Andy Tsen, CEO and Co-founder at Ramen.
Every game developer needs to know how to bootstrap an influencer campaign for their project. While my company, Ramen, develops tools and platforms to empower game creation, we also make games ourselves. One key part of the launch of our chart-topping game, Zenith: Nexus, was our influencer strategy.
We found that it’s possible to run an influencer campaign with little to no budget and scale it into millions of views about your product. All of the strategies we used to build this program have been battle-tested, and I’m happy to share them with you.
Here’s an example of a video that helped propel Zenith to the top charts.
Playing The Influencer Game
Realize that spinning up an influencer program takes time. It may be a month before you even run your first campaign, so start early.
A smart friend of mine once said to think of each influencer as an entrepreneur running a business. They need to consider what content will hit with their customers, i.e., their audience.
With this in mind, here’s how we constructed our sales funnel:
Discovery: First, find influencers that will work with your brand. Understand the influencer and consume their content to see if it overlaps with your game’s audience. Start with micro/nano influencers first, as they’re easier to reach, more likely to be passionate about your product, and offer better bang for your buck.
Cold outreach: Reach out to applicable influencers to see if they’re interested. Make sure the outreach is tailored to a piece of content you enjoyed, and tie it back to your product. Keep in mind that different influencers respond on different channels—if they are not responsive on one channel, try another one: Discord, Email, X, LinkedIn, etc.
The sales pitch: Sell them on your product, and why their viewers would find it engaging. Create a creator brief with assets and the things you want to call out most. Give them as much creativity and agency as possible.
In the first couple of videos you do, do not offer money or sponsorship. Your carrot is offering early access to a cool product the influencer might enjoy using. Pre-release builds provide content that others don’t have access to while giving the influencer’s community an early look. This is ideally a win-win scenario that works for both parties—a special free trial that gives value to the influencer while driving engagement for you. Try to get at least four or five videos up this way.
It’s important that your hook and product is interesting enough and gives enough value that the influencer would genuinely use it themselves. All of our best performing videos were never sponsored with cash. This is because people can smell out when an influencer doesn’t really care about the product—authenticity is king.
Sponsorship can come later, after you trust the influencer’s taste and content. This is when you can start to discuss the idea of a partnership. Speaking of …
Partnership Guidelines
When you’re ready for a partnership, here’s how we look to structure the contract:
• Base the payment on CPM, the amount you want to pay for 1,000 impressions, based on average views per video.
• Be wary of people that buy views or subscribers. Look for engagement metrics like comments, views per video and subscribers. All are important but all can be gamed, so ultimately you want to work with people you can trust.
• Ask for distribution rights so you can cut the footage and use it. Frame it as a way to help boost the influencers’ reach as well.
• Make sure you ask for the content to be posted for at least X days, if not more (some influencers will take the video off).
• Ask for review rights—you get to decide whether the video gets posted.
• Payment at the end, always.
Final Thoughts
Realize that while you just need one video to hit, most videos will not perform well. Running an influencer campaign is really a roll of the dice, even with the best strategy. Boost your chances by promoting a video across your socials once a video is live. Actively monitor comments and make sure you’re answering them. Active engagement helps both the algorithm and trust in your brand.
Also remember that you can get a second run for content by taking videos and clipping them into shorts for shortform video. This yields more engagement and is a critical part of the flow now. You can do this with AI, or you can hire a clipper to do it. AI can cover experiments but a professional clipper will typically be able to do this better in our experience.
Throughout the process, look at what works and what doesn’t, what landed and what didn’t, and use that for your next round of reach-outs. The more you interact with influencers, the better you’ll get at it. Good luck!
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
