Just two months ago, SLG was recognized by many as one of the most rolling tracks in the industry. Especially in the Three Kingdoms SLG market, where there are already two head products of "The Shore of the Land" and "Three Kingdoms: Strategic Edition", and there are no less than thousands of other related theme products, it seems that it is difficult to have a new product to become the head and squeeze in to share a piece of the cake.
However, after the launch of "Three Kingdoms: Plot the World", it maintained the top 10 of the best-selling game list for more than a month, and the estimated turnover in the first month may exceed 800 million yuan. These achievements are really beyond the expectations of many people.
About its gameplay, ecology, differentiation...... We've all talked a lot in previous articles, but when it comes to marketing, it seems like there's a lot of unanswered questions. For example, is it smashed by buying volume? If not, what did it do right to break through in the trilateral SLG market?
Recently, Grape Jun and Jin Chen, the head of the boutique game in the interactive entertainment industry of Giant Engine, have reviewed the marketing logic of "Three Schemes" from the beginning, which may be able to answer some questions about it. And from the marketing actions of this new product, you can also see some changes in the situation of SLG in 2024.
First, let's take a look at the impact of "Three Schemes" on the SLG market from a platform perspective:
In the past 2 years, the overall consumption scale of SLG has been stable in huge quantities. Until the launch of "Three Schemes" on June 13, SLG's market has grown significantly. However, the circle-breaking marketing of "Three Schemes" hit many pan-users who are not SLG core players, and the payment cost fell by 20% year-on-year, and the recovery of the overall SLG market also increased by 15-20%.
Wait, they all say that "Three Schemes" broke the circle, but how to prove that it really broke the circle?
From our point of view, we may use the discussions of some young people around us, the memes of college students, and even the emojis of group friends to provide evidence. But these are ultimately subjective and perceptual examples, and it is difficult to use them as objective arguments.
The perspective of the huge amount is different: after analyzing the user portraits and user migration data of the platform through the cloud map, they found that the user source of "Sanmou" in the byte series products does not coincide with the platform's SLG market very high.
Further, in the user tags of "Three Schemes", the top five are Generation Z, urban silver-haired, cutting-edge white-collar workers, as well as highly educated young and middle-aged and elderly people. These groups of people are mainly young people, which is obviously different from our impression of SLG basic users who are mainly middle-aged.
How is such a breakthrough achieved at the marketing level? This has to start with the positioning of "Three Schemes" at the beginning.
The Three Kingdoms SLG is too rolly, on the one hand, "The Shore of the Land" and "The Three Kingdoms · Strategic Edition has already washed most of the SLG users, and it is difficult to wash the new product again; On the other hand, the stickiness of SLG users is also very high, and on the basis of a high degree of familiarity with a product, it is very difficult for new products to make them shift positions.
Therefore, if a new product like "Three Schemes" wants to break the game, it is destined to find another way on the basis of attracting traditional users, and then find some different increments.
Such an innate positioning determines many of its subsequent strategies. At the level of gameplay, it may be reflected in measures such as burden reduction and krypton reduction; At the marketing level, what it has to do is to seize the node of the warm-up and the first explosive period, and quickly realize the "integration of planting and harvesting".
This is an e-commerce concept, which is a bit abstract to say, but it will be much easier to understand if you explain it with the "O5A" model that we talked about before - in simple terms, it is a model that uses a funnel structure to layer users, from O to A1, A2...... A5 corresponds to different user behaviors, and this process is a process of converting public domain users into private domain fans/core users.
Applying this model to the emerging SLG product, the situation looks like this:
The first step is to plant grass - they should use innovative material styles and selling points to reach the majority of user groups with richer marketing methods, and lay a good foundation for A1+A2 grass planting users.
In this step, Judu will have some help as a platform, such as providing a new image tile style that highlights the selling points of game elements, which can increase the click-through rate of game ads by about 10%;
In terms of target group acquisition, a large number of opportunity groups + bidding disturbance strategies can be provided, so that the conversion rate of the target group can be increased by 5-10%, and some core users will be won for the product more effectively;
For example, in terms of material supply, after using Xingguang Liantou products to match suitable influencer creative materials, the payment cost of the product will be reduced by more than 25%, and the CVR (the proportion of users from clicking on the ad to completing the conversion) will be more than 7 times.
