ABOUT NAHIR: LinkedIn  | Etermax




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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🚀 Influencer marketing opens up more user discovery channels

🔍 The challenges of finding the right influencers

🤩 How disparate categories can have surprising results

🍬 The intersection of game goals and audience interest is the sweet spot

🎭 How to revisit established performance metrics in this new paradigm

🤝 Brand enhancement vs performance marketing

🤹 Campaigns are partially bets and partially certainties

KEY QUOTES

How to make the most of an influencer relationship

We send them a brief with our brand guidelines, the tracking link we use and the hashtag we need, but the most important thing for us is to take care of the influencers’ audience and that our message is as relevant as possible for them. Basically, we work together to decide what would be the best communication and the best method to to promote our titles. We try to provide them with some tools such as promotions or exclusive benefits for their followers only.

Consistency is key

Our main goal is to have at least a post a day, which will allow us to build a sustainable brand over time

How to evaluate success of influencer partnerships

I have engagement, we have number of views, cost per view, how long it takes from posting until it is exposed to a major audience. We have all that information which can be measured and we use it to go through iterations, keeping the elements that we believe work and changing others. It can be the music, the hashtags, the length of the video, and of course, the creative content.

The element of surprise humour is always successful

I remember Adam Payne, where the influencer answered rather a wrong question. And someone stuffed a tart in his face. And it was really funny, and it’s worked very well. Humor always works.

It is important to course correct based on validated data

For example, we believed that lifestyle would be a good category, because we understood that the audience could work with our product. But to our surprise, this turned out to be the worst campaign. And, of course, the lesson was really useful. But again, the learning process is most important here.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I am very excited to welcome Nahir Garcia to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. 

Nahir: Thank you so much for having me. 

Shamanth:  We spoke in the Spanish edition a couple of days ago. That was very fascinating and inspiring. So I definitely wanted to make sure we covered the same ground in English. So let’s jump right in. What inspired you to start testing in front of creators for the first time?

Nahir: I think something that helped us to make a decision was our need to scale and grow our user acquisition efforts. I had the chance to build several departments and acquisition teams in the gaming industry and other companies in the past. I believe that at a certain point, when we talk about products with huge marketing and acquisition strategies, most of these companies aim to scale. 

When I say scale, I’d say both in terms of the amount of users and their quality. I think one of the biggest challenges is making the acquisition grow. Keeping the user quality in a totally competitive environment with more players and higher CPMs every time. In Etermax, for example, we make an enormous investment on Facebook, Google and several ad networks. But we are still in need of defining other opportunities to invest and get more users to our games. 

And we know that influencer marketing has been growing fast in the last year. On the other hand, we already have a solid structure in terms of acquisition. We definitely saw a big opportunity here. We want to explore it, to learn and understand more about this new kind of acquisition.

Shamanth: And at the scale you guys operate, just relying on the traditional channels, Google, Facebook, and even ad networks is not enough. You need to find incremental scale. It absolutely makes sense for folks to explore a channel like influencer marketing at that point of time. 

So I would love to understand a little bit more about the process. How do you evaluate the affinity of an influencer with a game? And I’m also curious, because a lot of influencers have never worked with games. And so, if they’ve never worked with games — they’ve never even played the game — how do you evaluate them? Are there specific signals that you’re looking at? What are you looking at and saying, hey, let’s look at the signal to date, this person can be good for us. How do you evaluate these folks?

Nahir: I think the market is pretty young. And we have a lot to learn here. We usually struggle with fraud, you know, the sales of fake users. So, we have to be careful when we find a potential new influencer. We invest a lot of time analyzing the quality of his audience before moving forward with our first campaign. But basically, we have a process where the first thing we do is research to understand what kind of influencer this is, what categories could be more useful from them. We began to choose different types of Youtubers, Instagramers, and TikTokers. From January until now, we have tested more than 60 different influencers. And we aim to double that number by the end of the year. 

Actually it’s not necessary for them to have worked in the gaming industry. But when we go out to find a new influencer, we pay special attention to ensuring that his audience has an affinity to our games. To make a good influencer marketing strategy, it doesn’t matter how many followers you have, but how much ability you have to influence your audience. 

