How to best use gamer motivation to level up your mobile game’s creative assets
Creative Assets
October 13, 2022
If you’re currently trying to promote a mobile game, you might want to look into gamer motivations. They can help you better target your audience and make your game stand out from the competition.
What is it and how can you take advantage of it? We’re sharing all the answers with you!
What exactly are gamer motivations?
Gamer motivations have been around the marketing world for some time. Marketers used to rely on user personas to improve their targeting. Recently, the mobile game industry took hold of it and rebranded it as gamer motivation.
Gamer motivations can be described as a way to target mobile gamers according to the reason that brings them to your game. Gamers, especially mobile gamers, are quite a diverse group and they may have various reasons for gaming. Some will look for social interaction in their gaming, others for a place where they can be creative.
This helps define users through the experience they’re looking for in gaming.
Gamer motivation will help you segment your audience to better understand and target them. By figuring out why people are attracted to your game, or why they could be, you can set up a more efficient marketing strategy and adapt your creatives.
With that approach, you can create different creative assets for different types of users, and ensure everyone in your diverse audience finds a good reason to play your game.
In its report, The Big Catch Playbook, Meta identified 8 common motivations:
These are not the only gamer motivations out there, Liftoff has another version:
When using gamer motivation, you can rely on personas that already exist, or you can look at your audience and your game and make up your own.
Every mobile game can fit in with different gamer motivations, diversifying your marketing efforts and targeting other motivations will broaden your audience, and boost your downloads.
What makes it so efficient
According to Meta’s research, leveraging gamer motivations in ad creatives “drive higher user value and higher ads quality scores”. Moreover, with the rise (and success) of storytelling as an advertising tool, gamer motivations are a great way to ensure your targeting will be effective.
Gamer motivations center the gamer in your marketing approach, your creative will be made with your users’ behavior in mind. By figuring out what drives people to your game, you can improve your conversion rate by framing your game as the answer to their needs. This will also reduce churn because you will target the right audience for your product.
Moreover, with new tools such as Product Page Customization in the App Store and Personalized Listing Pages in Google Play, you can create different landing pages for different motivations. Both ends of the funnel can be tailored to specific needs encountered by part of your audience.
Thanks to these tools, you don’t have to see your audience as one entity, you can go deeper and segment it, then target each segment separately. Your general page will have to tailor to a wider audience, but with personalized listing pages for your game, you can use your UA campaigns to be more efficient in your targeting.
You don’t have to segment according to demographic data, it will not necessarily help you figure out what your audience is after. Gaming audiences are specific and diverse, it will be more efficient to position yourself according to what they’re looking for: hence the efficiency of gamer motivation.
Because it allows you to directly target the needs gamers are trying to fulfill, your creatives will be more lucrative. Better targeting, a rare thing post-ATT, is assured to boost your ROI.
One more tip, don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone. You may think several gamer motivations fit your game perfectly, but you can always be surprised. Maybe one you didn’t think of, or thought wouldn’t be relevant enough, may actually bring a new onslaught of users if marketed properly.
Examples of gamer motivations and how they were used
The first step is of course to figure out which gamer motivations you’re trying to target. The better you know your audience, the more efficient your targeting will be. Some gamer motivations are common to almost all gamers: escapism and relaxation are often why gamers play in general.
Escapism or relaxation are the reasons that will drive players to look for a game to download, but it’s another game motivation that will help them choose which game they want.
Cats and soup and relaxation
However, games that have a relaxing atmosphere can communicate more on the relaxing aspect and make it the focus of their visual assets. Look at the game Cats and soup, it’s betting on its relaxing atmosphere because the core of the game is relaxation. Green is the most predominant color of the ad, a color often associated with calmness and peace of mind.
The soft music, which is one of the games’ music, is also soft and relaxing, with a majority of higher-pitched sounds. There is no text, no voice-over meant to distract the player from the routine of the cats in the game. The trailer shows very clearly, without a word, that this game will help you wind down.
Merge Mansion and discovery
According to Meta’s list, discovery is the gamer’s motivation for those who wish to explore and learn new things. Merge Mansion, which doesn’t need an introduction anymore, is betting on that to drive users’ interest.
The game in itself, a puzzle game with a merge mechanic would fit perfectly with gamers in search of progression, the gameplay allows them to build and improve the mansion the main character inherits. But the video ads are accentuating the discovery motivation.
Every video ad for the game, and even their app stores’ assets, is centered around the secrets of the grandma, even though it’s only part of the meta layer of the game and not particularly relevant to the gameplay in itself.
Instead, they’re betting on people’s need to uncover the truth and their desire to solve the mysteries exposed to them.
Stardew Valley and self-expression
Stardew Valley is a farming game where you play a customizable character that inherited their grandfather’s farm. There are a lot of things you can do in this game: creating your character’s life from the ground up (which is great for escapism), completing milestones in several areas of the game (for that progression hit), fighting monsters in the mines (for those in search of power) and you even have a multiplayer mode (for a more social aspect).
Taglines such as “Build the farm of your dreams” and “Rebuild from the soil up” clearly emphasize the freedom to make things your way in the game. This App Store trailer is all about creating your own story and having the liberty to create a story on your own terms.
The focus of this video is to show you that Stardew Valley gives the player the opportunity to create everything from scratch. Each player will have a different gaming experience, and they can make their farm unique.
There’s more than one creative to be made about your game. Each game has several facets and characteristics. Every one of them can attract a different kind of player. Some may be interested in several sides of your game and others only in one.
So diversify, and reach out to all these different types of gamers, because your game has something to offer to all of them.
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