G2 Esports integrates Western and Chinese social media management for data-informed decision-making

Founded in 2015, G2 Esports is a professional esports organization headquartered in Berlin. With over 40 million fans worldwide on 10 different platforms, the company aims to keep its fans at the heart of its operations. To connect and stay relevant, the organization conducts social media marketing on various platforms.

Before choosing an integrated marketing management platform, G2 Esports had a decentralized way to gather information. As there was no centralized method or system in place, data was gathered across various departments and platforms.

Collecting this data was a time-consuming task, especially with the brand’s presences on both top Western social media platforms and WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, and additional platforms popular in the Asia-Pacific. The brand needed an integrated solution to manage its social media presence on Western and Chinese platforms, and to pull key metrics to track performance across all company-related profiles.

One solution for a global brand

G2 Esports selected the Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud and the Chinese platform KAWO, which integrates with the Emplifi platform, to manage all social media platforms under one login. Through the Emplifi platform, brands can manage their entire presence across Western social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. KAWO enables brands to create, schedule, and publish social media content to the biggest Chinese social media brands including WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin. Together, they provide full visibility across G2 Esports’ entire social media catalog.

“Everything related to esports is on social media,” said Natascha Sturm, Senior Data Analyst, G2 Esports. “It’s how we connect with and entertain our fans, in addition to memeing ourselves and our competition. Emplifi gives us effective, automated reporting so that we can dive deep into our social media metrics and optimize our content.”

The data team needed insights to determine whether its social media campaigns were truly effective and make data-informed decisions to replicate success without losing interest from fans. Both Emplifi and KAWO provide content monitoring and key performance insights to evaluate social media campaigns.

Key data to inform social media campaigns

Through Emplifi’s labeling feature, G2 Esports can organize all data linked to its campaigns, memes and banter, game coverage, and much more. The content labels allow teams to immediately measure performance of all channels and compare them to KPIs and use for benchmarking.

“Accessing all of our data in one place to measure impact saves us a lot of time and effort,” Sturm said. “In the Emplifi platform, we set our rules and conditions for automated labeling and let the technology do the rest.”

The G2 Esports team established about 100 rules and conditions to automatically label all content tracked by the Emplifi system. The data team then pulls insights from Emplifi’s automated reporting to understand audiences on each platform and evaluate campaign effectiveness. The social media team can then tailor campaigns accordingly.

Reaching Chinese fans with relevant data

G2 Esports also actively builds its brand in the Chinese market and communicate to local fans in China where they are most active. Since performance metrics on Chinese social media platforms are not as easily available, the team needed support to access crucial audience information. To gain a deeper understanding of its Chinese audience, G2 Esports can use the competitor performance ranking tool to compare its Weibo presence to other organizations.

“Social media is a crucial way to gain awareness from the Chinese audience,” said ChiaYu Su, Social Media Coordinator-China, G2 Esports. “KAWO provides clear and straightforward access to Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin statistics and makes reporting much easier for our teams. Additionally, the Emplifi interface mirrors KAWO to ensure consistency across our operations, especially in our labeling system.”

KAWO shows the team how often competitors post, the type of content they post, and how their posts perform. From this information, G2 Esports learned that local esports social media content included more coverage of games rather than personal content such as memes. The social media team was able to adjust its strategy accordingly to meet the interests of the local market.

The takeaway

With the integrated Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud and KAWO platform, G2 Esports can access critical social media metrics in real-time to optimize its content for its global audience. The competitor performance tracking tool gives the China social media team insights into local competitor strategies that informs the organization’s market-specific communications strategy.

Interested in managing your brand’s entire social media presence on one unified platform? Schedule a demo with an Emplifi expert today.