By The Numbers: Launching Astralis

Originally posted on phedemark.me in February 2016. Some links might not work due to me changing the website from Ghost to WP.

So… as I was alluding to in this post from December 31st, I got the opportunity to follow my heart and work in Esport in 2016. Back then I couldn’t announce the new name, but now it’s not a secret anymore. So yes, I’m working with Astralis.

Now the launch of Astralis has obviously influenced my blogging, or lack thereof, and my idea of posting 1–2 times a week died in flames during January. What is dead may never die though, and since we’re now in February, I figured I could pick the blog up again.

And what better topic to discuss than our social media launch of Astralis?

Launching Astralis — The Idea

I’m a firm believer that content is king and interaction is queen. None of the things work splendidly alone, but together they can rule your (brand’s) kingdom. So as we were launching Astralis, we did so around three general assumptions:

• We had a newsworthy announcement, that people would gobble up every last piece of information about
• We could limit the amount of content and information so we were the ones to break important stories
• The community and the potential fans were eager to interact with us

Since we already had a brilliant story, and a lot of hype building up about who Team Questionmark would join, we were pretty certain that people would be hungry for information. The fact that only twenty or so people knew the entire story, and all of the ones in contact with our target audience were contracted by our company, made us pretty sure we could control the information flow. And gaining roughly 4,000 Twitter followers from January 1st to January 10th told us that we indeed had the community eager to talk to us.

Devising a strategy

The strategy of controlling content only works if you’re the only source it can come from, and if you don’t piss off your entire target audience at the same time. Countless brands have tried this approach, and ended up alienating possible customers or fans, because they sat on information for too long. With that in mind, we devised a quick three day strategy to execute fast and own the news rotation every day.

To prime our launch we agreed to share some of the details of the organization with a highly respected Esports journalist who then got the exclusive a day ahead of our launch. Thus our launch week looked like this:

• Day 0 — Breaking the news that the players formed their own organisation and became co-owners
• Day 1(morning) — Announcing the name and the organization’s backers
• Day 1 (afternoon) — First interview, includes salary information
• Day 1 (evening) — AMA with the players on the biggest CS:GO subreddit
• Day 2 — Interview with the founders, more unique information about the players and their salaries
• Day 3 — Announcing the uniform and some caricature drawings from a well known community member

Following Day 3, we actually headed right into our first tournament under the Astralis name, which gave the announcement frenzy a natural end. This had been part of our considerations, that we needed to get our content out there, before the eyeballs averted to something else.

The results

The overall goal with this sort of launch, is to blast your message out as far as possible, but also engage as many fans as possible in order to create an emotional bond.

The former is easier to measure than the latter, but I think we did pretty good in both respects.

We launched on January 19th and I did a quick recap on January 25th to tally the launch. This is how it went.

• +13,300 Twitter followers
• +8,600 Facebook followers
• +1,600 Instagram followers
• +665 YouTube subs (we hadn’t posted anything)
• 1,600,000 accumulated Twitter impressions
• 200,000 unique users reached on Facebook
• 128,000 post clicks on Facebook
• +15,000 action engagements (like, share, rt, comment, reply) across all platforms

What is even more important for us, 75% of the traffic to our website came from Reddit in the first week. That shows not only that /r/GlobalOffensive is a huge traffic driver, but it also tells me that we managed to meaningfully engage the community. We got 1000+ replies to our AMA, managed to hit the frontpage of the GlobalOffensive subreddit 5 or 6 times in three days and we received tons of messages from people, telling us that they really liked how open and up front we were in our communication.

The takeaways

I have all too often seen executives be completely confused, when I tell them that making sure you respond to 90% of the people that message you, can be one of the strongest parts of a marketing campaign. In this particular case, I can’t stress enough how much time we spent on responding to people — or how valuable it has proven to be.

On day 1 of our launch, we sent out 90 tweets (and replies) and hit over 1.2 million Twitter impressions. On those 90 tweets, we got 500 replies, 1,000 retweets, 4,200 likes and 20,000 url clicks. Now that’s obviously not normal, but it goes to show that investing in actual interaction is worth it. From quickly looking over the numbers, 66% of the engagement came on our public tweets and upwards of 33% came on the replies to people.

It is also interesting to see how big a traffic hub Reddit is. The numbers are obviously skewed because we hadn’t built out our social spaces before the announcement, but to give you an idea of the impact, the highest referral site which wasn’t Reddit or a social media outlet, sat on less than 8% of the traffic to our site (HLTV.org). We won’t create content specifically for Reddit, but it’s never a bad idea to make it easy for traffic aggregators like Reddit, to pick up the stories you print. That’s especially true if you have a commanding position in a niche, where you know your stories will be picked up. Making sure that your articles have an eye-catching headline and a good thumbnail goes a long way — but hey, that’s probably universal advice.