Finding trusted ways to reach your customers can be difficult without someone to vouch for you. Thankfully, there are thousands of creators and influencers out there who have developed a deep bond with their fans and are more than happy to act as your spokesperson.
To help you reach these creators, Stream Hatchet and Sideqik have teamed up to develop The Ambassador Program: A series of steps and services designed to help you identify the right content creator for your brand, connect with them, and present your product in the best light to their fans. With Stream Hatchet’s powerful data analytics bolstering Sideqik’s influencer marketing expertise, The Ambassador Program is a sure-fire way to create collaborations that promote your brand to active, engaged customers.
In this article, we’re giving a sneak peek at a couple of the key steps in The Ambassador Program to set you on the right path towards powerful creator-driven marketing.
Five Points to Consider When Choosing Your Brand Ambassador:
One of the most powerful tools at your disposal is information: Access Stream Hatchet and Sideqik’s full Ambassador Program Guide and get in touch with a professional consultant today:
Planning Your Partnership: Defining Your Objective
If you’re planning on entering the Ambassador Program, you’re no doubt looking to expand your reach beyond traditional gaming niches. Whether you’re a publisher, developer, esports organization, or simply a brand looking to market to Millennial and Gen Z audiences, you’ll want to set out a clear objective before reaching out for a collaboration. These objectives can be quite varied:
- You may hope to drive revenue by increasing your consumer base. In this situation, you’ll want to be reaching activated consumers who are willing to part with their money based on the trusted word of their favorite creators.
- Alternatively, you might be more interested in boosting brand awareness and redefining your image. In this case, partnering with creators’ whose content and tone align with your own brand is essential for proving your brand’s identity.
- Finally, you might have a particular event coming up such as a game launch or esports tournament. You’ll want to target fans of games within the same genre as your own, or fans of creators who frequently cover competitive gaming on their channels.
Whatever your purpose, you’ll need to set clear benchmark metrics that you hope to meet by participating in the Ambassador Program. Stream Hatchet and Sideqik are well-equipped to monitor these metrics and provide detailed feedback to help you gauge the success of any partnerships.
Planning Your Partnership: Identifying Your Audience
In tandem with defining your objectives, set about selecting the target audience for your Ambassador Program. Depending on your objectives, you’ll either want to determine your currently existing customers or set your sights on a new, untapped audience. There are a few different places you can look to when determining your audience:
- Game genre and design are a great starting point, as different genres often have vastly different kinds of players. Additionally, creators also take advantage of this fact and will typically cover one or two key genres in their content.
- Engaging directly with the community gives you a first-hand insight into your audience and their shared interests. Jumping on forums, social media sites, live-streaming platforms, and even podcasts within the field you’re looking at all provide the opportunity to learn what your potential customers are chatting about right now.
- Developing player personas can help refine your existing image of your audience. Although these personas are fictional, they’ll embody the core values of your audience and, in creating these personas, you’ll no doubt clarify some of the missing details you had for your player base.
Knowing where to look first or which approach best suits your needs can be tricky. Beyond metrics, Stream Hatchet and Sideqik can also provide advice based on years of experience to steer your campaign in the right direction.
Choosing Your Ambassador: Live-Streaming Creators
Now that you’ve worked out your objectives and goals, it’s time to look at the different kinds of creators that you might like to partner with in the Ambassador Program. For our purposes here, we’ll look at three main types of content creator and the pros and cons of each.
To start with, we have live-streaming creators – Stream Hatchet’s forte. Live-streaming creators often feel the most authentic due to their unedited content in which they chat directly to fans in real time. Live-streaming audiences spend a LOT of time with their favorite creators, which forms a deep bond and a level of emotionally driven trust unmatched by any other type of content creator.
Live-streaming creators also provide the most organic type of marketing for your brand. Instead of a two-minute pitch shoehorned into their videos, live-streaming creators can engage with your product in a more natural way. If you’re a game publisher, the streamer can play part of your game or even participate in a long-term campaign where viewers are rewarded for tuning in (such as a Twitch Drops campaign).
In short, live-streaming creators are a great choice for game publishers (due to the gaming community’s overwhelming presence on Twitch) and for lifestyle brands looking to market their product organically.
Choosing Your Ambassador: Long-Form Creators
Long-form creators curate their content and spend dozens of hours crafting well-thought-out analyses of their favorite topics. As a result, their opinions carry weight as reliable sources. Although the fans of these creators may not be as committed due to the lower volume of content, the true fans will wait with bated breath for their next upload.
Most importantly, these viewers are willing to support quality content and, in turn, quality brands. Top followers of long-form creators typically fund their favorite channels via sites like Patreon to enable niche, informative, and unique content to continue to exist on the internet. Long-form creators are also far less likely to change their content on a whim or hop on a bandwagon due to the longer production time required by their craft.
As such, a brand can rely on long-form creators to continue hitting the same demographic over and over within their given niche, making them fantastic partners for things like genre-specific streaming services and lovingly-crafted indie games.
Choosing Your Ambassador: Short-Form Creators
Lastly, we have short-form creators whose content is visually appealing and attention-grabbing, designed to pull in viewers casually scrolling through their phones. Fans of these creators are less likely to actively tune in for new content, but through passive scrolling or occasional viral hits, they can form an unknowing bond with these creators.
Brands that have an easy selling point are the best fit for partnerships with short-form creators. Make-up, fashion, and F2P games are all great candidates for sponsorship. Additionally, the lower the entry barrier for these viewers to purchase your product, the better. One niche example might be TikTok or Instagram influencers who create travel vlogs. In this case, continued exposure to amazing destinations and attractions can be a welcome escape for viewers scrolling through their feed after a long day at work.
The often transient nature of short-form creators’ fans can be a great boon to brands, as this means a high turnover of new eyes on your product rather than exhausting a finite fanbase.
It’s worth mentioning that a given creator may create content of varying forms – but typically, creators consider one form their specialty. For example, a Twitch streamer may edit out highlights from their streams to create content for TikTok, or a video essay YouTuber may cover their production process on Twitch to give a behind-the-scenes peek at what goes into making a video.
With your objectives and audience clarified, and the type of content creator you’d like to partner with selected, it’s time to start putting your plan into action. The full Ambassador Program walks you through the more technical stages of this process, refining down your search for Ambassadors and creating a partnership that benefits both parties equally. Tapping into these existing fanbases is the key to developing customers’ trust in your brand.
Stream Hatchet and Sideqik provide the guidance needed to successfully partner with the right content creators:
- Analyze the audience of creators you’re potentially looking to partner with
- Gain insights into the viewership data for games featuring in esports tournaments to learn how they align with your consumer base
- Explore the effectiveness of your social media campaigns to better understand what marketing strategies are reaching your audience
- Track the performance of sponsored creators and understand the role of your sponsorship
To get the edge in creator-focused marketing, access Stream Hatchet and Sideqik’s Ambassador Program today:
