Optimize your game’s monetization by selling direct
Draw in premium campaign budgets by finding the right brands for your game.
Audio app publishers, following their roots in AM/FM broadcasting, have always worked directly with brands to monetize their inventory. Now, following the loss of identifiers and the disappearance of third party data, many game publishers are asking the Big Question: is it time to take a leaf out of the audio book and go direct?
As you may know, the main benefit to selling your inventory to brands directly is the ability to win premium campaign budgets, by approaching brands to whom your audience is hyper-relevant. While a programmatic approach can allow games to start building their ad revenue with minimal resources, for established games with large aggregate audiences a direct sales approach can be a lucrative investment.
If you think it’s for you, here are 3 tips that will help you get a direct sales strategy right.
1. Get to Know your User by Building a First Party Data Strategy
The quality of your player insight sets the baseline for your ability to attract premium brand budgets. While you could use third party data, this data is limited in scale — and increasingly difficult to access. Building your first party data strategy will put your direct sales efforts on steroids.
Kick your first party data strategy off with low hanging fruit: the data you can gather from within your game. This may be systems data such as age verification (under/over 13) a, as well as richer insights gathered from rewarded surveys (e.g. “Answer a question to get 10 coins”).
On top of this, you could leverage mobile context (mobex): predictions of your users’ live context (eg. jogging, working, commuting) and their behavioral audiences (eg. shopaholics, vehicle users, night owls). This allows you to segment your players in an entirely new way. In fact, user behavior-based insights are typically more accurate than panel and/or self-identified insights, because they are based on real and current behaviors patterns. Additionally, since mobex is processed on the device, it is privacy-compliant by design — which makes it a great way to future-proof your first party data strategy.
2. Select the Right Brand for your Audience
Once you’ve developed a thorough understanding of who your users are, you’ll start assessing brand suitability. Getting this right is key, not only because the quality of the fit will define the size of the campaign budgets you’ll be able to draw in, but also because ads have a big impact on the quality of your players’ in-game experience. A strong in-game experience is crucial to your retention rates, since users have a low switching cost.
Assess brand fit by asking yourself questions such as:
- How similar is the brand’s audience to my game audience? (Reviewing which other apps the brand is publishing to can give you a good idea)
- Which product categories has my audience failed to connect with, in previous campaigns? Which categories performed well?
If you’re going the mobex route, you’ll have a leg-up here: knowing that your player base has, for example, a large number of Fitness Fanatics and Foodies, would suggest that brands such as Nike, New Balance and Uber Eats are a strong fit.
3. Find a Door Opener to help you Work with Brands
Once you have an idea of the type of brands you’re after, you’re ready to kick off your BD efforts. Before you start selling on your own, it’s advisable to hire a specialist (in-house or as a consultant) who can:
- Advise your internal team on which customer personas and media agencies you’ll want to target, and which metrics they’ll want to optimize for;
- Introduce you to the right POCs at relevant brands and agencies.
Make sure to look for someone with previous experience in selling to brands and media agencies, and confirm they have the connections you’re after.
Getting Started
If you’ve decided to make the leap into selling directly: congrats! We won’t say it’s easy, but you may find that investing in getting to know your users will open doors you didn’t know existed.
Here’s a few steps to help you get started:
- Confirm that a direct sales strategy fits with the wider company strategy
- Assess internal resources (depending on your execution, key resources may include product, BD/sales, creative, data management, and compliance)
- Select an ad server
- Develop your first party data (mobile context is private by design, but be sure to review the management of all other data against data protection regulations)
- Build your team
- Create your first case study
Get a Mobex (mobile context) Demo
Curious to see how mobile context could help you get your direct-sales strategy off the ground? Book a demo to find out!
