Online gaming platforms bet on content marketing to level up trust and engagement

The online gaming industry is booming like never before, breaking certain notions and stereotypes — that it’s ‘time-pass’ for people not interested in anything else, meant for loners and or only men.

According to a Deloitte India report, the online gaming industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40% to $2.8 billion by 2022, up from $1.1 billion in 2019. This is largely driven by smartphones and affordable data. Covid-19 has also pushed the growth further as users are spending more time on online gaming platforms as they stay at home and look for more entertainment options.

As the online gaming industry becomes mainstream, and more and more online games platforms spring up, the competition to grab the attention of consumers has become stiffer. The marketing teams of online gaming brands have to be on their toes all the time, figuring out ways and means to increase user base and engagement. And one very integral strategy they deploy is content marketing.

Manav Sethi

Explaining the importance of content marketing for online gaming brands with an example, Manav Sethi, Global CMO, Octro Inc, said, “The interest in chess exploded since Netflix's 'The Queen's Gambit' aired and if you look at Google trends, in the week when the show launched in the US, the UK and many other countries, worldwide Google searches for ‘chess’ increased significantly.”

So far, Octro has used content marketing to build trust, especially for its real money games. For any transactional platform where consumers are expected to share their money, trust becomes the mainstay.

The videos mentioned below led to a growth in paying users as high as 100% YoY:

Video 1:

Amin Rozani

Amin Rozani, Group CEO of Spartan Poker, said, “As an online gaming platform, we tend to leverage the power of content marketing to connect and build trust among the target audience so that they can confidently play and transact online. We keep attempting to curate different types of content that highlight what we offer and provide meaningful information via blog posts, content creators outreach, videos, infographics, webinars, to name a few.”

The brand spends 20% of its marketing budget on content marketing. Last year, Spartan Poker conceptualised a nine-minute video featuring TV celebrities to draw players for one of its flagship tournaments — the India Online Poker Championship (IOPC). The idea of the video was to bring out different personality traits of a poker player in a humorous manner and to amplify that, unlike other games, Poker involves permutation and combinations of Maths and other intellectual skills.

The video:

Sethi said the games at their heart are stories for players and can be integrated seamlessly in good content formats.

“Games are becoming persistent state metaverse and if you look at content platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Steam and Discord, the games have travelled as stories and content at scale as billions watch it, be it huge poker win or Roblox scale-up,” added Sethi. 

Krishnendu Guha

Krishnendu Guha, CMO Adda52.com, believes that content marketing is a great way to transform any business or even a person into a ‘brand’. He said, “By creating compelling social media posts, blogs, website content, etc., and setting up a target audience, gaming platforms can always encourage the players, both veterans and newbies, to at least explore what these industries have in store for them.”

He suggested that considering the demographics of most gaming aficionados, they are often easily reachable on social media platforms, which make it easier for gaming platforms to use content marketing to promote themselves. “It is all about grabbing the attention of as many viewers as we can in the shortest time span possible,” he added.

The brand spends between 20-40% of its marketing budget on content marketing, depending on the brand requirement at a given point in time. Just recently, Adda52 launched a campaign titled ‘Life Ko Ace Karo’, wherein it introduced some popular faces/celebrities to its audience and created the type of content that the majority of people could relate to. Adda52 created content with reality TV show Big Boss contestants to show that even celebrities find solace and fun in the game of poker.

Guha said, “We rigorously worked towards making content as interesting and relatable as possible using influencer marketing. The thing about content marketing is that it is not about the quantity of content, rather it is about the quality and relevance — ‘how much someone can relate to the content you create?’.”

While every brand aims to create unique content, it’s not a cakewalk to create something that stands out. The most essential checkbox that a brand must tick is to create content that is relevant and liked by their audience. These platforms are trying their hands on every possible content marketing format such as web series integration, content creators-led content, influencer marketing, music videos, snackable content, native advertising, etc.

Sethi said, “Today, it’s also easier to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns whether you are doing it for the brand, player acquisition, player safety, competitions, awareness or recall.”

Talking about the content marketing trends Spartan Poker follows, Rozani said, “Repurposing content across channels works best for our platform, it creates a seamless experience for people who visit social media, websites, gaming platforms and have a continuous, uninterrupted experience that we offer. Along with this, we conduct webinars, master-classes and use live videos, celebrity engagement, content creators-led content to educate the audience about the merits of gaming, which eventually makes it easier for users to connect with the brand.”

Online gaming platforms are increasingly associating with gaming content creators for influencer marketing.

