I encountered a gaming company running OOH (out-of-home marketing – flyers, posters and such) campaigns a short while ago, despite having a life-service game. I’ve seen a number of examples of such ads before, but it’s usually been AAA games or some massive mobile titles. It surprised me, as, just as I expected, conducting such a campaign would mostly raise brand awareness and this isn’t what such games usually opt for – maximising client conversion. It would make sense to run a large-scale campaign like that as a part of a coordinated campaign. On the other hand, it got me thinking – how do PPC campaigns convert on the spot, despite not going through the classic sales funnel used in the AIDA (awareness-interest-desire-action) model?
If you need consulting regarding the marketing strategy of your game, drop me a message at jakub@heapsagency.com and let’s have a talk about it!
The talk
I had a pretty insightful conversation with the CEO of one of the biggest SoMe agencies in Poland and I casually mentioned that I’ve been thinking about how the AIDA model isn’t the greatest fit in most cases for the gaming industry. Even though his agency doesn’t do gaming stuff, he agreed with me. Not because of his expertise in the marketing of games, but because AIDA hasn’t been well-regarded for the last couple of years.
How is AIDA supposed to work & the discrepancy
One of the hugest failures of the model is that it assumes that the prospect will pass through all of its stages. A campaign orchestrated according to the principles of AIDA would go something like this:
- A prospect sees a billboard with our ad and remembers the brand’s name (awareness).
- The prospect encounters a paid article about our products and finds them enticing (interest).
- The prospect learns that we have a 25% discount on our products, making them a useful and sensible purchase for them through a PPC ad (desire).
- The prospect purchases our products (action).
This model can work, but it has a glaring issue – it assumes that the prospect needs to go through all of the steps. And it just isn’t how it works in practice.
Live service games, mostly mobile ones, rely heavily on PPC campaigns. They often aim to get the installation at the very first attempt. They count on their ads to (possibly) expose the prospect to the brand, make them interested in it, have them desire the product and convert them in a single swoop. It actively goes against the AIDA model. And it works pretty darn well. The standard CPI for a mobile game usually oscillates at about 1.70-2.20 USD on Meta Ads. And these companies aren’t (usually) too keen to have their money spent on something that will not directly bring new customers.
This pertains to the idea of the messy middle marketing strategy. Overly simplifying, you have the middle, the product, and you have the prospect first be exposed to the brand (brand recognisability), then you increase the value of the brand with further communications. Then you create plenty of hooks, pieces of advertisements that pertain to value events in the prospect’s life and their experiences. Their goal is to, well, hook the prospect and have them convert into a client.
While it’s not a perfect analogy, most PPC campaigns seem to have more in common with the messy middle model rather than the AIDA model.
Is there any use for the AIDA model in the gaming industry?
Does it mean that the AIDA model is of no use in the gaming industry? I wouldn’t necessarily say that. While I think that the rigidity of the model doesn’t make for a great choice when it comes to planning actual campaigns and activities, it can be used as a tool for assessment. It can be used to figure out what the campaign we plan is actually going to do. And to see if it aligns with our goals. For example, we can assume that sending a press release about the start of the development process of a game will usually not yield massive results in gaining wishlists, but will be good for the exposure. So, we know that supplementing the press release with a PPC campaign will supplement the outreach generated by the press and use it to grow your social media presence or gain wishlists quickly. Both of these activities could be placed in an AIDA-like “sales funnel” to know what sort of traffic they will drive, how to build upon them and so on. AIDA can also be used for a similar reason – to contextualise marketing activities in a post-mortem of a project. To see if it made sense to conduct this particular activity.
So, could you conduct an effective AIDA-based campaign? I believe so. As a short example:
- a press release to generate Awareness,
- an influencer campaign to gain interest,
- a PPC campaign to tap into Desire and have the prospects take Action.
This would likely work, I believe. The problem with it is that it overly complicates the entire process and assumes that people will go through all of the steps of the process. This simply isn’t the case, as many activities that gaming marketers take can often fulfil different objectives. You can definitely gain all brand awareness, interest and increased perceived value and sales using an influencer campaign. AIDA in its classic version doesn’t account for such flexibility and this is its main issue. Our industry differs quite a bit when it comes to activities and their purposes and traditional marketing measures often don’t match perfectly with them. I’d like to do a deep dive into that in the future. We’ll see.
Summary
To sum it up, I believe that the AIDA model still has a place in the gaming industry. However, it shouldn’t be the leading mode of operation. Games require a different approach and it’s not uncommon to convert a prospect into a client during a step which wouldn’t make sense from the model’s point of view. The model doesn’t consider such flexibility and methodology closer to messy middle could be of better use. AIDA would be a good choice for assessments before and after conducting activities, to figure out how to bolster the stuff we already expect to do.
Heaps Agency 