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September 15, 2026
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With user acquisition costs rising, UA managers are always looking for ways to acquire new players for their mobile games. Mobile game influencer marketing has become one of the most talked-about alternatives: creators showing real gameplay to audiences who already trust them.
But talked-about doesn't mean well understood. Many studios still treat influencer marketing like an afterthought. And that's a mistake, according to Marion Balinoff, influencer marketing consultant who has spent over a decade in the space and has overseen more than $30 million in influencer campaigns along the way.
"What I kept running into was that dedicated influencer marketing expertise barely existed as a function inside most studios," Balinoff says of the gap that eventually led her to go independent. "It was usually bolted onto someone's UA or marketing role".
We sat down with Balinoff to unpack what a studio can do to turn this channel into steady growth. Here's what she told us.
Until a few years ago, gaming content was considered a niche interest for gamers only. However, looking at the gaming scene today, the picture has completely changed.
In the last year, viewers have watched more than 8.6 billion hours of gaming content on Twitch1, and 8.8 billion on YouTube2. That’s why more and more UA managers are turning to gaming influencer marketing to promote their titles.
At its core, an influencer marketing campaign for mobile games is a partnership between a content creator and a gaming company. Almost every game can benefit from influencer marketing in theory. In practice, Balinoff argues that's the wrong question to be asking.
"The right question is whether your goals match what the channel can realistically deliver," she explains. "Influencer marketing is expensive, at least in the short term, and running it profitably means you need decent lifetime value (LTV), or you need to be deliberate about which markets you run it in."
It's not just one approach. For example, you can pay for reach or build a long-term creator program where players who love the game create content and get rewarded for it. These are different investments with different payoffs, and mixing them up is how budgets go sideways before a single dollar is spent.
👀 Related reading: Paid user acquisition vs organic user acquisition: How to find the right balance
With over a decade of experience and hundreds of campaigns launched, Marion Balinoff has also seen many mistakes. Here are the four most common, and how to avoid them.
According to Balinoff, the first mistake many studios make is not having a clear agreement on measurement. "A meaningful share of your traffic will come in organically, and if management hasn't agreed on how that gets counted, you'll spend the whole post-mortem arguing about numbers instead of learning from them".
That is why it’s so important that everyone who controls the budget is aligned on what a good result actually looks like before launch, not after.
Like every other channel, influencer marketing requires some testing and iteration before delivering sustained growth.
“You need to collect data before you know where the money actually works, and studios that expect instant payback are the ones who kill the channel after one disappointing test instead of giving it the runway it needs.”, Balinoff says.
So expect some adjustments and don’t aim too high right from the beginning.
When working with influencers, many studios treat the Mobile Measurement Platform (MMP) link as the full picture. In other words, they only take into account clicks and downloads coming from the tracking link. According to Balinoff, that is not the right approach.
In order to get the full picture, you also need to consider the organic impact of your campaign.
That’s because, just like with a regular paid campaign, organic sees an uplift as well. People see your brand or game more often, and may Google it after, rather than interact with an ad in the moment.
Here’s how to do it:
Skip any of those and you're not measuring organic uplift, you're measuring noise. This is exactly why influencer CPI looks expensive without accounting for the organic uplift.
When gaming studios get great results from an influencer marketing campaign, they tend to replicate the exact same setup and chase the same results. However, you should always evaluate scale and fit, even when working with a creator you’ve already worked with.
Balinoff learned that directly from experience: “A client who'd worked with Mr Beast years earlier and seen incredible results wanted to repeat that success for a new launch. By then his rates had gone up significantly, and his audience had grown so large it was spread across languages and countries he'd never reached before. They cast an enormous, very expensive net and caught almost nothing useful in the countries that actually mattered.”
Today, the world of influencers and creators is so wide that trends come and go very fast, and it can be hard to keep up. So we asked Balinoff to share some of her insights to give you a better idea of what to focus on today.
TikTok is the social media platform where mobile gaming influencers thrive, but if profitability is your goal, it may not always be the right choice.
“Organic TikTok content gives you no way to track the quality of the traffic it sends, because there's nowhere to put a trackable link unless you're boosting through Spark ads”, Balinoff says.
In other words, the platform is good if you’re aiming for reach, but it may be difficult to track actual conversions.
So, instead of focusing on the same formats, try to branch out and look for creative alternatives.
One good example that Balinoff shared is Instagram's ManyChat tool, which triggers a DM when someone comments a specific keyword. It's becoming more popular, but there's still a lot more to run with it than most teams realize.
Of course, when you think of promoting a mobile game, the first creators that come to mind are gaming influencers: they already have an audience that loves gaming, so there’s a fit.
However, what Balinoff suggests is to look beyond the obvious and explore partnerships with influencers in other niches as well. People who play mobile games have many other interests and hobbies as well – do they watch crafting YouTube channels? Listen to true crime podcasts? Think about the person who plays and expand into other areas of the internet to capture them.
She also told us about a successful campaign where this happened:
“A simulation game with a male 35+ audience, built around war and resource management. The channels that ended up performing best had nothing to do with gaming: lawn mowing and garden restoration content, with audiences skewing 45+. On paper, there's zero overlap between mowing a lawn and managing an in-game empire. On the audience, it was a perfect match, and it delivered some of the highest quality users we saw.”
So, for example, if your game appeals more to a female audience, try taking a look at influencers who talk about lifestyle, true crime, family, and fitness – that often see a greater share of women among their audience. Besides delivering good results, this approach may also turn out to be more cost-effective.
There’s no doubt that influencer marketing is here to stay, but, according to Balinoff, it will likely become harder to make it profitable: “Prices have gone up every year for the last five years.”
However, this doesn’t mean that it’s a channel that you should completely ignore. In fact, what Balinoff said is that many studios are still ignoring influencer marketing as a growth channel, when instead it can deliver great results with the right creative approach.
In the near future, she sees studios making the creators a recurring presence, rather than hiring them for one-off campaigns. Creators showing up in a player's feed repeatedly is what actually moves DAU and MAU stability, not just new installs. On the other hand, studios budgeting influencer marketing like a one-time push are going to keep missing that.
Like every channel, influencer marketing is something that can help your mobile game grow when done right. As Marion Balinoff told us, don’t be afraid of conducting creative experiments – they can lead you to unexpected results – but be sure you’re always measuring everything correctly. This mix of data and creativity will make your campaigns much more effective.
A special thanks to Marion Balinoff for her expert insights and stories!
If you’d like to learn more about mobile game marketing and how to make your game stand out, take a look here: How mobile games can flip the script and stand out in a red ocean marketplace, or get in touch to learn about how rewarded UA can fit into your 2027 strategy!
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