"The main challenge is not the financial budget": Social Quantum on the promotion of games

Alexander Bezobrazov, Marketing Director of Social Quantum, spoke at the Epic Growth Conference about marketing problems, the reasons for the increase in staff and what specialists are needed to promote games today. We offer an edited transcript of the material.

The material was published with the support of Mobio, one of the organizers of the event.

Why are marketers being hunted?

Before I got into game dev, I worked for one of the largest hosting providers in Russia. When I came to game dev, the number of digits in my budget remained the same – 7-8, depending on whether we measure a month or a year. Only the icon in front of the numbers has changed: there were rubles, there were dollars. Six months ago, I was transferred from a company that is now in the Top 10 in the world by revenue among all mobile game developers to Social Quantum.

Why do companies hunt for marketing directors? When I was hunted, I was hunted for a specific task – to increase revenue X times with the release of new games, where a specific X is confidential information. It was interesting to me because I knew that in the gaming industry, if the game is good, you can really scale the company’s revenue several times.

How was Social Quantum marketing arranged?

When you come to any new company, the first thing you look at is whether you have enough resources (human, financial, time) to realize your goal.

What did I see when I came to Social Quantum? I saw several divisions that covered one big marketing function. By the way, my personal belief is that marketing is not a division, it is a function that covers the entire company [meaning “Theory P” – the concept according to which marketing planning should be deployed in a coordinate system divided into four parts: product, price, promotion and place, — approx.editorial offices].

In any product companies, the chief development officer is responsible for the product coordinate. In the case of a service company, this is a product manager, in gaming companies, this position is most often called a “producer”. The producer of the game determines what and how will be in the game.

In addition to the producer, Social Quantum had a small marketing department, 4-5 people: an analyst, a designer and a couple of people who were engaged in attracting traffic. There was also a fairly large department that drew all the art for games. And, of course, there were those who supported users.

In addition, there were “zones” in which work was not carried out.. The brand was not covered, any relationships with key business partners were not covered. But most importantly, the interaction between all these functions was specific.

For example, one day I came to the producer of a game, I ask: “What would you like to improve in your interaction with marketing?”. He says: “You know, I basically don’t know what marketing is doing here.”

Starting from the problems, I took on changes in the company’s marketing processes.

How did we come up with the idea to transfer the development of creatives to the art department?

Marketing in a gaming company has several functions. It is important to understand at what level you want to perform each of them. This often reflects both your professional level and the level of the company.

For example, if you are a so-called indie developer, then, as a rule, you outsource all the graphics, everything that you drew for the game, everything that you launched into advertising is ordered from a freelancer or from a web studio.

When it comes to a normal company, of course, you already hire a designer, but this designer is a jack of all trades who does absolutely everything you want.

When you start scaling a gaming company, you are faced with the fact that you are not satisfied with the quality of work of such a designer, one designer you simply can not cope with the volumes.

Our games are localized into 11 different languages. From quite understandable ones, like English and Russian, to translation into traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. And you need creatives to advertise in 11 languages.

We work with several dozen traffic sources, each of them has its own size. This means that you no longer need 11 sets of creatives, but multiply these 11 by the number of your traffic sources. In addition to banners and videos, there are more complex creatives: playable ads, playable endcard, interactive video and others.

So it turns out that there are not a couple of banners in the pack that should be surrendered, but several hundred pieces of content. And such packs need to be prepared at least 2-3 times a month, because creatives burn out quickly. Videos lose their effectiveness in a month, banners in even less time.

For this reason, we decided to transfer the tasks of creating creatives to the art department.

Why did we undertake to increase the number of UA managers?

Next, we had to take on attracting users. In the basic version, the game producer buys some traffic on Facebook himself. But if we are talking about a normal company, then there are usually 2-3 marketers who buy traffic from different sources, somehow manage partners, a producer climbs in a little.So it was with us.

Usually, in the case of a small number of marketers, Facebook is responsible for 50-60% of game traffic, the rest comes from specific game sources.

In that case, if you want to move to a higher level, you will have to scale the number of traffic sources. Asia has its own advertising networks with its own advertising inventory, and you will not be able to properly promote your mobile games in Asia if you do not have access to this inventory. Europe also has its own inventory, there are specific advertising networks whose specialization is games.

A small example. Everyone knows the Angry Birds toy. The manufacturer is the Finnish company Rovio. They have more than 100 traffic sources. Now see what options you have:

• you can work with each traffic source through an agency;
• you can put 10 traffic sources on each manager;
• you can work individually with each traffic source.

