Monetizing eSports Audience via Segmenting Psychological Values
Kacey Shap, PhD
Overview
A multi-channel gaming content company had over 2 billion monthly views on Youtube but struggled with understanding its esports game-watching audience. The result was a lack of strategy between Marketing, Sales, and Talent. Outcome: moral segmentation analysis enable the company to produce compelling stories with clear alignment, messaging, and branding, resulting in multi-million ($) in partnership deals with Automotive, Computer, and Entertainment companies.
Challenges.
The gaming company was siloed due to a lack of understanding of its eSport game-watching audience. Marketing: To better understand game watchers’ needs and interests for messaging. Sales: To leverage insights to existing multi-channel network for ads monetization and branding. Talent: To identify top talents, audience segmentation, and segment overlap for creatives. Needed data-driven approach.
Research Solution.
Connected with Marketing, Sales, and Talent teams to identify needs and build KPIs. Analyzed social media convos relating to online game watchers (in-network vs. out-of-network). The results of the qualitative analysis showed key differences in how people consumed gaming content. Conducted semi-supervised machine learning that calculated clusters (centroids), and ID similarities, and categorized them into groups. Used over 35 different factors (ordinal + interval data).
Insights.
To create our genre segmentation, and determine each genre’s psychological motives for game playing and watching, statistical modeling (known as K-Cluster Analysis) was employed to categorize and sorted data into like groups by score. In other words, our algorithm identified similarities within each answer and categorized them into groups. Insights enabled the company to shift its marketing strategy from creator-focused to audience-focused (what they want, how to target, and how to speak).
Results.
The psychological segmentation of the company’s game-watching audience allowed them to shift their marketing strategy from creator-focused to audience-focused. This allowed them to understand better what the audience wanted, how to target them, and how to speak to them in a way that resonated. The result was a clear alignment of messaging and branding, which led to multi-million dollar partnership deals with Automotive, Computer, and Entertainment companies. This shift in strategy and focus has proven to be a major success for the company and has opened up many new opportunities for growth.
Impact.
Boosted sales and ad revenue by millions of dollars by identifying insights in game-watching segments and by pioneering a shift from creator-focused marketing strategy to audience-focused.
