Video Game Marketing Strategies in Russia You Can Use Right Now

According to Newzoo, as of year-end 2019, Russia took the 13th place in the world game industry revenue rating. The revenue hit $2 billion in 2019, adding more than 15% growth in comparison with 2018.

According to Yandex.Checkout, a Russian payment service provider, from 2014 to 2018, the overall revenues grew by 20%-to-25% each year.

The lockdown period has also triggered growth of Russian gamers’ activities: they turned out to spend 1.5 more time in games, as well as to spend more money on games. According to Yandex.Money, this April the turnover of payments for purchasing in-game content has been 23% more than in March and 22% more for the very games. The number of in-game purchases has increased by 17% for the same period, while the average purchase amount has grown by 5% only.

However, both game publishers and video game marketing specialists understand that this growth is temporary, and after the lockdown is cancelled, one will have to go to great lengths to keep gamers’ interest at the same level.

In our article, we will study out online game marketing tools that you can use in your strategy even today for promotion in the Russian market to boost the number of game installs/downloads and, further on, to stimulate in-game purchases.

Online game marketing through blogging

A blog on your website or on a separate platform is a great games marketing tool that will work in the long-term run. New features, walkthroughs for newbies, specifics of difficult level playthrough or character upgrade—if your blog covers at least 50% of main user requests related to your game, you will accomplish several important video game marketing and internal objectives at once:

• Significant reduction of FAQ addressed to the support team so, consequently, you will be able to switch them to the solution of more important tasks.
• If you add an option to comment articles, you will get a great channel of communication with users.
• Making your company/game visible for mass media.
• If you set up a subscription, you will get an opportunity to promptly inform users about your news and releases.

VK and Instagram game marketing

Social media can be used for game promotion as one of the content strategy channels and a tool of direct video games advertising promotion. We provided insight into content for gamers in our article Russian Gamers Approve: What Should Game Developers Write about in Social Media?

When talking about targeted game advertisements, we recommend setting them up in several steps in various social media. When we mean Russian-speaking gamers, we should definitely include VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, and Instagram into our testing period.

At the initial (testing) stage, we need to define the most conversional social media and redistribute our video game marketing core budget to these very channels.

Later on, we need to define initial audience of high quality (analyzing the conversion traffic) and cover new audience on top of that:

• Look-alike those who went to a game install/download page;
• Look-alike those who installed the game;
• Look-alike those who made in-game purchases;
• Look-alike those who interacted with the page within the last 180 days.

The next step is focusing on the most active users and ads optimization for game events. You need to raise engagement of existing users all the time, create audience levels by engagement, set up a target price, and buy out the best ones.

Finally, it is important to keep the most valuable gamers and incline them to purchases. Make new creatives (tell about novelties, demonstrate in-game goods, show game levels). The goal is to sell more to active ones and to make buyers valuable users.

Game influencer marketing

One of the most effective promotion channels in the modern videogame world is famous or just well-known streamers.

When cooperating with game influencers, it is important to understand that streamers have their audience, which they value and for which they want to prepare interesting content of good quality and, consequently, share interesting games.

That is why it is important to put your best foot forward at once and tell what features in your game will grab the audience. For example, you can provide some unique in-game items or leveled characters for the stream.

A great way to collaborate with streamers can be conduction of a tournament if your game allows for such events. In this case, we told how we increased the coverage of a Korean game in the Russian market through a tournament alike.

Where do you look for Russian streamers? Twitch is popular in Russia; therefore, we should cater to streamers on this platform. As for the most popular Russian-speaking streamers for your video game advertisements, you will find them in our article 2020 Top List of Best Russian Streamers.

Games marketing on YouTube

If you need to cover a wide audience of users as fast as possible, YouTube will be one of the most effective channels in Russia. Why YouTube? Firstly, game content is one of the most popular categories on YouTube. There are more than 20 million video tutorials for gamers downloaded there, and if you search by ‘LOL’ keyword, you will find not funny videos related to the ‘laugh out loud’ expression, but records of League of Legends competitions (based on the study by Newzoo analytics company). Secondly, YouTube is an excellent tool to engage users.

What is more, there can be both direct and native ads. If you can afford that, we recommend using this channel as much as you can.

As a matter of our experience in video game marketing, YouTube proved to be a highly efficient channel that is able to show very good indicators in all basic metrics and ensure decent conversion.

Our article Top 20 YouTube gaming bloggers from Russia will help you find the most popular Russian-speaking video bloggers to promote your game.

Video Game marketing in Russia – what else?

In this article, we looked through only several video game advertising techniques and channels. In our White Paper Guide to Online Games Promotion in the Russian Market, you will find a complete list of founts of inspiration and tools to attract Russian gamers.

If you have not decided yet on which strategy to choose to promote your video game in the Russian market, RMAA Games team will help you elaborate a plan to conquer Russian gamers.

Learn more about our services related to video game advertisements and marketing.

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