How community managers can contribute more than clicks to help boost revenue

Stay Informed

Get Industry News In Your Inbox…

Sign Up Today

Liza Makhina is the head of publishing at Belka Games.

Have you ever wondered how community managers contribute to revenue growth? The truth is that – right now – most of them don’t since most companies aren’t effectively leveraging their potential.

Many game development companies follow the same flawed path: 

First, they hire skilled community managers and give them totally flawed KPIs and goals. Then, they spend months or even years figuring out how to make their community efforts bring actual profit. Eventually, failing to do so, they give up entirely on this department.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this article, we’ll explore Belka Games’ new approach, which has helped us transform our content strategy and unlock the true revenue-driving power of community managers.

Chapter I: Past mistakes

Community management actually looks perfect on paper. You might say that your team develops and executes content strategy on social media to boost your player retention and drive engagement.

Your community department also keeps up with the latest gaming and social media trends to create high-quality content and grow brand awareness. Sounds cool, right? What’s more, they even monitor player sentiment and share player feedback with the development team.

In reality, however, most community managers across the industry just post memes, publish random update announcements, and run social media giveaways for likes and shares.

They do gather truly valuable feedback from players, but most dev teams don’t really care about it since they already have data analysts giving them everything they could possibly need to know about their players.

So why are community managers doing all these tasks that don’t serve your ultimate goal – revenue growth? Well, probably because you, as a marketing, publishing or player experience professional, set them the wrong goals entirely.

Right now, these goals are probably: 

• Follower count
• Reach and median engagement 
• For any type of video content, most likely the view count and video retention rate 
• And if you’re feeling fancy, you might even look into share of voice and social media sentiment.

Firstly, what’s wrong with the follower count, you might ask? Let me instead ask you the following:

• How much revenue do these followers generate? 
• How many of those followers still have your game installed? 
• Would these people still play your game if you stopped posting on social media tomorrow?

If you can’t back up your answer with numbers, your community manager probably lacks a decent content strategy and can make neither long-term nor short-term decisions when planning posts.

Secondly, if you’re looking into reach and median engagement, let me ask you this: 

• What helped your Facebook reach grow? Was it the quality content posted by your community team or perhaps your paid campaigns running at the exact same time? 
• How many of those who liked or commented on your post actually made an in-game purchase afterwards?

The inability to answer these questions is why community teams aren’t generally provided with decent budgets. After all, why would you waste your money on likes, shares, and views that don’t bring you any in-game purchases? 

Thirdly, share of voice and SM sentiment analyses are… fine, actually. You can keep them. But why do you need these if you don’t know whether, business-wise, your content is even truly effective? 

As someone who’s been working with communities and communications for the past 10 years, let me just say – been there, done that. Now let me help you break this vicious circle.

Chapter II: Setting the right goals

Let’s take a look at the actual KPIs you should be setting for your community department:

1. Revenue generated by users who installed your game through community platforms. When you see how much money your community team brings to the table, it will be much easier to decide whether to invest resources into the community at all.
2. Clicks, installs, CTI, retention, conversion to payment, revenue by install date, etc. These metrics will help you track and analyse your best community creatives and make long-term, data-informed content decisions.
3. Organic reach and engagement rate. These will help you make informed short-term content decisions.
4. These metrics are especially important when it comes to benchmarking. Because you don’t know how effective your content is in comparison to that of your peers in terms of revenue, retention, and CTI. However, you can look into their engagement rate using very basic social monitoring tools. So, this will help you keep up to date not just with “trends,” but with what’s actually working for your competitors right now. 

Chapter III: Keep your skills and tools sharp

Make sure you give your team the proper tools and resources that they’ll 100% need to start doing their job efficiently. These are:

These will help you track clicks, installs, in-app purchases, and retention. Deep links will also help your team spend less time on giveaways and contests. 

These are also a must if you want to save costs on hiring another middle manager to manually update multiple Excel tabs.  

These are essential for making data-informed decisions when planning content and saving time on manual cross-posting. They will also help your team reduce their time spent on feedback monitoring and benchmarking.

Once you have the tools, your next step should be developing a basic content strategy and getting your processes ready. No matter how big your budget is, there’s no need to hire a hot-shot agency right now. Instead, let me give you a hint on how to draw up a very basic but effective community content strategy yourself.

