In the summer of 2021, Goat partnered with the miniature wargaming powerhouse Games Workshop to attract more people into the wild and untamed land of Ghur, and invite them to pick a side in the never-ending war over the Mortal Realms. This is the story of how we ran a social campaign for Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
The Objective
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is a fantasy miniatures wargame released in 2016, and Games Workshop’s second-biggest IP. With a niche but strong existing audience, Games Workshop tasked Goat with harnessing the power of influencers to capture new and receptive fans and customers for their new edition of the game; leveraging a new CGI trailer for the first phase, followed by the release of new beginner sets that include everything needed to start painting and playing.
Both the first and second phases were a mix of organic and paid influencers to reach our objectives of raising awareness of the new edition, generating new spending customers and building positive sentiment within new demographics.
What We Delivered
Across the 37 influencers and the 133 pieces of content created during the two months of the campaign, over 8.4 million people were reached. The content was engaged with 3.9 million times, resulting in sales and the client earning back their budget and more. The average sentiment stood at 98.2% positive, achieving our goal of setting a highly positive opinion of Age of Sigmar within new audiences.
The Campaign
The brief given to influencers was broad – instructing them to promote the Warhammer hobby through one or several of its four parts: collect, build, paint and play. This allowed them to take on parts of Age of Sigmar that spoke to them the most, signalling to their audiences that there is no wrong way to enjoy the hobby.
133 pieces of content were created, including long-form YouTube videos featuring battle tutorials and diorama creations, and guides on how to get started in Age of Sigmar. There were painting sessions live on Twitch where influencers of different painting skills painted the new starter set, Instagram Stories that introduced audiences to the hobby, how to get started and what they’ll need, and there were painting progress shots and calls for tips on Instagram and Twitter.
The Influencers
For this campaign, we knew we wanted to pick influencers who reflected a series of verticals that were adjacent to miniature gaming, such as board games, role-playing games, video games and fantasy TV and film. We wanted to test each vertical to see which was more receptive to Warhammer in order to narrow our efforts and optimize our strategy.
As such, we picked 12 organic influencers that represented these verticals, spread between the UK and US, and platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Discord. This was bolstered by 25 publishers across Instagram and Facebook that could amplify our assets to highly targeted audiences.
Optimisation
Between the first and second phases, we turned to our social data and Paid Social team, as well as organic KPIs to judge the success of the different verticals – finding that those who identified as ‘roleplaying gamers’ were exceptionally more engaged by the trailer, and were driving clicks to the custom information site as well as generating sales.
Because of this we returned our Paid Social strategy for phase 2, as well as turned a focus onto our roleplaying content creators. As this campaign was designed to drive awareness and interest from new customers, we focused on how the product would appeal to this vertical and doubled down on this. When briefing organic content creators, we worked closely with them to find what they found most attractive about the product and the world of Age of Sigmar, utilising that knowledge to steer the creative to fit their audience in the best way possible. The result was some of our best performing content.
What Is Next?
This campaign led us to multiple learnings and optimisations around these verticals, as we found certain channels, such as board games, thrive in an educational and onboarding content strategy, driving up their engagement and click-through rates higher than other types of channels.
We also discovered that repeat and consistent Age of Sigmar content produced more excitement with audiences, and influencers who really enjoyed the content were willing to make it a staple of their schedule and take on the hobby, with their audiences requesting more.
