Episode 58: User Acquisition Blueprint: Harnessing User-Generated Content for Effective UA

In this episode of the Mobile Games Playbook, we explore the power of UGC to effectively acquire users (UA).

UGC is a goldmine for mobile game marketers, but how do you leverage it for maximum impact? Join our expert guests, Nicole Danser, Senior Manager of Creative Strategy & Production at Liftoff Influence, and Sydney Bruce, Creative Account Strategy—UGC, as they share insights into identifying target audiences and the key components of a successful UA campaign.

By harnessing the power of UGC, you can unlock a cost-effective and authentic way to reach new players and grow your mobile game.

Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and check out our website, https://liftoff.io/

and https://gamerefinery.com/ for more information on game development topics and strategies for growing your game.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook, in association with Liftoff. Join us as we uncover the latest trends in user acquisition, monetization, and mobile game design. 

Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn't working for mobile game designers and all of the latest trends.

I'm your host, Jon Jordan. Joining me today are two experts who will discuss the topic of user-generated content in producing effective user acquisition strategies. Welcome to Nicole Danser, a senior manager of creative strategy and production at Liftoff Influence.

Hello. 

Nicole Danser: Hello. It's good to be here. 

Jon Jordan: We also have Sydney Bruce, who is creative account strategy and UGC at Liftoff Influence. 

Sydney Bruce: Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me. 

Jon Jordan: Good, good. So, thankfully we have two experts, and we have me as the host, who is not quite sure what we're going to be discussing today.

I've had a little brief ahead of time. When we talk about user [00:01:00] generated content for sort of UA, so basically marketing, what are we talking about? And why is this something that the industry is now talking about?

Why is this now important when maybe it wasn't a couple of years ago? 

Nicole Danser: Yeah, I would say four to five years ago, when TikTok wasn't as prevalent, and there wasn't, you know, Instagram Reels, testimonial style ad or a skit of some sort, did not hit well on, like, mobile advertising platforms 

But as TikTok became more ubiquitous, social media platforms with human beings and their faces are now plastered all over the internet. Mobile advertising platforms can screen those types of ads, and people watch them because they see them everywhere. They're entertained by them. So, we can use the formats that we see from TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms.

Put in our value propositions about a specific app and tell an entertaining story while still conveying why an audience should download our app. 

Jon Jordan: So I guess it's interesting that some, something [00:02:00] is partly to do with technology, partly to do with the platforms and sort of the content they're cooking up.

And then, over time, that's sort of like an education process for the audience. Whereas at one time, you know, a few years ago, you could have exactly the same as you're doing now, but it just wouldn't work. So there's a sort of a combined process going on there, which is how we consume stuff, which is interesting.

How does it, how do you start doing that process? Because obviously, I assume you have some sort of broad guidelines about what you want them to do. You can give them sort of carte blanche and, obviously, you know, we have games and audiences and how you tie that thing together. so what's the sort of starting point for these sorts of campaigns?

Sydney Bruce: I think it really depends on the client. For our team, specifically at creative studio Liftoff, there's a lot of collaboration with the client during the pre-production phase of the UGC process. So, along with brand guidelines and any asset requests, we'll also discuss their user base for the particular app title.

Our advertisers know the audience demographics for their apps, and sometimes they'll provide us with user personas, which may [00:03:00] include gender and age breakdowns, user motivations, or what keeps the user engaged within their app. I approach these conversations with the clients with a general knowledge of the user demographics anyway because of the Liftoff intelligence platform. I have reviewed the top source app, which is where the ads are being shown, and I probably most likely work with apps and similar verticals. So have a general sense of the type of audience and creator that we want to work with. And then in identifying the right creator, there are several factors that our creator team takes into consideration.

One factor is whether the creator falls into the target user persona for this title. For example, a sports betting app’s core demographic is typically males aged 21 to maybe 35. So we'll use creators who fit within this demographic to ensure authentic, believable content. But it's really important to always test new creator demos because creator talent can reign supreme.

So we've [00:04:00] had advertisers show or let us know that the core audience is 30-something females, but we'll have a fantastic creator who is a male or a creator who presents younger than 30-something. Their creative is so engaging and authentic that it actually wins out over the other creatives with a creator who might look more like the targeted audience.

So it's all about testing. and then especially collaborating at the beginning with the client. 

