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The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in events all over the world being canceled. Whether it’s the Premier League, music festivals, exhibits, or trade shows; COVID-19 has the whole world missing out on their favorite pastimes. People are putting lots of work-related activities on hold and as a result, many brands are also losing essential touchpoints with consumers. Needless to say, if you want to maintain a steady stream of income as a business, you’ll have to reevaluate your thinking about current and future advertising and marketing campaigns.

Gaming tournament platforms are an attractive and proven alternative to advertising at live events, allowing you to reconnect with consumers even during a lockdown.

In this article, we’ll cover the top 10 reasons why your brand should invest in organizing its own online tournaments on a gaming tournament platform today:

Proximus is a Belgian telecommunications company and one of the country’s biggest broadcasters of live sports. During the lockdown, they partnered up with the Belgian Pro League and launched the Proximus Pro League e-Cup. On the one hand to keep soccer fans digitally engaged on the one hand, but also to keep promoting the brand.

With StriveCloud as a technology partner, they created an online FIFA tournament in which fans can enroll to represent their favorite team and play against each other. The tournament platform was already up and running in one week, and within the first hours of going live, over 2,000 fans signed up.

When advertising at offline events your reach is always limited by the capacity of the venue. While the physical event space only has a certain amount of seats, the sky is the limit in the digital realm. The more users you get to sign up, the more potential customers!

Esports is probably one of the most accessible competitive leagues in the world. It’s fun and doesn’t require a lot to start: a decent computer and internet connection already does the trick. Besides getting people to sign up and play, online gaming tournaments have also stood their ground in terms of attracting spectators and ensuring esports fan engagement, filling out entire virtual arenas and garnishing millions of views. 

As a business, you want to have as many touchpoints with consumers as possible. You could spend millions to achieve the highest number of impressions possible, but chances are your budget doesn’t allow for that.

With your very own gaming tournament platform, you can reach your audience up to 24 hours a day and 7 days a week for far less money. Users can play or watch their favorite players compete around the clock, significantly increasing the amount of time they come into contact with your brand. With some smart activation efforts, such as gamification elements, you can keep them coming back.

Every day, thousands of users tune into community streams and enter competitive esports events on Kayzr, the largest esports community platform in Benelux. How did they manage to do that, you ask? The company teamed up with StriveCloud to gamify the user experience and stimulate gamers and esports enthusiasts to return to the platform.

What gamification elements are behind Kayzr’s success?

“People are coming for the rewards. If you take them away, engagement suffers. With StriveCloud’s help, we created a new reward system focused on moments of surprise and user empowerment, and fan engagement is higher than ever.”

Pieter Verheye, Community Manager @ Kayzr

Over the past years, many brands have been making investments in digital advertising, especially on social media. And this success is raising the budgets needed for an impactful campaign. The number of companies using social media ads has gotten so big, social networks are getting saturated and brands are paying more money to reach their audience or reach their goal of qualified leads.

That’s not the case for online tournament platforms. By adding a gaming platform to your media mix, you’ll be able to reach a more diverse audience, from the highly digitized youth to older generations discovering online gaming, more easily.

A vibrant gaming tournament platform with gamification elements allows you to strengthen the loyalty of your audience to your brand.

It’s by playing on people’s competitive streaks and enabling them to win badges and enter daily challenges with leaderboards, that you’ll ensure activity on your platform. By integrating such forms of recognition – moments of ‘delight’ – you’ll get users excited when interacting with you.

And what happens when you feel good about a brand? Yes, you’ll become a fan, an ambassador. One benefit you can get from such a bond is a higher chance of generating revenue, through merchandising for instance. T-shirts, hoodies, and snapbacks are good options if the group becomes big enough to warrant the investment. For online platforms, other options are also available which do not rely on expensive designs and shipping. Platform skins, premium badges, and other visual upgrades serve the same purpose as real-life merchandising but for the online space.

What’s the benefit of getting to interact with your audience on a daily basis? Right: you get equal chances to target them with ads, promoting your products. Additionally, an analysis by analytics and advice firm Gallup found that fully engaged consumers are on average 23% more profitable. 

Engaged users are also more likely to pay for the content you put behind a paywall. The free version is the ideal marketing tool to funnel users to the more lucrative version of your platform. You can tease players with limited trails of the premium version in order to further entice them to upgrade.

A huge advantage of digital experiences is the ability to collect data. Of course, you can’t straight up ask for a bunch of things. As a matter of fact, you better keep the signup process as low-barrier as possible. Once your audience signed up on the gaming platform though, you can start gathering all kinds of information such as the dates and times spent on games, scores, money spent, and so on.

You can then use these data to finetune marketing actions in your esports realm, for example when best to send notifications to compete in the tournament or when to notify users about special offers.

A fun extra for sports organizations: with new fans comes to a fresh appeal, especially for sponsors and rights deals. You can create new products for sponsors and you can leverage the increased advertising possibilities. 

Today is the time to get into esports and create more opportunities to keep growing your revenue. While the industry has been gaining traction over the past few years, millions of new people just recently got to know it during the lockdown. 

Big brands such as Coca-Cola are already jumping at the opportunity to attach their names to the esports community to reach the growing fan base. In February 2020, Coca-Cola published a press release revealing it signed a multi-year entitlement partnership with e-NASCAR, the esports arm of the US car racing association. 

“eNASCAR presents a unique opportunity for Coca-Cola to engage with consumers. Through our new position as a NASCAR Premier Partner, we’re exploring innovative ways to activate across the sport. This series allows us to connect with race fans, identify new talent and ultimately, celebrate champions with refreshing ice-cold Coca-Cola.” 

Chris Bigda, Director Sports Marketing and Activation — Motorsports @ The Coca-Cola Company.

If you’re looking for alternatives for traditional advertising at events to create new revenue opportunities, investing in a gaming tournament platform is the way to go. 

How so? Esports have proven to be attractive and successful in getting thousands of consumers together by providing a fun digital experience. 

What’s in it for you? Other than a replacement for offline marketing, esports tournaments enable you to:

1. Reach new and bigger audiences without exponentially increasing the costs, 
2. Gain more data insights to leverage in campaigns,
3. Benefit from the increased likelihood that engaged consumers spend more.

And good news: thanks to the quick set-up and low-barrier entry, you can have an active platform in next to no time.

Then contact us for a personalized demo