The gaming industry is booming. According to a report by New Zoo, the global gaming market was set to hit $159.3 billion in 2020 and Mordor Intelligence says that they expect gaming revenues to hit $256.97 billion by 2025. One of the easiest ways to get your hands on some of that money is through influencer marketing. And, no matter whether you’re a gamer looking to break into influencer marketing, video game developer, or a brand looking for an influencer to work with, these gaming influencer marketing platforms will help you get off on the right foot.
Just like beauty, fashion, and fitness influencers, gaming influencers have a big impact on the purchasing behavior of their followers. As gamers live-stream themselves playing popular video games on platforms like Twitch, Mixer, and YouTube Gaming, they’re able to not only show off the games themselves but the products that they use to make the time they spend gaming more enjoyable.
But can working with popular gaming influencers and content creators really make a difference for your business? You bet it can. Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits of working with gaming influencers.
10 Gaming Influencer Marketing Platforms:
Benefits of Working With Gaming Influencers
Influencers are influencers for a reason. They hold a lot of sway over their followers with many followers looking to the influencers they follow to help them find the right products to purchase. While working with gaming influencers offers innumerable benefits, here are what we consider to be the top three.
Gaming Industry Growth
As we’ve already mentioned, the gaming industry is constantly growing. There are more than 2.7 billion gamers and the gaming industry is on track to keep up a 12% rate of growth over the next few years. With all of this growth, it’s likely that the number of gaming influencers will increase dramatically, too. We may even see new gamer streaming platforms coming into play, joining the existing popular platforms like Twitch, Steam, YouTube Gaming, and others.
Reach and Traffic
Gamers tend to have large, loyal, and very engaged followers. Their audiences enjoy watching them play their videogames of choice and the best gaming influencers are great at narrating their gaming in an interesting, almost stream-of-consciousness way. Ultimately, gamers are just like their followers and their followers recognize and appreciate that.
Engagement Through Multiple Touchpoints
Brands have a chance to reach their target audience through multiple touchpoints with gaming influencers. Gaming influencers can be invaluable for brands releasing new video games or gaming-related products through downloads, purchases, and promotional marketing.
10 Gaming Influencer Marketing Platforms
Ready to take your gaming to the next step by becoming a gaming influencer? Or maybe you’re a brand looking for an influencer partnership? Either way, here are 10 gaming influencer marketing platforms that will help you meet your goals.
Services Offered: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Third Party Analytics, Influencer Content Amplification
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube
Pricing: Custom
Grin is an influencer marketing platform that’s been around since 2014. They’re one of the best gaming influencer marketing platforms because they understand the value that influencers bring to the table. This platform makes it easy to integrate all of your favorite marketing tools, from social platforms to eCommerce solutions to communication tools. Grin’s main audience target is eCommerce businesses and the platform makes it easy to manage your influencers, ship products, create tracking links for commissions, and more.
Grin not only offers email marketing integration options but SMS and Slack, too. This makes it easier to reach Generation Z where they are—which might not be email. Plus, you can keep your communication options in a single place, making it a whole lot easier to keep track of what’s going on. In addition to communication tools, Grin includes everything you need for successful influencer marketing: finding the right influencers, relationship management, content management, analytics, reporting, payments, and more. The platform also includes a lookalike tool so you can find new creators who are similar to your top-performing influencers.
If you’re interested in getting the most out of your influencer content, Grin’s got what you need for that, too. You can automatically pull influencer content and user-generated content into a single location, making it easy to find, track, and repurpose your content as you see fit. You can also see and track the performance of your influencer marketing strategies, tracking engagements, likes, views, and sales.
Services Offered: Campaign Management, Influencer Marketplace, Third Party Analytics, Influencer Content Amplification, Global Influencer Payment, Fraud Detection and Audience Health
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok
Pricing: Starts at $299/month
If you’re looking for something outside the traditional models of influencer marketing, #paid might be for you. This was the first platform to target influencer marketing campaigns to different segments of sales and marketing funnels. Like Grin, #paid understands that influencers are influencers because they have taken the time to grow and nurture an audience, creating and sharing content that resonates with their target audience and adding value. Instead of focusing solely on reach, #paid is a gaming influencer marketing platform that seeks to pair brands with influencers that are a good fit.
With #paid, brands can find the right influencers based on their goals and the scope of their project. But #paid goes a bit deeper than that, letting brands use Whitelisted Ads, where specific creators and content for paid Facebook ads and Instagram ads are whitelisted. Then, brands can connect with Facebook Ads Manager to push those ads to their timelines and feeds using the creator’s name. This makes the content look more authentic because, while it will still be tagged as a sponsored post, the content doesn’t come from the brand’s own account.
Influencers who want to participate in a brand’s influencer marketing campaigns can raise their hand to show their interest. From there, the influencer will send a message to the brand, letting them know why they’re a good choice for the campaign and what their strategy will be.