Jon Jordan: And in terms of the workflow, you're asking them to create a custom bit of content. I mean, that's the UGC bit. So obviously, that's a much more engaged process than you handing them an ad, which I guess maybe was a lot of the influencer stuff before.

So how does that process work out? Because, I can imagine some creators have their own teams to do that stuff. And some of them probably don't. So there's quite a spectrum, I imagine, of how you're dealing with that. 

Nicole Danser: Yeah. I would say there's a give and take between what the advertiser and the creator need.

If the advertiser has very strict creative flexibility, we'll have to get the exact script to them and then work with a [00:05:00] creator who's really good at memorizing a script while also making it feel authentic when they're actually talking about it.

When there's more creative flexibility, we let the creators have a little bit more fun with the script. We give them a general guideline. There are also specific creators that we seek out when they're experts in a specific kind of, like, template or format. So there's the interview on the street style where you need two engaging people who have good mic audio on the street.

Finding the right people for the right format is also an important part of finding creators and matching them up with demographic and brand similarities.

Jon Jordan: But, Sydney, before you talk about sort of testing and obviously, I guess that's adding another sort of friction point in it because obviously, you're doing testing, and some of the testings, you know, well, that just didn't work 

I'm just thinking this is adding a lot of hassle to my job that I'm having to deal with all these sorts of things. I've got to find the creatives. I've got to match it all up. And then maybe it's not going to work. And so from that point of view, is it, am I being overly pessimistic about just the amount of hassle that you're dealing with to get [00:06:00] these ads out?

Sydney Bruce: I think we have a pretty good system down. Our team's been in the UGC realm for over four years now. And then, we work really closely with our account managers or creative performance managers to get the ads tested.

So once they are ready, we'll set a priority for testing cadence. This is usually based on previous performance metrics for similar UGC or similar titles. However, if a creator submits an outstanding UGC video that we believe will perform really well, we'll probably set it as a higher testing priority.

However there are multiple strategies behind testing UGC. So do we want to test the creator? Do we want to test the script or the concept? Do we want to test the same creator, and the same script but a different UI or gameplay asset within the UGC? So from there, we can run AB tests for any of these variables to determine what performs best.

And then I think on top of that, to achieve like [00:07:00] maximum impact, well, you know, look at the data and make any adjustments, and then we can make iterations on the UGC. So we'll continue to refine it based on testing results. For example, we may see a piece of UGC that works really well as a short-form video, so less than 30 seconds. And then we see a top-performing asset, within the same testing placement, also less than 30 seconds. How can we incorporate these two creatives? We'll stitch them together. To make a long-form iteration. And then another example is we may see a piece of UGC that's working really well as a portrait orientation, so we can make a landscape orientation to test in those ad placements as well. So it sounds like a lot and maybe it is, but we've been in this space for so long that it kind of just feels natural at this point. 

Jon Jordan: And can you give us, I mean, obviously, all these things are very different, but in terms of an average sort of campaign, how many sort of creators would you be working with and how much, because effectively what [00:08:00] you're doing is just saying, When this works, this sort of format is a better way of engaging with an audience than other types of UA. So it's basically a numbers game. So, roughly how many creators do you need to work with?

Can you give a number to that? Or is that just an inane question? 

Sydney Bruce: So we have our own creator platform. We have hundreds of creators that we're working with. We have a dedicated creator team who actually manages the creators personally. They will help coach our creators to make better quality ads.

But I think the specific UGC campaigns we're doing for advertisers really varies depending on how long we've been working with the client and their goals. For example, a successful UGC campaign looks different for a client who has never tested UGC before. In that case, we would have a lot of creators; we would have a lot of different concepts and value propositions. So that way we can test to understand what works best in this [00:09:00] case. This is why learning what type of UGC does not work is just as important as learning what does perform well. A Successful campaign for an advertiser that we've been working with for a while would include UGC creators and creatives from creators who have top-performing tested UGC.

So, there is probably a smaller pool of creators there, and the ideas and iterations would come from data-driven metrics that we've seen before. For these advertisers, a successful campaign includes creatives that are hitting their KPIs, driving installs and app purchases, and having a strong return on ad spend.

Jon Jordan: I mean, that's what it all boils down to, isn't it? Yeah. Fundamentally, you're not adding all this sort of complexity for no reason. I mean, I'll ask the questions, and maybe, maybe they're inane questions, and you can't sort of answer them in the precision I want, but for the level of work you're putting in even with your streamlined flow, it seems like quite a lot of work.