Let’s say you work on a certain game and know for sure that your players will make an in-game purchase if they get in-game themed decor at a 50% discount, for example. But right now, your users are scrolling their social media feeds instead of making such purchases.

So, a post which brings them from their feed to your juicy sale will naturally become your number 1 priority. You can boost it and create the best art or video possible to grab players’ attention and make them stop scrolling and open your game instead.

In this abstract scenario, all other “traditional” community posts like giveaways, tutorials, and dev diaries can be used to warm up the audience before this big announcement. But these posts don’t bring you any money, so you probably want to limit the time and resources spent on brainstorming and content production at this stage. 

In this abstract example, the community manager constantly considers how to generate more revenue from the content they plan and post.

But thinking is hard, right? It’s much easier to take inspiration from your top-grossing peers. If they generate huge revenue, their community managers probably know what they are doing. Wrong. If their product is big and successful, it doesn’t mean their social media content is working that great. 

I’ve already touched upon the topic of benchmarking while speaking about the importance of monitoring engagement rates. So, let me give you just a small example of why you should look into your peers wisely.

Here are some examples of very basic community contests which are obviously engagement rate bait. The first one is Monopoly GO, the second is Travel Town, and our Clockmaker is the third. Look at their engagement rate.

Without having these numbers at hand, we would probably think if these big titles post such detailed banners for simple weekly contests, we should do that too! But right now, our data shows that we actually are nailing these types of posts.

Chapter IV: Time for action

Okay, now that you have your tools, strategy, and benchmarking at hand, you want to test everything out in action. It’s time to create your first proper content plan. 

First of all, focus on what should be driving your revenue. Usually, it’s just a couple of high-content events, season passes, or limited-time offers. These should be the first to go in your plan. 

After that, add warm-ups to boost organic reach and engagement: run giveaways, contests, and any other activities that your community already knows and loves.

Other entertaining content for your loyal fan base has to be very simple in production so that they don’t lose focus. In my experience, tutorials, event calendars, and UGC-contests do not require too much creative effort or budget. So your community manager can keep those, but stay focused on the content that really helps them reach their new business-oriented KPIs.  

Here at Belka, we use Miro’s upgraded content plan template to plan and control the resources we spend on effective community posts. Each line is a week, and each coloured tab is a social media channel.

We also use special tags to highlight top-priority content or posts where we might need help from our creative outsource vendors, use a special deep link, etc. From the very first warm-up to the “last call” announcements, everything is pre-planned and transparent. This shows us the whole picture.

When your content is nicely planned and posted, you can move on to analysis. If you do everything right, you should see almost instant results on your dashboards. 

But before you celebrate your big achievement of making your community management department effective and business-oriented again, I have three final tips for you:

1. Stay sharp and question every content decision you make: analyse your own and your peers’ content weekly, monthly, and quarterly to make informed short- and long-term decisions.
2. Hire people who don’t need constant supervision: good community managers are capable of managing, brainstorming, and analysing the content that they plan to publish.
3. Allow your community team to experiment: now that your basic content works for your business purposes, never stop looking for the next big thing to implement into your team’s workflow.

Because that’s exactly what we’re doing right now. With a very small in-house team, we managed to achieve great results in a very short period of time. Let me share some of them:

• Community revenue: from 0 to 6 figures in a few months
• Organic reach on Facebook: 1.5-2 times larger than pages with the same following
• Engagement rate on Facebook: 8-10 times higher than our peers with much larger fan bases

To sum up, here’s a concise to-do list for you:

1. Set business-oriented KPIs:

• Revenue
• Clicks, installs, CTI, retention, conversion to payment, revenue by install date, etc. 
• Organic reach and engagement rate
• Share of voice, SM sentiment, your game’s rating, etc.

2. Implement deep links, dashboards, AI, social listening, content publishing, and monitoring tools into your workflow.

3. Keep your content strategy KPI-focused and simple. Community posts that drive your revenue should be your #1 priority.

4. Warm-ups and filler content are cool but don’t spend too much time on these.

5. Create a proper content calendar to see the whole picture of your community activities.

6. Monitor your results and peers constantly – but wisely.

7. Be sure to experiment plenty with your community content.