Services Offered: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Third Party Analytics
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitch, Blogs
Pricing: Not public
CreatorIQ is a gaming influencer marketing platform that seeks to make influencer marketing easier as well as minimizing problems like inflated reach metrics, follower fraud, and inauthentic influencers. It integrates with social platform APIs and uses a powerful AI-based algorithm to analyze more than 1 billion public social accounts to determine if they should be added to the platform’s database of more than 15 million creator accounts.
The AI then assigns an Integrity Quotient to each influencer to help brands understand how authentic the influencer’s audience is so they can decide which influencers they want to work with and invite them to join the brand’s network.
Services Offered: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Third Party Analytics
Channels: Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Tiktok, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs
Pricing: Not public
Upfluence is one of the more mature influencer marketing platforms around. It was founded in 2013 and has grown to hold a database of more than 4 million influencers who have a collective reach of billions of followers. Upfluence clients can search through the database to find just the right influencers using more than 20 filters. Users can also use the platform’s social listening capabilities to monitor influencers they’re interested in as well as their own competitors.
Upfluence makes it easy to manage influencer marketing campaigns, set up budgets and campaign goals, create customized briefs for each campaign, and start working with influencers. You can also pay creators directly from the platform.
Services Offered: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Influencer Marketplace
Channels: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs
Pricing: Not public
AspireIQ works with Instagram and YouTube, offering a self-service platform with an opt-in database of more than six million influencers. While anybody can sign up for AspireIQ, creators need to meet certain criteria in order to view brands or campaigns (more than 500 Instagram likes or 2,500 YouTube views).
Influencers that meet the AspireIQ criteria will be added to the searchable database and can see proposals from brands. The search process is easy, using a Tinder-esque Quickmatch system to match up brands and influencers.
Services Offered: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Third Party Analytics
Channels: Twitter, Blogs
Pricing: Not public
Talkwalker is a social data analytics software company that includes an influencer marketing platform that gaming influencers can use to connect with the brands looking for them. The platform seeks to make it easy for brands to find the influencers that match their needs as well providing the tools brands need to track the impact those influencers have on their marketing campaigns. Brands can use Talkwalker to identify influencers and dig deeper into social data to find new ways to collaborate and connect. Talkwalker uses high-quality data with more than 50 filters to make it fast and easy for brands to find the insights they need to drive marketing success.
Services Offered: Influencer Search & Discovery, Campaign Management
Channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat
Pricing: Annual fees range from $50K–$500K
NeoReach is a digital marketing platform that connects influencers across niches (including gaming) to the brands that need them. The platform uses an algorithm to mine social media platforms for data and indexes that data through their platform. As a result of this algorithm, brands can get direct access to data for more than 5 million influencers. NeoReach, as you could probably tell from the pricing mentioned above, is not designed for small to medium businesses. For larger businesses, NeoReach provides not only influencer data but several tools to help brands find influencers, run influencer marketing campaigns, track the performance of those campaigns, and report out.
Services Offered: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Influencer Marketplace, Third Party Analytics
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Blogs
Pricing: Custom
Mavrck is a full-service influencer marketing platform with more than 10 million micro-influencers and 102+ million social profiles. The platform lets brands connect their existing online presence and setting up a dedicated site or page for customers to log in. Mavrck will examine the social data of those customers and if they’re deemed to be influential, Mavrck will encourage those people to become brand ambassadors for your brand.
Services Offered: Campaign Management, Influencer Marketplace
Channels: Snapchat, Instagram Stories, TikTok
Pricing: £3000 minimum spend
Fanbytes has long been dedicated to reaching Generation Z and Millennials. It’s built into the platform’s mission to “help brands win the hearts of Gen Z and Millennials on social media.” They have more than 10,000 curated influencers on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube, and have experience creating viral campaigns for clients across channels. The platform itself gives brands everything they need to track and measure the effects of their influencer marketing campaigns from a single dashboard.
Services Offered: Influencer Search & Discovery, Campaign Management, Third Party Analytics
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitch
Pricing: Custom
Julius got its start as Thuzio, a web-based talent agency for athletes who wanted to supplement their income with endorsement deals and appearance fees. Over time, more influencers across different niches joined Thuzio and it eventually became Julius, an influencer search and discovery tool.
Julius offers access to more than 120,000 influencers who have all been researched before being added to the database. Since Julius covers a wide range of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and more, gaming influencers can rest assured that they will find a home here. While Julius does capture tons of data about each influencer in its database, they also have analysts that work on every profile so brands can get a better understanding of the influencers as people instead of data points.
Choose the Right Gaming Influencer Marketing Platform
Gaming influencers looking for an influencer marketing platform to join, video game developers, and brands looking for influencers to partner with can all find the best gaming influencer marketing platform for them by focusing on things like your goals, who you’re trying to reach (your target audience), and the type of content you want to create or share. Fortunately, each of the gaming influencer marketing platforms on this list offers the tools you need to achieve success in your campaigns.