WHO DO YOU TARGET WHEN YOU ADVERTISE IN ESPORTS?

If you want to drive your next marketing campaign towards gamers, esports is a great market to dive into.

But within esports there's still a variety of consumer types, with a wide scope of how they enjoy games, and how they engage with the content. We’re here to help you determine the demographic you’re working with to get the best possible outcome for your campaign.

ESPORTS FANS ARE JUST GAMERS…. RIGHT? WRONG!

Esports fans are among the most passionate and hungry for content in the gaming space. Why? Because they're constantly seeking out more information not just as fans, but as casual gamers, aspirational gamers and professionals. Unlike sports fans, esports fans aren’t just spectators, and a lot of them play games themselves and actively take part in the wider gaming community. We've spoken about this breakdown in an article previously here, where we talked to academic esports researcher Chris McCutcheon about why esports is a smart investment for brands. Today we’re going to go into a bit more detail as he breaks esports fans down into four key categories.

Fans - These are people who enjoy watching and following the world of esports but don’t necessarily play the games. This would be similar to the persona of a “Popcorn Gamer” Newzoo (A marketing insights hub for gaming) has available on its website. 54% of this market is male and 46% of this market is female, with the median age of 29. You can see the full breakdown from newzoo here.

Casual Gamers - People that play the games for enjoyment. They do invest time into consuming esports content but mostly it will be games and properties that will appeal to their gameplay such as patch updates, new heroes, new skins and everything in between. We offer this information to our fans heavily on Dot Esports to cater to this type of gamer.

Aspirational Gamers - Aspirational fans are people who take gaming a bit more seriously and aim to pursue a career in the world of streamers. You’ll often find them playing for ranks, on twitch doing live streams or at grassroots tournaments looking to make a name for themselves. They will follow esports and attend a lot of live events and streams in order to keep up-to-date on the latest tournament standings and seek out content regularly. This category would have a lot of what Newzoo categorises as “Ultimate Gamers”.

Ultimate Gamers live and breathe anything gaming. They are regularly consuming gaming and gaming related content. These types of gamers have a lot of disposable income as well. The median age for this category is 28 and 65% of the audience is male. You can refer to the full breakdown from Newzoo here.

Professional - The smallest pool of esports fans but they are the most influential among esports fans. They will get a lot of live coverage and news coverage in esports and many of them have fan pages or personal social media channels where they interact with fans directly.

There are a wide variety of gamers and personalities that fit into these four categories, and this is not a 100% inclusive list, but Newzoo helps define some of these core personalities and how much of the market they take up.

Newzoo breaks these personas into 9 distinct categories; Time filler, lapsed gamer, cloud gamer, ultimate gamer, popcorn gamer, all-round enthusiast, hardware enthusiast, backseat viewer and conventional player.

GAMURS GROUP CAN HELP YOU TARGET THESE AUDIENCES

As the leading esports media network, we want to connect you with a passionate, untapped, tech savvy audience. We use organic reach across all of our platforms and work to produce the highest engagement possible. You can find information on exactly who you’d be targeting through GAMURS Group brands in a basic overview on our website here.