A comprehensive approach to promoting MMORPG before release: experience Zorka.Mobi and Gamevil

Victor Ryzhov

Irina Kovalchuk

A clear pool of mobile application promotion tools has been formed on the market for a long time. However, not only the tools are important, but also the strategy itself. In this case, we will consider an approach to attracting users when, before the release of the game, placement with opinion leaders and the purchase of traffic using the CPA model are simultaneously involved.

Task

Attract the maximum possible number of pre-registrations at the first stage of advertising campaigns. The second step is to get as many high—quality installations of the game as possible.

Sources: myTarget, Target VK, placement with opinion leaders.

About launching the game

Talion is an open—world MMORPG from Gamevil, a developer with offices in Korea, the USA and Germany. In it, the player is given great opportunities to customize his hero and no less freedom of action. Created on Unreal Engine 4, the game also boasts its graphic component.

Screenshot from the game page on Google Play

At the time of the launch of advertising campaigns at the end of January, the full version of Talion was not yet in stores. Only pre-registration was available to users. A special landing page was developed for iOS and Android devices, where an interested player could leave an email address. Subsequently, she received a notification about the launch of the full version of the game.

An integrated approach

The history of cooperation with Gamevil began in July 2018. Then we were lucky enough to make a presentation at one of the local meetups in Korea. There we talked in detail about the Russian mobile games market and the nuances that need to be taken into account when starting activities in Russian-speaking countries. After that, our dialogue with Gamevil representatives took place on the sidelines for the first time.

A few months later we met again, but this time in Berlin. There we agreed to conduct test advertising campaigns. In them, we focused on the CPI indicator. The first launch was supposed to take place on January 28 — exactly one month before the release of the full version.

The advertiser’s needs were very clear: purchase of advertising on social networks and placement with opinion leaders. The geography of promotion is Russia. By that time, the game was already fully localized and translated into Russian. The aforementioned landing page was also ready, with the help of which it was planned to attract users. This approach is justified: it allows, firstly, to introduce users to the product more closely, and secondly, to create a kind of hype around the game even before the release of its full version.

We note in advance that after the test launches, we conducted campaigns not only at the pre-release stage, but also when the game was already available in stores.

Screenshot from the game page on Google Play

The course of the pre— registration campaign

Any advertising performance campaign begins with defining the portrait of the target audience. In our case, these were men aged 20 to 40 years. In addition, we focused on audiences of similar games and related interests: gamers, games, video games, mobile games, online games, fantasy games, MMORPG, Lineage, etc.

The main emphasis was placed on social networks, so myTarget and Target VK were chosen as traffic sources. myTarget used multi-format placements, video creatives targeting a wide audience, as well as gaming MMORPGs, RPG communities and communities of competing games. As for Target VK, only static banners were used there.

“In Zorka.Mobi we quite often work with the gaming vertical, so there were no special difficulties with attracting traffic,” says Dmitry Chudovsky, Marketing Director Zorka.Mobi . — The only moment that required attention and took up most of the time was working with creatives. From the advertiser, we received the source code of the game’s characters and the prepared text. Our team had to prepare not only static banners, but also cut video clips (gameplay, character creation process). The purchase was carried out only by an internal buying team Zorka.Mobi and there was enough work: we had to process a very large number of creatives. There were hundreds of them.”

One of the most important points when working with advertising materials is the timely evaluation of the results. Thanks to timely decisions on the replacement of a particular creative, it is possible to maintain the high efficiency of the entire campaign as a whole. In our case, the most qualitative result was brought by video cuts of gameplay, creatives with the process of creating characters and screenshots of the interface itself.

In parallel with performance campaigns, Influencer Marketing was also involved as one of the channels for attracting users.

Screenshot from the game page on Google Play

We analyzed our database of more than 300 thousand bloggers and selected 21 of them. When choosing, we focused on the statistics we collected by channels — the number of views, the level of engagement and the demographics of users.

The cost of bloggers’ services varied from $300 to $7,500, depending on the format (Full Review or integration) and channel statistics. A media plan was also drawn up in advance, where the expected results were described in detail: the minimum and maximum number of views, clicks and targeted actions. Having received the final approval of the media plan, we started launching the placements. Here are some examples:

• Video on the channel “FROST”. The format is Full Review.
• Video on the Orc Podcaster channel. Format — integration.

The most popular placement formats among opinion leaders when promoting gaming products are Full Review and integration.

Adhering to the accepted standards of confidentiality of information, we cannot disclose all performance indicators. However, we are pleased to note that we have successfully achieved the set results on the landing pages: more than 250 thousand pre-registrations.

Campaign progress — direct download

The first thing that has changed in performance campaigns since the game was released in stores is the payment model for the result. If earlier we estimated the cost of registering a user on the landing page, now it was important to understand what the price of each installation of the game was.

Fundamentally, the approaches when working with pre-registrations and installations did not differ. Traffic sources remained the same. The only difference was that new advertising banners were used, adapted specifically for loading the game.

Example of an advertising banner

As for Influencer campaigns, here we acted according to a proven strategy.

“We usually recommend our clients to use a mix of gaming and non—gaming bloggers to attract users to the game,” says Dmitry Khudoy, head of Influencer Marketing at Zorka.Mobi . — This allows us to reach a wider audience, maximizing the performance, as well as closing the client’s PR goals. Specifically in this case, we decided to leave the same pool of influencers (only non-gaming ones) for the second stage. In general, all the placements worked well both at the first and at the second stage.”

Internal development helps to monitor the effectiveness of placement with opinion leaders more carefully Zorka.Mobi — Zorka platform.Video. It aggregates information on the number of video views, clicks on links and application installations. In addition, the platform significantly facilitates the planning of advertising campaigns due to the ability to make forecasts on the minimum and maximum performance indicators of a particular channel.

On February 28 — the day of the official release of Talion — bloggers started publishing commercials. They were released systematically for nine days until March 8. Two or three weeks later, when the videos gained a peak number of views, the client was able to evaluate the results based on the reports we submitted.

It is worth noting that during the advertising campaign Talion occupied the first line in the RPG category in the Russian Google Play for 6-7 days.

Editor’s note: the analytical service DataMagic estimated Russian Talion downloads in the first weeks at about 170 thousand.

Conclusions

Using both performance- and influencer-promotion channels at the same time is quite a rarity in modern realities. And even less often, advertisers are ready to launch campaigns at the prerelease stage.

In this case, there was confirmation that the use of such a strategy brings results. On the one hand, Influencer Marketing, as a tool, helps to increase audience loyalty to the product and allows you to tell in detail about it. On the other hand, there is Performance Marketing, which no less accurately “hits” target users and works together with bloggers. Such synergy creates a virality effect, which subsequently has a positive effect on the results.