A new way to reach gamers
By Research & Data team. Top image: Leonardo AI + Dialect design team
Want to create personalized messaging that more effectively targets your audience? We’ve found a way…
What drives your specific gaming audience? What influences their decisions? How can you grab their attention, where, and when?
We can identify the types of messaging that people are receptive to by locating their position on a psychological map. This map plots personality-type clusters sub-divided according to their individual motivations, emotional needs, values, and interests.
Psychographic segmentation is the methodology behind this data-science. It enables marketers to zoom in on profitable areas of consumer preference by analyzing their psychological traits, then tailoring campaign messaging to match.
We’ve talked before about why psychographic insights beat crude demographics.
But psychographic models can be improved too. We can achieve deeper insights by enhancing:
Depth - Layering in ethnographic studies reveals hidden behavioral patterns, decision-making factors, drivers and barriers.
Scale - Using machine-learning to identify granular gamer segments within vast datasets unlocks precision media targeting.
Sample frequency - Regularly refreshing our data captures behavioral and cultural changes missed by static models.
It’s this coupling of psychographics with ethnographics, ongoing updates, and expert understanding of gaming that is uniquely powerful.
What we’ve discovered
Integrating these techniques confirms that individual games and genres attract unique multi-segmented audiences, each motivated to play for their own reasons.
Linking those segments to drivers enables us to zero in on the emotional “language” that each part of your user-base speaks.
This is key because as we know:
For example, some player personality-types are intrinsically attracted to mayhem. Whereas others love opportunities for camaraderie, good-natured trash-talk, and team bonding. Yet others are swayed by escapism. They want to dive deep into game lore and emergent storylines.
Moving beyond what people like, we also know how they like it. For instance, some sub-segments are hard to reach through influencers but are receptive to tutorial-based content or highly factual ads that play to their preference for self-empowerment.
Conversely some are ad-resistant but are well-disposed to the opinions of influencers.
Based on that brief glimpse, you can see how a switched-on creative team can use that information to sharpen your marketing messages, hitting each segment’s sweet spot like Cupid’s Arrow.
Supercharged psychographics: the benefits
The upshot is hyper-targeted campaigns that reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time, on the right platform.
And, because we’ve cross-referenced psychometrics with behavioral evidence, we’ve also uncovered which clusters are most responsive to different gameplay mechanisms such as competitive events, community-driven challenges, in-game rewards, and meta-narrative twists.
That enables us to market early-access events to the correct audience or, conversely, to help you prioritize features to meet the preferences of your developing fanbase.
Other benefits include:
Identifying the most profitable audience segments.
Strategies to improve player acquisition and retention.
Better brand positioning based on a deeper understanding of your place in the market and the audience’s unmet needs.
Growing market share by unlocking new audience opportunities.
Evidence-based insights for marketing decisions - leading to campaigns that achieve more for less.
Campaigns that match product developments to player needs, desires, and pain points with greater precision - enabling you to generate a stronger sense of positive momentum with your communications.
And there’s a lot more to come. We’re still fine-tuning our model at the moment but we’re so excited about its potential that we wanted to share a few nuggets now.
The fresh insights we’re gaining into videogamers are already changing our approach, and while we’ll bring the full model to market in 2025, we’re happy to share our knowledge with you anytime.
If you would like to discover more about our integrated approach and work together on a project, get in touch.
