we're very very excited about it here are some of our gaming clients that are using one or all three of the concepts and the strategies that uh that I went over today automations with segmentation with retargeting completely transforms your social from a blackbox into gold into something that's sitting there for the taking waiting to be actualized ready to go and with Dynamo we could help you do it to recap the industry is bleeding Dow monetization teams are tasked with raising LTV raising revenues retargeting and re-engagement capabilities today are hard and you cannot reach your audience at scale social media and your social communities are gold they're full of potential we now have the tools and the technology to help you actualize that

and everyone should start adopting we think the Gaming Community at large should start adopting all of these concept and these strategies in order to turn their social channel into gold and in order to drive business for their games thank you so much thank you Isaac I'm going to stay up here very good very good thank you very much WoW a Whistle Stop tour of that now we are I think just in the last few seconds but does anyone have a question let's take a question there's one here in the front row thank you very much and we'll see how we're doing for time then but uh you covered a lot of ground there go for it all thank you for the presentation for super interesting first of all um you talked earlier about that you guys actually connect the player ID to the to the community ID now this is super interesting can you elaborate more on that on what's this community ID exactly what what is that like it's a what exactly do you want me to elab said that you connect kind of the community ID to the player ID right yeah yeah you show these charts where you actually give this distribution to different kind of play layers how this connection is being

created like so technically how it's being created is the the quick answer is we came up with a similar matching technology similar to what Facebook has uh with their matching technology with their ads and the way we do it is just a very simple uh one-way API that we open up and we don't know any of your users data it's a unique code that you guys share with us it just takes a few hours and then we match the business ID with the social ID to give you all of them that all of that visibility by the way everything that I went over today all of the automations to help with automatic replies and automatic likes and to send DMS with links to bring players back in game that has no Tech integration no Tech integration the only thing is if you want to implement some of the segmentation technology which is of course Very powerful in order to personalize your attack and really convert at a higher clip that's great thank you L we we're out of time so we'll have to stop there that's great if you want to find out more please do hunt I down on meet to match or the emails on screen there um

again round of applause thank you very much for your time appreciate it thank you that was good thank you