So on, say, a best-performing sort of ad that you're creating this way, could you say how much more effective it would be [00:10:00] than what we might consider a standard sort of UA ad? Would they be twice as good, three times as good, or would you be hoping for them to be more than that?

Nicole Danser: I don't have stats. Maybe Sydney might, but what I've seen a lot of the times with advertisers that don't have UGC, and then we start making media for them, is that we'll watch as more and more of our ads get cycled into the testing process. That they'll hit the top spenders. Sometimes it doesn't happen, and we have to innovate and figure out new ways to make the ad work, but when UGC comes up against maybe something that's full gameplay and full user interface, It is more engaging, and it gets more clicks and downloads we've seen.

And that's not to say that it's all UGC is the star and is doing everything, because we often are deciding, well, there's a top performing gameplay, we can add that we can stitch within this. We can have the UGC, we can have the creator reacting to the top gameplay. We can have them show their phone and then cut into [00:11:00] the gameplay.

So it's a nice collaboration between UGC and top-performing gameplay of some sort. 

Jon Jordan: Do you think there are any genres that it worked particularly well for? I mean, in my stereotypical way, I'm maybe seeing more female-skewed sort of games because maybe that's more of the consumption of those sorts of things, but probably I'm totally wrong. Is there any genre that's better? Can you talk a bit about how it works on that sort of, the type of, game that you're, that you're trying to sort of advertise?

Nicole Danser: I mean, in a similarity to sort of a sports betting, something that uses real money gaming of some sort of like Papaya with their solitaire cash, that was one of the examples that I was thinking of when you bring it, we bring in our UGC, and then all of a sudden like top 10 of the ads are all of ours. I think it's important to have [00:12:00] UGC for those ads because you want to show off the ethos and reliability of this app because it's real money at stake. 

So it requires noting the reliability of payouts and the social proof of its credibility through the app ratings and the creator talking to the screen, saying like, Hey, this is legitimate. I have won money from this. You aren't going to get in a bad situation. So that's one of the ones that we've seen work really well for our All formats: talking directly to the camera and interviewing on the street like a skit between two people.

Sydney Bruce: I think to add to that, Nicole, I think a good way to look at this is if UGC is not performing for a vertical, we probably just haven't found the right concept or script or value prop to use yet. And that just requires more testing, just like any creative UGC or non [creative]. It just requires a lot of testing and understanding of the app to know what will push users to hit their goals. 

Jon Jordan: I [00:13:00] guess there are certain types of creators that you sort of worked with. So you tend to be more focused on that. And there are just other areas that, for whatever reason, haven't been. So you just haven't got that experience of working with them to know what works. 

Sydney Bruce: Yeah. We definitely watch social media trends pretty heavily to know what can transfer from Meta and TikTok. So we'll go through phases where, you know, if there's a TikTok trend, like an interview on the street, there will probably be a new social media trend in a few months that we'll have to find different creators for that we don't have access to right now, but they're always available to do UGC for us once we find them.

Jon Jordan: It's funny you mentioned the Papaya one cause I actually saw those ads, and they're actually quite funny. So there's sort of, like, they get through the trust thing because, as you say, you're sort of doing things in the app, and then you're getting real money out of there, but they stood out as being funny, you know in a very influencer type way where they were over the top funny, you know, but I guess that's what you're aiming for.

Nicole Danser: It's always interesting to balance entertainment and trying to weave in the [00:14:00] value propositions. How can you stay high-energy and interesting enough to capture people's attention while still driving home the points—not just the points that you can win money but also that it is reliable and still doing that well?

Sometimes, using really goofy formats is interesting. I think we've seen even these formats when they're goofy, still work for things that are, even non-gaming, like crypto apps, credit apps, and things like that. It really just depends, and it's all about experimentation to figure out how goofy you can be and how much credibility you can sort of squeeze from that kind of format.

Jon Jordan: And how involved are the influencers involved with this. I imagine, again, it's a bit of a spectrum, but when you were talking there about sort of different types of apps, I guess something like crypto, that sort of influence to have a very particular take on how they would, on what, you know, they're not so bothered about the content, maybe if this is an ad, but how they would present that they just are inherent, this is how I sort of do these things.

And that's how [00:15:00] my audience is. So how does, how do they feed back into the process? Do you see more of that? 

Nicole Danser: Yeah. So a lot of them have made hundreds, if not thousands, of ads on our apps.