Abhishek Aggarwal

Abhishek Aggarwal, Co-Founder and CEO, Trinity Gaming, a gaming talent management firm, said that the most relevant content marketing trends in the esports industry would definitely be the content creators-led content or influencer marketing, because the gaming content creators are not only termed as players now but as influencers or public figures who have a good say in the market. Being a talent management organisation, collaborating with good content creators can definitely benefit the creator, the organisation and the brand client. A famous trend that we have seen in the limelight so far can be Instagram trivia, which is an interactive content to know the audience better.

Recently, Adda52.com launched a campaign with two popular celebrities where it showed how poker helped them gain many significant life skills. Guha added, “Most people thought that if the celebrities could gain so much wisdom through the game, why don’t they try themselves?”

Very soon, you would also be leveraging influencers for content creation, responsible gaming and anti-fraud messaging.

Apart from the above, Adda52 partnered with TSP for a limited mini-series. Guha said, “Creating such content helps connect with our consumer through a medium that they enjoy and understand so well.”

The Adda52.com mini-series with The Screen Patti:

Total Gaming a.k.a Ajay (Ajjubhai) is a gaming influencer with 20.6 million subscribers on YouTube. He said, “Content creation in the esports and gaming industry plays a major role in connecting with audiences, brands, and the esports community at large. While many influencers choose to play games professionally, there is an emergence of gaming influencers who are looking forward to creating humorous, relatable, and engaging gaming content. Last year, we all saw a boom in the gaming content creator industry as many professional players chose to foray into content creation after the Pub-G ban. Content creation has also helped gamers increase their engagement rates and reach exponentially.”

Ujjwal Chaurasia

Another gaming content creator, Ujjwal Chaurasia a.k.a Techno Gamerz, with over 15 million YouTube subscribers, seconded Total Gaming and said that India has seen a huge influx of online gamers and gaming content creators since last year due to the pandemic. “This has only been increasing. Nearly 45% of Indians turned to mobile gaming just in 2020. We are seeing more and more gamers on YouTube creating content for the audiences they have acquired. With on-ground marketing taking a hit, brands started collaborating with influencers and content creators for advertising and promotions.”

Guha said marketers are now opting for more contemporary content formats such as memes, GIFs, infographics, and other visually appealing strategies, to grab people’s attention and cater to a short attention span.

While we have talked about the importance of content marketing for the online gaming industry and various content strategies they deploy, it’s important to understand the right way to do so.  There are certain aspects of content marketing that are universal to brands across categories, while a few are specific to the gaming world.

Rozani of Spartan Poker said that the gaming world has steadily evolved with a high degree of participation, and now gaming brands must recognise relevant platforms to run the content and strategically approach for valuable and responsible-driven content.

Aggarwal of Trinity Gaming suggested that the gaming industry being an interactive one provides a lot of scope for content marketing but one has to be really careful with strategies that balance both the essence of gaming and marketing. “Every content needs to be cleverly drafted as most of the gaming audiences are digitally aware. While drafting the content strategy, brand managers should focus on the demographic fan base of the influencer to yield more interactive results,” he added.

Sethi pointed out that any good game has a loyal base of players. He said that in most cases, these players are emotionally attached to these games. The burden is on the platform to ensure that they choose right message, medium and influencers in order to extract efficacious returns from these campaigns.

Guha of Adda52 emphasised the role of culture in content marketing and talked about the importance of inclusivity that can be brought out through content marketing. He said, “For years, gaming, especially online card games, were considered only for men. But how can we make people from every corner of the world feel included? Now, more and more women are encouraged to play online games and it is getting better with time. So, in the field of gaming, it is about creating a brand identity through content marketing that is able to include as many people and sections as possible.”

From a gaming content creator’s perspective, Total Gaming suggested that the very first thing that a gamer has to understand is how well can they fit in a particular brand in their content without looking pushy.

Techno Gamerz seconded that audiences are smart and will immediately show their dissent if a brand doesn’t suit the creators' personality or has no benefit for the audiences.

He added, “We as creators should be open and transparent about the partnership with our audiences. Placing a brand in your content and making it look organic is not going to work with audiences anymore. Audiences look for honesty within the content creators they follow.”

The content created by online gaming platforms is mostly funny and interactive so that the audience can take it as light-heartedly as possible.

Aggarwal concluded, “There are content creators who are famous because of their particular genre, and also deal with the content related to their genre. For example, CarryMinati is live, and Antaryami Gaming is famous because of its rage and comedy. Therefore their content marketing strategy would be revolving around their genre to connect with their fans and audiences. The gaming industry is so vast that it cannot be clubbed under one particular emotion and this is something that makes this industry so diversified yet united.”