People tend to be divided around this time of year; some see the Christmas lights go up and the festive adverts hit the telly and are overcome with joy. On the other hand, you get a lot of people who go into full Grinch mode, grunting at every mention of the holidays and simply waiting for it all to be over.

Regardless of the category you fall into as an individual, there is no getting around the fact that this time of year can be an excellent one for businesses. It seems to be a period where the public simply accepts that they will be spending money and are more willing to engage with a new organisation. If you are a business owner, you should be marketing your organisation throughout the festive period, regardless of the industry in which you work.

Marketing eSports

There are several marketing strategies out there, and the most effective will vary depending on your industry. If your line of work focuses specifically on eSports, then the means of marketing you should use will be specific to you. This is even more so the case during the festive period. Throughout this time of the year, many large organisations completely dominate the market regarding more traditional channels.  As such, you have to make sure you are taking these businesses into account when you market yourself. If you don’t have the same budget to work with as some of these organisations, you need to consider alternative routes where you will still be visible and gain customers but in a more unique way.

Marketing eSports During the Holidays

So, what are some of the most effective ways that you can market your eSports platform throughout the festive period? Some of the best methods that you could use include but are not limited to:

Do Some Giveaways

The festive period is often branded as the season of giving, so why not get into that giving spirit? Given you are an eSports platform, the easiest things for you to give away to customers to encourage them to engage with your site more include:

1. A free trial to a game or a game expansion that is yet to come out or is going to be released closer to the Christmas period
2. Currency that can be used in games
3. Discounts on existing games that players haven’t been on yet
4. Free level-ups on games

By offering these different options to your customers (or potential customers), you are making them more willing to engage with you even over the festive period. There isn’t usually much overhead necessary for this marketing tactic either, as you are not spending money to get it in front of people, merely knocking a bit of money off. As such, this kind of marketing can be done very easily and is incredibly accessible regardless of the size of your business.

Try Content Marketing Which is Inspired by the Holidays

If you have games on your site that you can alter to add skins and different backgrounds, then you should do this to better reflect the winter months and the holiday period. One of the best games that does this is Overwatch; as with every season, Blizzard release limited edition skins for their characters and make small alterations to their maps to better reflect what time of year it is. These alterations could include adding snow onto the ground, creating Santa and reindeer skins for your characters and even rewriting theme songs, so they use sleigh bells.

Of course, this form of marketing will vary depending on whether you just host games or have creative control over them. If you have creative control, then it is certainly something worth doing. If you host the games, you should reach out to the developers and put this idea forward. Tell them you will be very vocal on the likes of social media about the changes to get more people playing their game. After all, this would be a win for both of you. You can also produce plenty of content surrounding the changes to drum up buzz about your game.

Use Social Media Effectively

Many people are busy throughout the festive period, but others spend their time off work or away from studying, having fun and relaxing. This means lazy days on the sofa where they can browse social media and completely unwind from everything. Given they are looking for something entertaining to do and will likely be on their phone more than usual throughout this period, you should make sure you are taking advantage of this by running ads on Google, but more specifically, social media. These ads are effective regardless of the time of year, but this will probably be the case now, as more people enjoy using social media throughout the festive period.

Do You Need Help with Festive Marketing?

Festive marketing can be tricky regardless of the industry you are in, given there are a lot of massive companies with bottomless budgets that completely take over traditional channels. As such, you need to get more creative with your marketing, and some of the best ways you can do this are listed above.

If you and your business need help with marketing over this time of year, you should reach out to YouYaa. YouYaa is a professional marketing agency with a lot of experience with eSports platforms and, therefore, can point you in the right direction. If you require any further info or have questions, do not hesitate to get in touch.