Shamanth: Right. And if they have a lot of followers, that can also be fake followers, so it can always be a challenge. And I’m sure you’ve talked about that as well. And you’ve talked about different types and categories of influencers. Can you give examples of these types of influencers or audiences that you’ve looked at? I’m asking this because, for games like yours, such as Trivia Crack, there can be a lot of different types of categories. You can have sports, trivia, entertainment, politics, everything. So how do you decide what categories to pick? And what are some examples? And what types of influences do you prioritize?

Nahir: Yeah, we are leaders in trivia games. And trivia is something that everyone enjoys. It can be associated with any topic. And that gives us some flexibility to adapt the content to different categories, while still showing a relevant message. We have done tests with many categories: anime, lifestyle, golf players, game channels. And, at this point, I think that the testing process is very important. It is still a kind of creative experimentation. In that process, we learn which categories work better. And, of course, it takes time to create and establish processes, to learn what the best categories for each game are. But I think we are definitely on that way.

Shamanth: And out of all the categories or types of influencers you have tested, are there categories that are surprising?

Nahir: Yeah, totally. For example, anime and comics are something we have recently discovered, you know, positive experiences. And we had not imagined that it could work so well.

Shamanth: Wow. I also hear that you said you recently discovered, which means you’re testing new categories. And you’re saying, hey, is this category working well, is this doing well or not? So you’re not going after one set of categories only, but you’re also running constant tests to find other new types of players, other types of influencers. And a lot of these influencers have very different styles. There are very different ways to make videos.  A cosplay influencer would just have a very different style compared to comics or somebody in sports. 

With all of these differences, are you giving them exact dialogues? Or are you telling them, do whatever you want? What is that process of communication? What does that guideline process look like?

Nahir:  We try not to give them scripts or dialogues to work with. At the end of the day, what we are looking for is a long term partnership, where both parties benefit from the campaigns that we make together. We work on teamwork between the creative ideas that the influencer may have and what we need as a company. I always prefer agreements where both parties win, where we win. This is an important concept for us because we really care about the users. We know that a loyal audience is very valuable in terms of marketing and business. And anyway,

we send them a brief with our brand guidelines, the tracking link we use and the hashtag we need, but the most important thing for us is to take care of the influencers’ audience and that our message is as relevant as possible for them. Basically, we work together to decide what would be the best communication and the best method to to promote our titles. We try to provide them with some tools such as promotions or exclusive benefits for their followers only.

I think having that possibility is key, and usually works very well. And it’s a super important point and definitely the most natural way to promote a product.

Shamanth: I like what you said about thinking about the influencers’ audience, you think about how to take care of the influencers’ audience.  How do we make it easy for them? And, how do we give them enough incentives by giving promotions or exclusive benefits? I would also imagine, if you had to give them promotions, you had to work with the gaming team, or the product managers, or producers to make that happen. It sounds like it’s quite a coordinated effort to make this happen. And also to tailor everything to the audience of the influencer. So also great in terms of the day to day logistics. 

How do you schedule the influencer posts? And how often are these posts running? How do you think about the scheduling?

Nahir: We have a process where we explore together, you know, what type of integration is most convenient. In which social network we want to run with these goals. The market guidelines are at a creative level, we define a calendar together. The day of launch usually depends on the influencer and the network, of course. And finally, we plan dates for those on our calendar, the rest is a matter of testing and analyzing results.

Our main goal is to have at least a post a day, which will allow us to build a sustainable brand over time

That will undoubtedly position us much better at the branding level. You know, let’s see next year.

Shamanth: One post a day, I imagine that’s a lot of coordination, and we just talked about what that involves. That’s something. That’s crazy. 

I imagine it’s not easy to track metrics for these influencers. It’s not the same as traditional channels. So what are some of the metrics that you’re looking at, in your dashboards, to evaluate success?

Nahir:  I come from the world of performance marketing. And as you know,here the game rules change a bit. And I confess that I still have a hard time not touching certain KPIs that I constantly looked at before. And it’s quite difficult when we don’t have tracking links, for example, Tiktok doesn’t have that possibility. 

But we can do it on YouTube. So basically, we have to think, where is the best mix in each case. We, of course, monitor the impact on organic sources, but we’re not completely blind. I mean,

I have engagement, we have number of views, cost per view, how long it takes from posting until it is exposed to a major audience. We have all that information which can be measured and we use it to go through iterations, keeping the elements that we believe work and changing others. It can be the music, the hashtags, the length of the video, and of course, the creative content.

