As soon as people hear ‘economic downturn’, they automatically panic. We get it, but it’s time to stand back, take a breath and understand how you can take advantage of it.
Organizations routinely slash marketing budgets during difficult times but that’s a short-term solution for a long-term problem. Data from Kantar shows that it can take 3-5 years to recover from market share losses as a result of cutting budget. It also shows that by increasing spend by 20%, brands gained 0.9% market share during recessionary times.
These results show that cutting back your budget isn’t the solution and one way you can be spending it is via gaming sponsorships. So let’s look into what they are and what they can achieve.
Using Twitch as an example, a Twitch sponsorship is the partnership between a Twitch content creator and a brand, which sees the streamer promote their products within their content. This can be via affiliate links, product mentions, displaying logos or product giveaways.
The world we live in is saturated with ads. The landscape is noisy and the attention span of your audience will have been negatively impacted because of this. This means that today, brands need to be creating meaningful experiences with their consumers - which is achieved in-game marketing. In 2023, according to Statista, the in-game advertising market is projected to reach $32.51bn.
As well as this, so far in 2023, there are 3.1 billion active gamers worldwide with this number expected to hit 3.3 billion by 2024 with 38% of them being made up of 18-34 year olds [source: Exploding Topics]. According to TwitchTracker, so far in 2023, 436 billion minutes of gaming has been watched - which is a lot of time worth of sponsorship opportunities!
Even if you’ve never tried the gaming market before, maybe now is the time. 2023 is the year we will see more brands, who aren’t traditionally associated with gaming, enter the space. The gaming audience is worldwide, passionate and engaged, with brand recall through gaming sponsorships at 53% for endemic and 43% for non-endemic brands [source: McKinsey & Company].
By partnering with a gaming content creator, your brand will have access to their private community. Many believe that consumers don’t spend money during a downturn, but this isn’t the case for the gaming community - they have a big appetite to spend money and they will justify it. As mentioned, the audiences of streamers, no matter how big or small, are incredibly passionate and they are willing to spend money on merch, in-game items and other goodies!
We also believe brands need to adopt the mindset ‘think global, act local’ - something that can be easily achieved through gaming sponsorships. Businesses need to adapt their brands to suit individual localized audiences, which is exactly where sponsorship comes in.
We know, and work with many global brands, but they also need to stay locally relevant. Customers want a more localized experience when presented with a brand, and creators have the opportunity to put a local spin on your product. They live and breathe their audiences and are sensitive to what they want - your brand should be taking full advantage of this opportunity.
And finally, this is your time to be confident. If other brands are cutting budgets, the competition is lower and you don’t have to shout as loud to be heard.
A weak economy can be the start of a more powerful you.
If you want to find out more about how you can implement gaming sponsorship into your marketing strategy, get in touch on info@ggtalentgroup.com