I would say that these creators have made hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of media for their TikTok pages or Instagram reel pages. They have a very specific way that they like to do things. We can always tell them like, hey, we'd actually like you to try something in a different way, but because they honed themselves for capturing the attention of a very specific type of audience, we kind of believe in them and their style 

If it doesn't work, then, you know, we'll try a different creator and a different way of presenting the energy. But they also take feedback well, so that is also something lovely to deal with. 

Jon Jordan: I guess it's talking about the attention economy and all that sort of stuff.

How quickly do the methods get used up? Because obviously everyone's looking at what everyone else is doing, and you're looking to see what the trends are, as you mentioned, Sydney, And I guess part of the freshness of this stuff is that it's [00:16:00] new, which means that people, yeah, you're, you're finding out something that works really well.

And then I guess over time you get a bit diminishing returns on it because sort of it becomes, you know, interviews on the street, not that I don't think that, you know, that becomes, oh yeah, everyone's doing that. So how quickly does that sort of stuff happen, or is it a little bit slower than I'm suggesting?

Nicole Danser: I think it's slower definitely in mobile advertising than it is on DSPs like TikTok cause that's, like, people have got short attention spans. There's a new audio clip already that's hitting the charts that you've got to make your new dance to. But for us, if you can get onto the concept and the format first, that means that you have like legs up, you'll have a month up on it, we're giving out maybe two, four over other folks who don't have the resources that we have to find these creators and make these ads. Interview on the street still works for us because just because you see that it works for another app doesn't mean you have the resources to go out and find these creators, get those scripts drafted, and figure out what works.

So I think it’s a slower turnover with the formats that we use. and when we do see that an ad no longer works because people have seen [00:17:00] it, we switch things up, we change the location, we change the hook, just because a person on TikTok sees one interview on the street once doesn't mean that they're going to next time they see another one, skip through it because like, Oh, I've seen that format.

But you haven't seen the actual internal content, which is where an interesting hook comes up: "Oh, I didn't know this was an ad about so and so app" because the question that they ask at first has nothing to do with what I expect the app to be about. 

Jon Jordan: And, again, this will be a length of string sort of answer I suppose. But in terms of like sort of campaign lengths, is this sort of, you mentioned that you would, you know, during a, maybe a campaign, you’d have like a core sort of a bit of content, and then you'd be changing that up, maybe putting in new, new gameplay or, you know, you can sort of remix it to use a sort of different term.

Could you give us an idea of how a campaign runs for a month, and you'd do 10 different variations? Obviously, it will be; all these things could be shorter or longer, but just to get a rough feel of how long these things are going on for and how much you are [00:18:00] changing it up.

Could you give me an idea about that? 

Sydney Bruce: Yeah, I can touch on this. I think a best practice for gathering enough learnings is to test a creative for at least a month. We've had instances where a creative might go live, but it doesn't actually take off and start performing for two weeks, so then, you know, if you were to pause it after two weeks, you would never have gotten the insights. We've seen creatives run over a year where we've had to extend the license with the creator, so it varies. And then there's also seasonality. For example, we're working with a sports betting app. The NFL season is coming up. So that's going to be a really good time to start testing our UGC. They'll probably run from September all the way to February, and we'll make iterations and produce new creatives throughout that entire NFL season for the advertiser.

Jon Jordan: That kind of makes sense. And if a good campaign can have that duration, then it sort of makes sense. All the work you're doing in the early stages to sort of get the thing up and running. I was thinking if you're changing these things all the time, that makes more sense. And in terms of, you know, [00:19:00] for particularly on the, I guess, the game side, now.

You know, I don't know how many people or what percentage of mobile game UA would be using this if people are thinking about it or come across this for the first time. Could you give any advice on what they should be thinking about? It seems like a very important technique.

So if people aren't using it, I guess they should be; at least, I assume you would say they should have been investigating it. So if people are interested, but not knowing anything, What are the next steps for them to be thinking about using it and getting engaged?

Nicole Danser: Well, if you want to work for Liftoff, we can definitely offer it. Sydney, I think you probably have a slightly more nuanced take. 

Sydney Bruce: I think knowing your audience and what works well within your app is important. But the main thing is to be open to testing, be open to experimenting.

You may think you know the right creator and the right value proposition, but you would be surprised at how many other things could work. We have some clients whose primary audience is 35 [00:20:00] plus-year-old females, and younger male creators might actually work.

It's just about finding what will engage the audience and actually retain the users. So just be open to experimenting. 