I think within branding, we are discovering a good experimentation process, where we know where we stand and what our next move will be.

Shamanth:  Right. Like you said, it’s very, very different metrics. But you’re not completely flying blind. You’re also monitoring the organic impact. If your influencer goes live today, you kind of know somewhat directionally what’s happening. 

And returning to the day-to-day logistics of running these campaigns. How do you decide whether to work with an agency or go directly to an influencer? What’s better?

Nahir:  We work with both.  Some influencers work only with agencies and that is okay. While others can do direct deals. Obviously, when we work in direct contracts, the costs are reduced. And as a result, we have a better return on investment. But to be honest, we are normally open to work in both ways, as long as the goals are reasonable, of course.

Shamanth:  And I also imagine and understand that some influencers just work only through agencies, and that can also be a factor. 

And also, talking about logistics of working with these folks. I know influencers don’t work based on performance. If you tell them, “I will pay you for CPI?” They will say “No, no, thank you”. So how do you evaluate pricing? How do you justify pricing? 

Nahir:  Yeah, Influencer cost can vary based on your business goal, industry platforms, your targeting, posting frequency. And usually, they have a flat price. But I think having a good influencer marketing strategy takes time. And it’s mostly associated with branding actions. Definitely, this is not performance. That there’s justification for this cost is the same as any branding campaign can have. I think it’s essential to combine both strategies, branding and performance. And if you can create a strong brand support by actions that bring you results, probably your branding strategies will enhance the results you can have in your performance campaigns. Performance for us as a data driven company is a huge factor in our growth. We are very performance focused, but we are not going to sustain and keep the users around if we don’t have a good brand. 

Shamanth:  Yeah, certainly. And are there examples of campaigns that you can think of that were very successful?

Nahir:  In general, the categories that work better in terms of acquisition are entertainment and science. In the case of influencers, we had had good results with anime and comics, which are actually two categories inside entertainment. But it depends on the creativity of the influencer, for example,

I remember Adam Payne, where the influencer answered rather a wrong question. And someone stuffed a tart in his face. And it was really funny, and it’s worked very well. Humor always works. 

Shamanth:  That  happens, in Trivia Crack. If you get the wrong answer. Somebody will stuffed a tart in your face. Hopefully, that does not happen in the real app. 

Nahir:  No, no. That does not happen. 

Shamanth: Are there examples of campaigns that you expected that would be very successful, but it did not work out? 

Nahir:  Yeah, many, we’ve had many. And these are the most interesting. The ones that teach you what you should not do. All campaigns are partly a bet, partly a certainty.

For example, we believed that lifestyle would be a good category, because we understood that the audience could work with our product. But to our surprise, this turned out to be the worst campaign. And, of course, the lesson was really useful. But again, the learning process is most important here.

We always try to understand and document this learning so as not to repeat the same mistakes and to make better decisions in the future. But, if you are not making any mistakes, you are not innovating and probably you are not learning anything.

Shamanth:  I like how you say that. 

Earlier you were talking about how you’re discovering new categories, right. And if you’re discovering, you have to test. Some of those are not going to work. You’re still documenting the learnings and trying to understand the learnings. So, it sounds like one of the goals is also learning about the audience. Obviously, performance is good. Performance is great. It’s always helpful. But it sounds like one big goal is just learning about the crowd. You know, how people are reacting, how influencers are reacting to the audience, to the campaigns. 

Nahir, this was very in depth. This is certainly instructive. I learned a lot. Much like you, I’ve worked so much in performance marketing. And with influencers, one of the things that scares people is that it’s not clearly as measurable, it’s not as clear. So thank you for breaking this down for us. Thank you for breaking down the process of how all of this works.

Nahir:  Yes, thank you too Shamanth, it was a pleasure. 

Shamanth:  This is probably a good place for us to wrap. But before we do that, can you tell people how they can find out more about your work and everything that you do? 

Nahir:  Yeah, probably in Google. Find me on LinkedIn, too. 

Shamanth: Nahir, thank you so much for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show for the second time. We are excited to put this out very soon. Thank you so much.

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