What is a funnel in marketing?
A funnel in marketing refers to a classic approach used to illustrate the customer journey through various stages before making a purchase or taking a desired action. The process represents how potential customers progress from initial awareness of a product or brand to becoming loyal advocates. While different marketing theories may name these stages differently or introduce additional steps, the main steps can be simplified as follows:
- Awareness - basic knowledge about your product. At this stage, the main goal for marketers is to make people remember your brand. That’s why marketers like to put a big logo on ads.
- Consideration - understanding of the perks of your product and possible intent to buy it. This is the moment when your potential user considers buying your solution.
- Purchase - pretty clear from the name of this stage what it’s about. But for marketers, it might be important to push users from Consideration to Conversion through special offers, discounts, additional value, etc.
- Post-purchase - sometimes it means loyalty, advocacy or both. This time your goal is to deliver value to your product and make your user happy to repurchase it for themselves or recommend it to others.
Once again - these steps sometimes have more granularity and are split into smaller steps. Also, Google described something they called micro-moments.
This same principle can be applied when you're promoting a video game. Let's see how different games work with that.
Awareness stage:
During this stage, you're focused on preparing your game, sharing trailers and gifs, and building a community. Your primary goal is to ensure that people know about your game. This is especially crucial for AAA projects, where attracting a more extensive player base is essential, and converting potential players into actual players becomes a priority.
For instance, Riot Games' League of Legends already boasts a massive audience with millions of players worldwide. However, their team continues to work on growing the game's popularity and attracting new players. They employ various strategies, including in-game events and online advertising, but they also extend their presence into the real world. A noteworthy example is their recent campaign - "League of Legends Teams up with Coca-Cola." Additionally, Riot Games has a partner program that assists creators in enhancing their work, recognizing the importance of influencers in spreading the game's message.
In this stage, the results are measured in impressions, indicating how often your game is seen or encountered. To increase awareness about your game, consider showcasing it through Twitch streamers. You can set up a campaign on our platform and gain access to 17,000 streamers in the shortest period. This allows for a wider reach and more visibility for your game among potential players.
Consideration stage:
The Steam wishlist count can be a valuable metric to measure potential player consideration.
In October 2022, Electronic Arts made The Sims 4 (Base Game) free. This not only allowed them to set a new record of 70 million users but also attracted 16 million new players. These players subsequently drove the sales of expansions to the base game, generating additional revenue for the company.
Additionally, building a community around your game during this stage can further boost player interest and engagement.
Purchase:
This stage might be easier to understand. However, note that for free-to-play games, the purchase moment might occur long after the player downloads the game.
For example, in Genshin Impact, players enjoy all its advantages. This free-to-play game is exceptionally well-crafted. In the beginning, players are showered with gifts, and resources seem endless. But at some point, you start running out of premium currency, and if you want to remain a free-to-play player, you have to limit yourself and deny certain characters or open your wallet. Many players encounter a barrier with that one character they feel they cannot miss out on due to the "waifu" factor. And after a year of playing, people make their first in-game purchase.
Post-purchase:
This stage is crucial for games to ensure that players stick to the game and keep exploring new challenges.
In the case of AAA projects, it goes beyond just the game itself. For example, League of Legends involves building a massive esports system with events held in Olympic stadiums, anime, and other games in the same world. The 2022 World Championship watched 141 943 967 hours. Another example is Genshin Impact, where they created a Genshin Impact Cafe in Japan to further engage with players beyond the virtual world. This post-purchase phase aims to foster a strong and lasting connection between the players and the game, extending the overall experience beyond the initial purchase.
Define your game's funnel.
Do you know how your game's funnel works? Try this exercise to define each stage, the primary channels to communicate with your players at each step, and how to measure it.
By understanding this, you can establish the right goals for your campaigns.
How Drope.me works for each stage
The beauty of Drope.me is that you can use it for each stage individually or in various combinations, including all at once. This platform makes it easy to interact with loyal streamers, presenting them with tasks that your game needs. In turn, the streamers perform the specified actions for payment. The convenience lies in that you can engage unlimited streamers within a single campaign by configuring it just once and limiting the number of actions required. We'll provide just a few examples, but the platform's possibilities are truly limitless and ready to bring any ideas to life.
Awareness - The most obvious option is to stream your game, reaching as many potential players as possible. However, there are actions suitable even for games in development or pre-release promotion. You can ask streamers to share teasers of your game, showcase your concept art, or simply talk about the upcoming release.
Consideration - Set an action to "Add this game to Steam wishlist." This way, you can visually see how much the audience is interested in your project. Ideally, this should coincide with an upcoming sale period.
Purchase - The action "Own this game on Steam" is perfect and serves as the most compelling call to action for here and now. Plus, you'll see the results of the previous funnel stages that you set up with Drope.me.
Post-purchase - Another stage where the platform's capabilities are limited only by your imagination. You can ask players to leave a review on Steam, recommend the game on social media, or give them special tasks (e.g., achieving a problematic in-game achievement or reaching a certain level). Create art, videos, and any other content related to the game.
If you want to efficiently set up the user funnel while reaching a vast audience of loyal streamers with a simple campaign setup within 10 minutes, try creating a campaign on Drope.me. You won't have to write to hundreds of streamers and wait weeks for responses. Our team is always ready to help you get the most out of your campaign if needed.
