In the gaming business, a Whale is defined as the 2nd or 3rd sigma of spenders. This means the 95th (or 99th) Percentile of your spenders. Depending on the game, this might represent a very significant portion of your total revenue (in a Whale dominate game). Therefor, “marketing to whales” is a very important task/challenge. My good friend Bart Bohn at AuManil have developed algorithms that help identify and monitor the Whales in your game… but the key question I have is, how do you EFFECTIVELY market to these whales?
The Whale challenges are:
- How do we Identify Whales (AuManil has this solved! -Thanks! :))
- How do we get ATTRACT new Whales to play our game? (Acquisition)
- How do we get Whales who play to STAY in the game longer? (Retention)
- How do we get Whales who play to SPEND more? (Monetization)
- How do we get Whales who have left to COME BACK? (Re-acquisition)
I don’t have all the answers, sadly. Each of these are very hard… I do have some ideas, and am constantly testing these ideas while running Marketing in the real game Dungeon Overlord. Obviously, I can’t share data or any big secrets, but I would love to hear from my friends/readers if they have any ideas on how to solve these problems.
Focusing on ATTRACTING new Whales; Facebook has some new “target” groups that let you supposedly target Whales with your ads. Has anyone tried this yet? I hope to try it out soon.
Targeting players of other similar games seems to work fairly well, but I wonder if “Bids” for ads effect weather or not we reach Whale players?
Thoughts?
Any ideas for the other Whale challenges?
