There are several solutions for creative optimization available today. The challenge lies in selecting the best option for your marketing team and growth goals. At Solsten, we understand the complex needs of marketing and creative teams which is why we’ve created this step-by-step guide illustrating how effective psychographic insights are for those facing the current marketing challenges of data privacy, market saturation, and targeting limitations in this attention economy.

Imagine your studio is about to launch a fictional mobile golf game called Legends Tour. Legends Tour will be a PGA licensed game where players can build solo skills in tour-mode or unlock gear, apparel, courses, and more by participating in various co-op tournament modes. Using the step-by-step guide below, you can integrate Solsten’s insights into your creative optimization process, reducing CPIs and boosting ROAS. Mythical Games used this approach for NFL Rivals and experienced a 50% reduction in CPI.

Step 1: Access Your Audience Intelligence Dashboard

With our product, Navigator, game teams can generate player audiences crafted from a wide variety of criteria. Interested broadly in RPG players? No problem. How about players who like Call of Duty, Nike, Breaking Bad, and volleyball? We got you. After you input your criteria, Navigator rapidly identifies the global population who match this criteria. This audience is segmented into custom personas that reveal psychosocial traits, favorite games, movies, tv shows, apps, gaming preferences, demographic data, and much more. You won’t find a more complete picture of gamers anywhere else.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience For This Creative

Using Solsten’s Market Potential data, Navigator can help you analyze which audience to target for this creative by comparing the total population size, average monthly spend on gaming, and lifetime value. Each persona group can also be weighted using Solsten’s proprietary Player Centered Score (PCS) which is a valid, accurate indicator of how “valuable” this player group is to your game concept. Connect with a Solsten expert to learn more.

Step 3: Create a Foundation For Your Next Hero Creative

Solsten measures over 275 psychological traits across 12 trait categories. For marketing and creative teams looking to make an impact quickly, we typically recommend starting with player motivations and values. Navigator’s Explorer will reveal high and low scores for your audience’s motivations and values.

Motivations are the driving forces that compel behavior. As an industry, we have become very adept at capturing and measuring player behavior (ad performance, in-game actions, transactions) but it is important to understand that past behavior is poor indicator of someone’s future actions. Values are an individual’s core cognitive and emotional principles, standards, or judgements of what is important in life.

Now, let’s see how applying key motivations and values of your audience can impact a simple single-image ad for our fictional game, Legends Tour.

The Starting Point

The creative hypothesis was to feature friendly competition in a legendary-esque backdrop. The perspective of the ball invites players to participate in a fast-paced, exciting environment while subtle storytelling beneath shows a tournament underway, alluding to the multiplayer aspects of the game. The art style appeals to both casual and serious golfing enthusiasts. Will it convert players? Potentially. Regardless of performance, the reasons for success or failure will remain hidden. Solsten can change that.

The Psychological Approach to Creative Development

Let’s unpack the second approach. After reviewing Navigator audiences for people who are interested in the sport of golf, golf games, and the PGA, you have unlocked several key insights for a player population who would be interested in your game concept. The first audience segment you hope to attract to your game has a psychological makeup that dramatically altered your creative direction.

This group is:

Motivated by difficult tasks: These players would rather climb Mt. Everest than walk through Central Park. They prefer difficult tasks over easy ones, and will continue to do so as the difficulty increases. What’s harder in golf than teeing off surrounded by thousands of fans hoping to see a hole-in-one?

Motivated by competition: Competition isn’t just an event for this group, they are deeply attracted to status and high-stakes competition. Instead of alluding to multiplayer modes, the new creative is leveraging a hero golfer in a setting reminiscent of #16 at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, one of the tour’s most infamous holes.

Value courage and perseverance: These players embody courage in action and tend to take physical action to effect courageous outcomes. Despite obstacles or setbacks, they pursue a goal or passion over time. The copy speaks to these intrinsic values.

Armed with psychological insights, your team can develop predictably resonant creative ads that directly correlate with scientifically valid datapoints specifically for your audience. Now, you understand the “why” and can confidently proceed towards knowing your creative has been purposefully built to attract high value players. Leading studios like Mobilityware, Tilting Point, and Zynga are reducing CPIs and boosting ROAS because Solsten empowers them to:

• Understand ANY audience: Easily and quickly understand high-value players by segmenting player populations from the most expansive and actionable psychographic database in the world. Solsten’s platform represents 3.4B people globally, unpacking insights around intrinsic psychological traits, gaming preferences, current interests, and much more. We deliver the most comprehensive and actionable consumer insights to companies like EA, Sony, and Supercell.

• Psychology-based creative development: Leading studios are incorporating player psychology into their creative development playbooks in 2024. As the battle for attention continues, the optimal approach to driving predictable, consistent ad performance is by aligning your creative direction with the psychological drivers of your current or prospective players. Humans are extremely cognitively diverse, and engage for different reasons. Unlocking human motivations, values, competition styles, communication styles (to name a few) empowers your creative team to develop campaigns, hero ads, and app store assets with psychological precision.

• Psychographic segmentation: Protecting the economic viability of current games is a major priority in 2024. We’re seeing more studios prioritizing long-term retention, allocating marketing budgets to live ops efforts and re-engagement campaigns. Using our API, studios can quickly segment their player base to understand the psychological differences that exist and augment their creative accordingly. Solsten can help you understand why your creative performs the way it does across your entire portfolio.