Jon Jordan: And I guess we go back to Nicole's point. I mean, obviously, you know, people might have ideas about, you know, this is our audience. This is our segmentation that probably knows that sort of stuff, but companies like Liftoff, I guess other companies are there, but we're talking about Liftoff here.

You'd sort of do that heavy lifting for them. I mean, that's the expertise you bring to the table. They don't need to know any influencers or anything like that. That's the sort of process that you would take them through. 

Sydney Bruce: Come to us. We're super collaborative, and that's what I love about working with the clients because, as I said, they know their app, their brand, they know it best, but we know the creator side, the UGC side. So when we work together, performance really grows, and it's cool to see. 

Jon Jordan: As we finish, it is always difficult to look to the future, but do you have any pointers about how you think the industry is moving?

Any trends you think will be particularly supercharged in [00:21:00] the next year or so? 

Nicole Danser: I'm particularly interested in the collaboration between UGC and interactive ads like Playables. We've seen that work in the past quarter where even previously successful interactive ads with just a little bit of UGC response at the end, based on how the ad went for them if they won or lost.

The mini-game within the interactive ad—I think that's definitely going to become more prevalent. I'm really excited about creating more of those creatives, so you'll see them around. We've even got creators in banner ads at some point or different, different types of non-gaming and gaming interactives.

Jon Jordan: Any closing words for you, Sydney? 

Sydney Bruce: I think in terms of what's next for UGC it's really going to be dependent on what the creators are coming up with on social platforms.

Like we follow those trends and it transfers really well into DSPs. So, like I said, we're always watching what's next. We're trying to make those [00:22:00] social media trends into ads. So yeah, I think that's kind of what's next. It's going to be, depend on what the creators are putting out there and how we can tweak those into ad placements 

Nicole Danser: And not to throw an entirely different topic at the very end.

Jon Jordan: Oh, go for it. 

Sydney Bruce: We love it. 

Nicole Danser: With sort of the combination of AI and UGC. I know everybody thinks AI is the future. It's probably because it is. But utilizing AI in order to not necessarily do a zero-to-one ad with AI, but using tools to translate them into different geos or figuring out how to slightly tweak the language so that you don't have to have a creator film two exact pieces of media with just one slight variable change. Like there's a way to use AI to make that small change. So there's a lot of opportunity with AI. I know it's a hot topic.

Jon Jordan: It's a hot topic. Cause I guess generally think when it comes to AI, there's, sort of the immediate and maybe, medium-term productivity, [00:23:00] efficiency sort of things where it's doing these small tweaks. And then I guess there's the much broader sort of conceptual idea of letting AI go off and do its own things, which probably won't be discussed now, but both of those have, one of them is obviously, maybe a bit further in the future, but they're both exciting in their own way.

And AI is definitely usable right now. So, no, that's really, I really enjoyed that. I feel I am much more educated now and, and I think, you know, as a closing remark for me, someone who sort of to a degree sort of looked at the use of sort of influencers generally in sort of gaming advertising.

What you've been explaining to me here makes total sense. Obviously, you're using the influencers' sort of audience and their style, their voice, so to speak, in the advert, but you've built these processes where you're shaping them to make effective adverts.

So it actually sort of seems like the maturing of influencers, you know, this process is exactly what was required. Cause I guess a few years ago, we saw influencers making loads of money doing ads that probably didn’t perform very well,  but they sort of seemed like, oh, you know, you could get headlines for you doing ads with these well-known people, but didn't actually work and wasn't really [00:24:00] scalable across, all the games and apps that you guys work with.

Nicole Danser: Yeah, we get to be slightly more in control of the script. So it's not just clickbait that gets a download, but somebody deletes the app immediately. We can know the correct combination of what gets the user's attention while also what features we can feature in the game to get the folks that will be long-term players.

It's a balance. 

Jon Jordan: Well, thank you very much to Nicole and Sydney for their expertise. 

Nicole Danser: Thank you. It was a lovely time. 

Jon Jordan: Well, you can come back. I don't often get such kind words. But thanks to you for watching and listening. Remember every episode. We are talking to people who are building out the whole mobile games industry.

We covered everything; we’ve done a bit by UA recently, but we've done AI in the past, and I'm sure we'll be coming back to look at the big trends in mobile gaming in 2024 and 2025. So don't miss out, do subscribe and we'll see you next time. Bye [00:25:00] bye.