Case study · Retail · Gaming · Organic content
The account was a catalogue.
XO Games posted what had arrived, what was discounted, and what you could buy today. Competent, consistent, and it only ever spoke to people at the moment of purchase. Gamers do not buy a console every week. Between purchases the brand had nothing to say — so between purchases, nobody listened.
What we did: marketing strategy, audience analysis, content positioning, content pillars, scripts, and ongoing organic direction.
What we did not do: run the advertising. XO Games managed its own paid campaigns throughout.
Follower growth and point-of-sale data reported by XO Games. See "How we measured this."
01
The situation
XO Games sells consoles, games and accessories in Bahrain. Its social account was active and well maintained: new arrivals, offers, prices, stock.
Every post asked for a purchase. Some asked politely. None asked for anything else.
The account worked the way a shop window works — useful to someone already walking towards the door, invisible to everyone else on the street.
02
The diagnosis
The store did not need more promotional content. It had plenty, and it was good.
It needed a reason to exist between transactions.
A gamer buys a console every few years and a game every few months. On every day in between, a catalogue account has nothing to offer, so it earns nothing: no attention, no habit, no preference. When the purchase moment finally arrives, the store competes on price with everyone else — because price is the only relationship it ever built.
The account was talking about products. Gamers talk about games.
03
From catalogue to community
The strategy did not remove the promotional content. Retail needs it; customers want to know what has arrived and what it costs.
It put that content inside something larger.
The new pillars asked questions instead of making announcements. Which titles are worth the money. Which console suits which kind of player. The thing every gamer does and will not admit to. Polls, comparisons, arguments worth having. Recommendations by player type. Challenges. The conversations a gaming shop's staff have all day and had never once published.
We wrote the strategy, built the pillars, and scripted the content. The store published it.
The test for every post stopped being "does this sell?" and became "would a gamer send this to another gamer?"
Promotional posts still ran. They simply stopped being the only reason the account existed.
04
What changed
XO Games reports that its follower base grew 61%, and that repeat purchases — counted in the store's point-of-sale system — rose 27% across the period.
The follower figure is the one we can speak to directly, because followers are what organic content is for. People who had no intention of buying anything that week found a reason to stay.
The repeat-purchase figure is the store's, and it belongs to more than us. XO Games was advertising at the same time, and we did not run those campaigns. We can tell you the two things happened together. We cannot tell you the proportions, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
How we measured this
Both figures are XO Games'. Follower growth was reported by the store. The 27% is repeat purchases, counted in XO Games' point-of-sale system and reported to us; we did not have direct access to that system. Our engagement covered organic content strategy, scripts and direction. We did not manage the store's advertising account.
We do not claim attribution for the commercial result. XO Games ran paid campaigns during the same period. The rise in repeat purchases may reflect the organic content, the advertising, the store's own merchandising, or all three. No holdout test was run. Any agency that draws a straight line here is selling you something.
Follower growth sits within our scope. It is the output of organic content, and we report it as that — not as a commercial result. A follower is not a customer.
No absolute figures appear on this page. Revenue, purchase volumes and audience size are our client's confidential commercial information. This is the standard we apply to every client.
Questions, answered
- You grew followers by 61%. Isn't that a vanity metric?
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It is, if you present it as a business result. We are not. Followers are what an organic content strategy produces, and this engagement was organic content. The commercial number on this page belongs partly to work we did not do, and we have said so rather than absorb the credit.
- So what did the content actually achieve?
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It gave a store something to say on the days nobody was buying. That is not a metric; it is the precondition for one. Judge it by the fact that people chose to keep listening.
- Why publish a case study where you can't claim the sales?
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Because the alternative is claiming them. We were hired to fix the content, we fixed the content, and the store's business improved during the same period alongside its own advertising. Publishing that honestly tells you more about how we would report on your account than a cleaner number would.
- How is this different from your other engagements?
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Mubasher Derivatives was getting leads it could not count — that work was measurement. AASN Online was selling only to people who already knew its founder — that work was reach. XO Games was speaking to its customers only at the till. Same method, three different diagnoses.
Scope of work
- Marketing-strategy development
- Audience analysis
- Content positioning
- Organic content planning
- Content-pillar creation
- Script writing
- Community-engagement concepts
- Promotional-content restructuring
- Interactive-post development
- Customer-retention positioning
- Ongoing content direction