How Influencers can help you to grow
A few months ago Overwolf held one of their webinars, specifically on the marketing aspects of our apps and how to make the most of them.
One of the topics covered, albeit very marginally, was about influencers.
What is an influencer? The definition can vary depending on the field of application or the platform used, in particular for gaming, an influencer is a streamer.
Trucky is a mostly visual application, showing incoming data and information from telemetry in real-time and offering various tools to support gameplay. Some of the functionality also includes statistics and insights on driving style.
Having monetized the application and reached a certain degree of maturity in terms of the exposed functionality, it was time to increase the user base.
The Trucky Ambassador
The Ambassador is the influencer who already uses Trucky and has a genuine interest, or maybe it can also be a new user who didn’t know the app before (but in particular is harder to reach and convince).
The ideal Ambassador is an active user, who already appreciates the app, knows the app properly, does live streams regularly and in particular on ETS2 or ATS, with an adequate number of followers on Twitch or Youtube. We decided to put a minimum limit of 1000.
Consequently, the Ambassador is required to show in-game overlays during the live stream, to talk about it, to advertise it (of course without expiring in a sterile promotion but it must be contextualized), to invite his audience to use it. All for free.
Obviously, the Ambassador must be remunerated in some way: we offer to provide betas and previews to be tested, to be actively involved in the development of the app with suggestions and contributions, the removal of ads, and the activation of premium features.
In particular, to manage Ambassadors enablement as easily as possible, ask your DevRel to create a “hidden” Subscription Plan so that you can manually add users to remove ads or enable specific features
All benefits, perks and obligations are stated in the Ambassador program page on Trucky website.
Recruitment
In mid-December 2020, we launched a public announcement to recruit influencers.
The response was great: dozens and dozens of applications in a few days. We reviewed them one by one, checking their status, how they perform live streams, the average views of the recorded live streams, their chats, the quality of entertainment.
We responded to each one via email, even when it was a no. Those who were accepted were admitted to a private channel on our Discord and assigned a specific, visible role in the user list.
We provided media assets for their live streams to be mounted on OBS overlays, for example, so that they all showed up with the same visual elements.
At this moment we have 11 Ambassadors reaching more than 30k followers, covering many languages (German, Spanish, Turkish, English) and many timezone (from Europe to US).
The Launch
The Ambassadors had to start their work communicating something new and great, we couldn’t leave the app as it was otherwise the Ambassadors would lose their early access benefit.
The launch of the Ambassador program coincided with the development of a new feature, something very specific to ETS2 and ATS and already known to many users because it was implemented in community tools “offline” and outside the game.
The plus of having it on Trucky was the strong integration with the game and usable directly from the game without ALT+TAB.
The final goal was to build hype through the Ambassadors.
The work of the Ambassadors
The ambassadors responded magnificently, they did an amazing job, they were interested and excited by the new feature and were able to communicate it in the best possible way.
They did such a good job that in after one week, Trucky’s backend server that handles all the APIs went down and urgent software changes were needed to properly handle the load.
On one hand, it was very frustrating to see services go down at such critical times but on the other hand, the interest generated by the Ambassadors was so high.
I won’t disclose any particular number, but the increase in app downloads and usage was over every expectations.
An example? See how statistics changed between November and December focusing on mid-December breakpoint:
Or installs:
And furthermore, revenues:
Having Ambassadors covering different languages have also influenced local countries increase:
Communicating with Ambassadors
Communication with Ambassadors is very important: you need to keep them engaged, make them feel that they are important, and get them involved.
This is not a trivial phrase, they ARE REALLY important and vital for the growth of the user base.
Almost every day I release a new version with a changelog description, properly packaged for them, with new features activated so they can tell their viewers what’s coming and build hype.
Ambassadors know that they can find the latest beta in the pinned messages of the Discord channel dedicated to them.
I get so many feedbacks from them every day, very often they get comments and requests from their users. And this helps to improve the application because it’s right to give the users what the users ask for. It makes them feel heard and useful to the growth and improvement of the application itself.
Providing benefits to Ambassadors
Aside from being directly involved in the development of the app, every announcement on Discord or official blog post is accompanied by a sentence encouraging users to follow the ambassadors on their social channels, especially Twitch, to be updated and catch the latest news.
Follow our ambassadors and their live streams on Twitch to find out more.
In addition, using advertising revenue, you can consider to provide them with a “fund” with which to prepare giveaways and contests during their live broadcasts. It is not easy to spin this money, unfortunately there are to consider payment systems fees and currencies exchange, decreasing the actual value that the Ambassadors receive. I’ve discussed this with them and we evaluated what’s the best way to receive this fund: some said Instant Gaming cards, some Amazon Gift Cards (but there are limitation on exchanging Gift Cards between different countries) or simply, using Paypal.
For the future, I’m considering providing new Ambassadors, an entry fund with a variable value based on the number of followers.
Dealing with Ambassadors
This is a bit of a critical topic: although many Ambassadors don’t object to showing a logo or overlay during their live streams, sometimes you can get nos, especially from those with the largest following.
And it’s understandable: some of them do this as a real job, they get paid by sponsors to display their logo, they get physical tools for free so they can promote them on live streams.
It depends on how formal the relationship between you, the app and the Ambassadors needs to be, sometimes you may need to draw up a contract and sign it mutually in order to commit to each other’s duties.
