How to get started with app or game influencer marketing
Looking for a comprehensive guide to Game Influencer Marketing? Check out our FREE Guide to Unlocking App Growth with Influencers and Podcasts.
Influencer marketing has quickly become one of the most effective channels for driving mobile app installs, user engagement, and game growth.1
With traditional channels becoming less reliable and more expensive, platforms like YouTube, Podcasts, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch, have quickly become a part of the UA playbook.
Creators now play a central role in how consumers discover products across all industries – and the same goes for apps and games. Although not quite as standardised and tightly controllable as traditional channels, Influencer Marketing can play a vital role in helping apps and games break through the noise and drive growth in the short and long term.
But launching influencer marketing isn’t as simple as paying a big influencer to mention your game or app and hoping installs will start to pour in.
Without a strategic approach and a comprehensive understanding of the nuances of platforms, consumer behaviour, and creator dynamics, many studios burn through budgets without seeing any positive impact or learnings.
If you’re new to app or game influencer marketing, here are five critical steps you must take before launching your first campaign, plus a bonus tip to help you scale smarter.
1. Set a Clear Goal for Your App or Game Influencer Marketing Campaign
Every successful influencer campaign starts with clear objectives. Ask yourself, do you want to build brand awareness ahead of a launch or a brand refresh? Are you focused on driving app installs at scale? Do you want to re-engage lapsed users? Or are your goals something else entirely?
Defining these goals clearly at the outset is absolutely essential because it informs all the decisions you need to make further down the line.
Your game’s influencer marketing setup will differ dramatically depending on your goal. For example:
- Awareness campaigns may prioritize reach, impressions, and creator credibility & sentiment.
- Performance-driven campaigns will focus on CVR, trackable installs, cost per install (CPI), and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Everything – right from required budgets to influencer selection and campaign tracking & measurement setup depends on the goals you’re trying to achieve.
By setting a clear goal upfront, you create a roadmap for everything else and can use that as your North Star to guide all your decisions.
2. Allocate Budgets for your Game Influencer Marketing Campaign Strategically
One of the biggest mistakes marketers new to Influencer Marketing make is under-investing. Influencer marketing isn’t a channel where you can “test” with a tiny budget and expect measurable impact and actionable insights. Besides, influencer marketing costs are highly subjective.
How much you need to spend depends on factors like:
- Game genre
- Target audience
- Campaign objectives
- Organic performance baseline
- Amongst many other factors.
There’s no universal minimum budget for influencer marketing, but each app or game will have its own unique threshold.
On a channel where a majority of the conversions occur organically, it’s essential to spend above this threshold so you can reliably attribute traffic to the influencer campaign. And even if you have a fair amount of tracked traffic, if you have only worked with a limited number of influencers, your sample size will still be too small to draw conclusive results.
Without reliable attribution or datasets, you won’t have any observable insights on what works and what doesn’t, so you will never be able to optimise or scale your strategy.
Ultimately, your budget isn’t just about producing ROI, it’s about producing measurable & replicable results and a long-term strategy, so it’s essential to commit to the investment from the outset.
Check out our webinar on Strategic Budgeting for Game Influencer Marketing here.
3. Align Internally on Resources, Processes & Attribution
Internal Misalignment is another major challenge teams often face in game influencer marketing. Successful influencer marketing is a highly cross-functional process, so it’s essential to ensure your team is not functioning in silos and all teams are clear about the projections, timelines, methodologies, and expectations from the outset to avoid bottlenecks further along in the process.
Before launching your game influencer marketing campaign, you need to make sure your internal teams are aligned:
- Involve your data & analytics team from the outset
- Sync with marketing operations
- Agree on how you’ll measure and attribute impact
This alignment will help you:
- Reduce attribution noise for cleaner measurement – you need to ensure a stable environment (i.e. no changes in other marketing spend) during your influencer marketing campaign
- Address probabilistic attribution challenges upfront
- Set realistic expectations around short-term profitability vs long-term learning
When everyone is on the same page from the outset, you can avoid hiccups with approvals, data sharing, measurement, and attribution, and really understand Influencer Marketing’s potential as a part of the wider marketing mix rather than as an isolated channel being tested in a silo.
4. Establish an Organic Baseline Before Campaign Launch
As mentioned earlier, a majority of the conversions in influencer marketing are organic. If you want to measure true campaign impact, you have to be able to attribute these organic conversions to the influencer campaign. This is only possible when you measure uplift created during the campaign period – and THAT is only possible if you have a baseline to measure against.
Here’s how you can set up the baseline:
- Track organic installs and engagement during a training period before the campaign
- Ensure this period matches your campaign window (e.g., same days of the week, seasonality)
- Ensure your spend across the wider marketing mix is stable during this training period and the campaign period to avoid conflating periods
- Use the organic traffic recorded during this training period as your baseline for comparison
After the campaign, compare your organic numbers against the baseline. This allows you to calculate incremental uplift, and you can model this data more precisely using your tracked installs to get a more accurate picture of influencer impact.
5. Be Prepared to Test, Learn, and Iterate
Unlike traditional paid UA channels, influencer marketing for games is not a plug-and-play solution. There is no one-size-fits-all playbook, nor is there a formula for overnight success.
You can always start out with ‘best practices’ so you’re as close to the ideal as possible, but ultimately, figuring out the optimal setup for your specific game and app will hinge on collecting data that is specific to your game or app. And this kind of data will only become available if you test and iterate.
Realistically, your first 2–3 campaigns may not be profitable. It can seem risky to invest in a channel without guaranteed outcomes on the first test, but instead of treating your first few campaigns as isolated campaigns, think of them as investments in data collection.
As you test and gather more insights on what kinds of influencers, verticals, content formats, platforms, visual assets, incentives, talking points, and so on work specifically for your game and your target audience, you’ll be able to optimise your strategy and start seeing more consistent and reliable results.
Once you figure out the optimal setup, the long-tail and wider brand benefits you’ll see will be unmatched.
6. Bonus Tip: Partner With Experienced Influencer Marketing Agencies
The influencer space is complex, and navigating it alone can be costly. Partnering with an experienced agency can help you:
- Accurately forecast performance and budget requirements to help with internal approvals
- Understand platform, format, and vertical best practices from the outset
- Make data-driven influencer selections without trial-and-error
- Negotiate competitive pricing to produce the best ROI
- Develop effective creative briefs for influencer content
- Track and attribute installs more accurately
- Scale strategically with less wasted spend
More specifically, working with an experienced gaming influencer marketing agency can drastically reduce the learning curve, reduce the strain on your internal resources, and help you reach profitability faster.
Final thoughts- How to get started with game influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful ways to grow your game or app in 2025. But success does not come overnight, and setting up for sustained impact goes beyond splashing budgets on big names.
By setting clear goals, budgeting properly, aligning your internal teams, establishing an organic baseline, and committing to testing, you’ll create the foundations for scalable app growth through influencer marketing channels and build a truly resilient marketing mix.
If you want to dive deeper into proven game influencer marketing strategies, check out our free Guide to Unlocking App Growth with Influencers & Podcasts.
Looking to work with an experienced game influencer marketing agency? We’ve scaled Influencer Marketing for over 80 different mobile games & apps, and our campaign strategies are led by the Former Head of Influencer Marketing at SocialPoint, Head of Growth at FunPlus, and Senior Product Manager (Growth) at Bandai Namco.
Check out our services or book a free consultation today!
- https://www.pocketgamer.biz/mastering-non-conventional-ua-channels-emergence-growth-and-trends-for-2025/ ↩︎