If you’re looking to reach a new audience for your business, Twitch could be a great platform to explore. Twitch is a live-streaming platform that is popular with gamers and other enthusiasts. While it may not be the first platform that comes to mind for business promotion, it can be a great way to connect with potential customers who are interested in your products or services.
At TwitchMetrics, we’ve worked with dozens of clients who have successfully partnered with Twitch streamers to drive business growth. In this post, we are going to explore a few tips and tricks we’ve learned from these businesses for leveraging Twitch streamers to reach a new audience for your business you never knew existed.
A 5-step Twitch Marketing Framework for Successful Campaigns on Twitch
We’ve created a 5 step framework that you can use to hip yourself to the process. This 5 step framework will work whether you’re an established business with a marketing team or a one-man/woman startup.
1. Define your target audience
The first step in leveraging Twitch to grow your business is to define who your target audience is. When you know who you’re trying to reach, it becomes much easier to identify Twitch streamers who have an audience that overlaps with your target market.
To get started, think about what demographics you’re trying to reach and what their interests are. Once you have a good understanding of this, you can use a tool like TwitchMetrics to build a list of streamers that fall in a viewership, games played, and follower threshold you like.
2. Evaluate partnerships based on engagement, not just viewership
Once you have a list of potential partners, it’s important to evaluate them based on more than just their overall viewership. You should also consider factors like their chat activity, average concurrent viewers, and the quality of their content.
You can use TwitchMetrics’ chat analyzer tool to gauge how engaged a streamer’s audience is. Be very careful of streamers who use bot viewers. You can normally spot them when they have inconsistent viewership levels.
These factors will give you a better idea of how engaged their viewers are and how likely they are to pay attention to any promotions you do with them. A more engaged and loyal fanbase will lead to better business outcomes when executing the partnership.
3. Plan your marketing campaign & key points not to forget
Now that you’ve found the right Twitch partners, it’s time to start planning your campaign. This is where you’ll want to get creative and come up with a promotion that will resonate with the streamer’s community.
A few examples of successful Twitch campaigns we’ve seen include product giveaways, coupon codes for viewers with an affiliate kickback for the streamer, and even simple brand mentions. You can also work with your Twitch partner to come up with unique ideas that you collectively have seen work well in the past.
A few key points on this no matter what route you choose:
- Don’t forget to set up a chatbot that runs in a set time increment. Normally you’ll run it once every few minutes.
- Set up a command in their chat for your brand that will populate a link in their chat. Twitch commands start with an exclamation point like so: !command. Your streamer will know how to set this up.
- Create a stream overlay banner that will stand out in the stream.
- Make sure your website can handle the influx in traffic by checking server speeds ahead of time. Do not underestimate this. If you’re working with a bigger streamer we see this happen all the time.
4. Set up post-campaign analytics
To properly evaluate the success of your Twitch campaign, it’s important to set up analytics ahead of time. This will help you track how many people clicked on your links, how many sales were made, and other important metrics.
The best way to set this up is normally just through short link tracking or setting up UTM parameters so you can attribute the traffic.
5. Have realistic expectations & measure success based on those
It’s important to have realistic expectations when running a Twitch promotion. Don’t expect to see a 10x ROI overnight. A successful Twitch campaign can take some time to build. If you’re looking for direct ROI, we would suggest trying to work strictly on an affiliate-based deal where it’s a simple dollars in dollars out based on coupon code usage.
Revenue is not the only metric you should focus on when measuring the success of your Twitch campaign. Other important factors to consider are brand awareness, website traffic, and social media engagement.
Twitch Marketing Campaign Examples
Here are a few examples of businesses that we at TwitchMetrics have worked with who have seen success in leveraging Twitch streamers to reach a new audience.
Cloakzy, Timthetatman, CourageJD & Twisted Tea
Twisted Tea partnered up with some of the biggest streamers on Twitch including Timthetatman, CourageJD, and cloakzy. They ran a simple promotion where they gave away free products to viewers who used a coupon code while shopping on their website.
They saw a massive spike in traffic and sales as a result of the promotion. Most importantly, they were able to reach a whole new audience of potential customers who were interested in their product. According to our data at TwitchMetrics, over 30,000,000 people saw the campaign. That’s…. a lot and why we suggested your server can handle the traffic.
State Farm & Dr. Lupo
State Farm partnered up with Dr. Lupo to do a simple brand mention campaign. They didn’t offer any coupon codes or giveaways. All they did was mention their brand a few times during his stream and set up a chatbot so viewers could learn more about the company.
According to our data at TwitchMetrics, at any given time during Dr. Lupo’s stream, he is averaging around 15,0000 viewers. With that reach, State Farm is able to reach a massive audience and create awareness for its insurance. That is huge for a large youth audience who is someday going to need to buy insurance. It’s really a brilliant play.
Rivalry eSports betting & MidBeast
Rivalry is a sports betting site that partners up with a lot of streamers including League of Legends streamer MidBeast. What’s great about this campaign is that it’s able to target a very specific niche audience.
Midbeast has an audience that is interested in League of Legends and even before this partnership MidBeast would let his stream know what games he was going to bet on and who he had winning. By promoting Rivalry through his stream, they’re able to target that audience very effectively and gain market share in one of the most competitive markets in the world of gambling.
How Much Does Twitch Marketing Cost?
To give you a range, we looked at what some of the companies that use our platform TwitchMetrics are paying streamers and created a cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) range.
Twitch marketing costs ranged from $4-18 CPMs. Expect smaller streamers to be on the lower end, and larger streamers to be on the higher end.
The good news is that compared to traditional marketing, Twitch marketing is very affordable and can be a great addition to your current marketing mix.
What you have to keep in mind when deciding on a budget is that the average CPM rate for streamers natively on Twitch is around $2.50. So offering lower than that is not worth their time.
In Conclusion
Twitch can be a great platform for businesses to reach a new audience and promote their products or services. By following the tips above, you can create a successful Twitch campaign that drives real business results.
If you’re looking to evaluate and report on your campaigns, TwitchMetrics can be a great tool to leverage to set these campaigns up A-Z.
