Beyond User Acquisition: How to Win with Influencer Marketing

Written by Marion Balinoff , an influencer marketing consultant with over a decade of experience, including six years in mobile gaming. She has worked with top gaming companies like Wooga, Supercell, Bytro and Huuuge Games, running performance-driven campaigns with budgets ranging from micro-influencers to MrBeast. Known for her data-driven approach, Marion specializes in making influencer marketing measurable, scalable, and profitable for user acquisition.

Gaming marketing is going through an interesting transformation. More marketers are looking to diversify their mixes with alternative channels and with good reason.   The cost of running an Influencer Marketing campaign can vary a lot from one app to another.

So how do you calculate how much you need to spend? If you’re looking to work towards performance goals like ROI and installs, keep 2 key things in mind -  Over 70% of traffic from influencer campaigns will be organic. Several things can affect prices - including target markets and audience profiles, platforms, your daily organic installs, and your install goals Since most of the traffic is organic, aim to generate at least a 25% uplift from your organic baseline so you can visibly see the impact.

  Examining this installs goal against typical industry standard Conversion Rates helps calculate the number of views needed to hit those figures. I typically conduct some scenario mapping to account for fluctuating CVRs- mapping out pessimistic, medium, and optimistic scenarios.    Your CPMs are where your target markets and audience profiles come into the equation - Male 18+ audiences, for instance, are cheaper to reach than 35+ females.

  Analysing Campaign Performance When it comes to the set-up, I always advise starting with YouTube for performance campaigns.   The bottom line is, that you want to ideally ensure you are, in fact, taking organic traffic into account, because tracked traffic only gives you half the picture.   When it comes to performance analysis, you need to look at this at a vertical level, not purely a creator level.

One key thing to note is that only about 30% of influencers you work with will be profitable. So looking at the percentage of videos reaching profitability per vertical, anything above 30% can be classed as a high-performing vertical, particularly if you’ve had at least 10 live videos and generated over 500K+ views.   For verticals that fail to reach performance benchmarks, you should analyse the CPM, CVR, and LTV further to identify if and where you can make improvements to get closer to your benchmarks.

A low LTV would likely indicate low-quality users, so you can stop investing in such verticals.   Tactics to Improve Influencer Campaign Performance On a very fundamental level, adding QR codes to YouTube integrations is a great way to maximise tracked conversions.   Gift codes and gift links are always worth testing.

  Contests and giveaways work similarly, providing an additional incentive and sense of urgency to drive tracked conversions.   This involves creating an in-game item based on an Influencer.   Naturally, this requires actual involvement from the product team, but is absolutely worth it.

  That said, the sign-off from the product team can be difficult. So start small - alter little things in existing assets - like colour, names, and so on.   But two key things to remember with custom assets?

First, avoid seasonal themes, as there could be unpredictable delays or setbacks.   Start out with a knowledge-gathering phase, working with smaller creators and testing wider verticals at scale. Once you’re confident in your insights and have narrowed your vertical focus somewhat, you can move on to optimising with mid-sized creators, testing iterations like gift codes.

Finally, when you’ve validated your top-performing verticals, you can work with bigger creators, leveraging tactics like custom assets.