Top Ways to Promote on Streaming Platforms Like Twitch
Streaming was invented for gamers, but it keeps evolving. It's easy to infer this if you look at the Chat tab on Twitch—it rarely has less than 100,000 viewers. The streaming market is set to reach $95.88 and continues to grow.
Marketers cannot ignore such a big piece of pie and use Twitch as one of the platforms to promote their videos. Let's talk about the benefits of this approach and the possibilities for advertising your brand.
What is Live Streaming and Why Marketers Should Know About It?
Ignoring sites with huge traffic and loyal audiences is a bad idea. Now, we will show what statistics reports about the popularity of Twitch. If we look at the data, it shows 144 million views per day and 32 million visitors over the same period. According to the Alexa ranking, this is the 38th site in the world, and an excellent base for sales as users are loyal to ads.
For viewers, the statement “a streamer cannot survive without advertising” is an obvious reality. If financial pyramids or various fraudulent schemes are not promoted in the broadcast, viewers of small streamers will perceive the brand as the savior of their idol. Plus, the audience is loyal too. Twitch users are mostly male (65%) and are in the paying age from 18 to 34 years old.
Ways to Promote on Streams
- Direct Advertising
This is the path for market giants. Coca Cola and others have created their channels and thoughts through complex marketing activities, usually gamified. For example, Old Spice launched a live quest where viewers could control the actions of a real person in the forest. Naturally, there were some curiosities: for example, the chat made the hero taste the stone. As a result, Old Spice Nature Adventure gathered 2.65 million viewers, while 703,000 people watched the broadcast at the same time. Moreover, the action was carried out already in 2015.
Without large financial investments, such a path does not make sense: you need extensive promotions and money for the implementation of the campaign. At the same time, there is a possibility to get promoted with small financial investment. You can buy Twitch views and get promoted naturally by the algorithm. So, the algorithm is working in a very common way; if you are getting thousands of viewers at once, it means that you’ve something interesting and you can be promoted naturally on the platform. That’s why it’s important to buy Twitch views and get promoted naturally.
- Advertising Through Streamers
This is the easiest and most popular way to promote your products. AdBlock cannot catch your banner directly in the video and will not block the brand story on the air. There are several options for cooperation, and we do not recommend limiting yourself to one streamer and one advertising method. Banner in the channel description—any enticing activity or a beautiful picture will do. Add a brand to the broadcast such as your logo, banner, QR code, and terms of the promotion. The choice is wide enough.
Product mentions in the chat and direct links - For this, the streamer sets up a bot that periodically spams advertising messages in the chat.
Product mentions during the stream - The streamer can read your text or tell about their own experience of use. What will be more native and more successful is up to you.
Separate product streams - Sponsored streams are usually hosted by game developers. You "rent" a streamer from its main activity and ask to broadcast on your product, for money, of course. You can scale up and ask the game streamer to conduct a cooking stream—let him cook something with your kitchen appliances, for example.
The brand in the title of the broadcast - Pay for the hours of placement and wait for the result. Since the links in the titles are not clickable, it is difficult to track performance through metrics.
Prize drawing - Give the streamer gifts for the competition and negotiate the conditions. The more interesting the mechanics, the more reliable the effect will be.
Product placement - A locker with an energy drink behind the streamer's back, a mouse, or keyboard, Funko toys on the shelf, etc. There are many options.
How to Find Yourself a Streamer
Make sure the audience matches. It's not just games that are streamed on Twitch. There are tabs with creativity, communication, music, and educational broadcasts. Thus, it is not necessary to produce and sell something related to games in order to advertise on the site. For example, an online electronics store can promote graphic tablets in the "Art" tab.
Check streamer activity and adequacy. Follow the regularity of broadcasts, chats, and behavior for a week or two. Not everyone is suitable to avoid swearing and unbridled persons (there are enough of them).
Check audience activity. Make sure that the stream includes real people, and not bots, and the main feature is an active chat. If the people on the broadcast are not toxic yet, it's a godsend.
Conclusion
Streamers are promising distributors of your ads. This is confirmed by the constantly growing market and multi-million dollar contracts with famous characters in this industry. For example, Tyler Ninja Blevins made $1 million simply by playing Apex Legends, a competitor to his main game, Fortnite.
The main factor you need to consider is that streamers are not your employees: they will not perform complex KPIs and, in rare cases, agree to work for a percentage of ad revenue. Come with a clear and well-developed technical specification, excluding misunderstandings.
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