These are different approaches that determine the quality of your work with traffic sources and the volume of new users that you will attract. In our case, it is enough just to make some kind of conditional empirical formula. By understanding what budget you need to achieve and what budget UA managers can manage on specific channels, you can calculate how much you need them.

I have three levels of UA manager – junior, middle and senior. For me, a junior who does not know how to effectively manage a budget of $100 thousand per month is a person whom I have no right to keep in my company. He takes the place of a stronger person who scales the business better.

So we came to the conclusion that we need a dozen and a half UA managers and this is a big problem for us. Now we have scored only half.

The path in analytics from Producer to Data Scientist

When the toy is small, when the company is small, everything is handled by a producer or product manager. This person monitors all metrics. At some point, he hires a product analyst. The producer looks at metrics at a higher level, and the analyst “digs” into the details using Excel, basic Python or R.

But in general, in the gaming industry, marketing without the game itself, in which users naturally also do something, generates so much data that it is banal to work with them at the “A! It will do!”. Here you need to constantly analyze and see what happens. This requires several full-fledged marketing analysts. Already at this moment Excel smoothly goes somewhere into the wonderful past and Python comes.

At the 80th level, you no longer have analysts, but data scientists who speak some kind of bird language – TensorFlow, PyTorch, and so on. They call a bunch of libraries that are already completely incomprehensible to you. They relate to machine learning, which allows, according to data scientists, to do wonders from predicting LTV to almost automating advertising.

The importance of working with ASO

When we talk about any mobile app, its landing page is the app store. At the most basic level, all game manufacturers do two things: they either fulfill the requirements of this store, or follow generally accepted practices.

Do you need separate screenshots for tablets and phones? It’s OK to take different screenshots for devices with different screen sizes.Do you have the game localized into different languages? It would be logical to do the localization of the page as well.

But if you want to grow further, you must multiply the efficiency of working with landing pages.

Imagine if we increase the conversion rate of a page in the app store by 10%, then this will lead to an increase in all advertising traffic without changing the advertising budget. This way we can reduce the installation cost.

This is done with the help of constant experiments with the landing page. A person with a set of experiments is already that more professional level, without which we cannot go further. We can’t just ask the producer to change something without experimenting.

When you have an application only for Russia, you can probably ask one marketer to do it. When you have an application open to all 200+ countries in the world and at least 20 of them are large markets, you want to do experiments in each of them, because the same content has different effectiveness in different countries.

A funny little example. One of the most popular and commercially successful game genres is Match-3. Those simple games where you put three things in a row, and they are removed. In the West, the most attractive for users are those Match-3, in which some apples, rubies, and so on act as chips. In Asia, animal faces work much better, some cute faces.

That is, you understand that for a landing page in different regions there should be different graphics, different screenshots, different descriptions.

Insufficient and sufficient level of work with SMM

At the basic level, you can not run social networks at all. But then it turns out that people come there, make reviews about the game, they are taken into account in Google Play indexing, because it takes into account big Google.

The normal option is to hire an agency that fills these networks with regular content to create the appearance that the toy is alive. But this is not the level that is sufficient from my point of view.

For example, at Social Quantum we want to see a community of players from different countries. This means that you need to bring support specialists there and tell them how to work with people outside of tickets. This means that there needs a person who understands what to do at all. This is not just an SMM provider working for one market.

Problems on the way to a bright future

From all of the above (as well as from the need to build relationships with app stores, the need for advertising monetization, brand building and relationships with advertising networks) I proceeded by building new marketing processes.

When you want to go from the beginner stage to the normal business stage in some area, you or those who are at the beginner stage do not have enough knowledge. You have to teach, you have to struggle with a lack of knowledge, if you are a beginner yourself, then you have to get this knowledge. But when you are at a normal level, and we were at quite a good, normal level in many things, you have to overcome resistance, because everyone says: “And everything is working well for us, why should we change something?”. This is exactly the case when, unfortunately, I had to part with some of the marketing staff, because they were doing well at the level of 2013-2014. But mobile advertising is an area that changes literally in seconds.

Instead of a conclusion

Today we have:

• a team of UA managers in Moscow;
• a team of UA managers in St. Petersburg;
• automation team;
• the staff of analysts inside the products, which smoothly goes to various automated systems with machine learning;
• several dozen people in St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, engaged in creatives.

If we talk about marketers, then their staff has grown to a dozen people and we want to double again, because we understand that this will give us a multiple increase in relation to the number of traffic sources that we will launch.

The main challenge is not the financial budget. We understand that we have an almost unlimited budget. We understand that we have already more or less configured our automation tools in order for employees to work efficiently. The main thing we lack is talent. It is very difficult to find seniors on the market today.