These means, coupled with the support of the overall global marketing plan, can make the product have a solid A1+A2 foundation. Taking "Sanmou" as an example, its A1+A2 data in the early stage is 23.6% higher than SLG's market data.
The second step is harvest - on this basis, the emerging SLG products should strike while the iron is hot and convert as many A2 users as possible into A3 users. After completing this harvesting process, things will go much smoother, because SLG users can go to A3, and they can basically play in and form a certain stickiness.
To put it bluntly, there is one goal: to increase the conversion value of A3/A2 - at least to outperform the data of other traditional products.
To achieve this goal, rely on highly targeted content marketing. Because the young user group does not reject advertising, but only rejects pure slogan-style brainwashing marketing advertising. If there's something new and valuable, they're happy to know about it.
In this regard, you can clearly feel that "Three Schemes" is particularly well prepared. We talked about it before, and they cooperated with various UP masters at station B; In the byte series products, they also put a lot of effort into content marketing. For example, in a number of different content directions, KOLs and KOCs are cast in a large area of the talent pool, and the best content directions are screened out from the middle layers, and then accurately expand the influencers in these directions.
Judging from the game materials released by "Three Schemes", the content direction they mainly show includes the core gameplay of the game, the display of military generals, and game benefits.
There is a very special difference between these materials: medium-length videos of more than 15 seconds account for more than 80% of the overall materials, which is significantly higher than the material structure of similar SLGs. And there are 5% of the head material, which contributes 50% of the consumption. Excellent content quality brings a cost-effective performance that fits the quality, and also reflects the effect of layers of screening in the early stage.
At this step, the A3/A2 conversion rate of "Three Schemes" is 30% higher than that of SLG's market data, which well realizes the strategy of integrating planting and harvesting.
Of course, there's more than one way to increase conversions. In recent years, live streaming is also a promising way of content marketing.
First of all, its creator ecosystem is solid. Taking Douyin as an example, game content creators in Q1 2024 increased by 181% year-on-year. Among them, creators of different sizes with millions of fans, 100,000 and 100,000 or less have all increased by more than 20%.
In the form of live broadcasts, manufacturers are becoming more and more active. You may think that SLG live broadcast can only be played or gacha, but this year, there are some emerging SLGs that have done a good job of exploration. For example, "Beast Lord" set up a stage specifically for the live broadcast and invited many guests. even combined with the content of the game, specially went to the zoo to shoot on the spot, coupled with the interaction with a sense of the net, the beauty explained, and danced...... It went out of the loop without any surprises.
After understanding this, do you still think that SLG is a category that can only maintain its performance by buying volume and spending money?
The actions and achievements of many emerging SLGs are probably enough to show that although SLG is very heavy on buying volume, its growth does not depend on buying volume alone. Huge also mentioned that since the second half of last year, SLG's marketing model has undergone great changes, and the content ecology has become the key to SLG's continuous operation. The proportion of content marketing for many products has even reached half of the purchase volume.
Taking a certain domestic Three Kingdoms SLG as an example, it has launched a large-scale UGC creation incentive program in recent years to encourage all players to create content, and the official will sign contracts with some excellent creators to guide them to continue creating, bringing a wave of content explosion. Since then, they have also found that this program has continued to explode the popularity and downloads of the product, increased revenue by 30%, and DAU has hit a new high in the past three years.
And after analyzing the user portraits on Douyin, they found that the proportion of users between the ages of 18 and 30 exceeded 30% of the total. It's a counterintuitive thing to do - SLG users are "rejuvenating", living younger and younger.
With such changes, it is not difficult to feel that the SLG market still has considerable potential, because there are still many young users waiting to be tapped. And the creative potential of creators in content is also immeasurable. Even if Station B sends "Three Schemes" very well, it can only be said that they have found the right direction and discovered the potential of some creators, but it cannot be said that the Three Kingdoms SLG has been hollowed out again.
Huge also mentioned that in addition to being younger and more content-oriented, as the mini game market continues to be hot, SLG mildness has also become another new trend. The explosion of "Endless Winter" proves the huge potential of this direction. How to reduce the burden while retaining the core strategy and war gameplay of SLG, and continue to explore in combination with diversified themes, will be a new opportunity for the SLG market in the future.
For latecomers, if we can return to the essence of strategy in terms of gameplay, pay attention to content quality in marketing, find incremental users in terms of purchase volume, and play new tricks in more directions of content creativity, there will be more new dividends in the SLG market.