Marketing in eSports For Your Business

If you aren’t already aware, eSports has become a global success that is taking the world by storm. It’s had exceptional yearly growth for the past 5 years and the predicted growth is just as exciting. For those that aren’t up to date on eSports, electronic sports, is a form of sports played primarily on computers.

They feature competitive video games such as League of Legends, Counterstrike and Dota 2 across multiple tournaments across the year. With prize pools reaching into the millions and growing larger every year, eSports is serious business. In 2014 the total prize fund for all eSports tournaments was over 30 million USD. If that wasn’t impressive enough, the viewer count was higher than your average television show!

This surging popularity of eSports has led to the rise of a new platform for marketing your business. Video streaming sites such as Twitch.tv and YouTube now reach more people than traditional television adverts. Not only does it reach more people, but it’s also much cheaper to advertise your business on. One of the biggest benefits of your business marketing in eSports is the cost. Compared to other traditional methods of video advertising, online eSports marketing is considerably cheaper. Almost anyone can sponsor an eSports event, and with a wide range of teams and pro-players, your business can easily get involved.

Marketing in eSports: How Big is it?

When we talk about business and marketing there is only one thing that really matters: money. So how much money is in eSports and how can marketing in eSports bring you a return on your investment? Well in 2015, a report from Superdata valued the global eSports industry at $612 million. The corporate sponsorships in North America were valued at $111 million. To put this into perspective the Wimbledon Tennis Championships are only valued at $65 million in sponsorships. That means marketing in eSports has more money than some traditional sports.

How to Target a Difficult Demographic

Gamers are traditionally a very difficult audience to target. They don’t watch regular television, have spam filters set up on their emails, use ad block on their internet browsers. Traditionally they aren’t very outgoing people and prepare to stay indoors. Fortunately, the eSports core demographic is currently 18-26 year old males. If your business was to take up some marketing in eSports, you would be in the prime advertising position for this difficult to reach target audience. This doesn’t even include the predicted growth. If the growth trends of eSports continue as they are expected this market will only increase and getting in early could have huge benefits for your business.

Can my Business Advertise in eSports?

Currently, there are plenty of opportunities for your business to be represented in the eSports market. You can choose to sponsor an event, a player, or even a team. This will cost your business money, but the potential brand awareness would be huge. You can also run video adverts on streaming websites such as YouTube or Twitch.tv, this carries the same benefits of television advertising. However, this also has the added benefit of the demographic niche you can target. It’s also possible for your business to benefit from SEO and PPC within the ever growing eSports Google market. Esports isn’t just good for traditional businesses either – a huge sub-niche of websites has popped up recently, fulfilling gamers wishes and requirements for more and more eSports products. In a similar way to football fans buying a new full set of kit to try and emulate the pros, we see gamers wanting to buy league of legends accounts to emulate their heroes, or even making money through selling their own gaming skins or accounts.