Top 4 advantages of gamification and marketing games for your events

Whether you are planning a physical, virtual, or hybrid event, your priority should be to ensure that all your guests are fully engaged in the story you are telling them, and the message you’re trying to send. Gamifying your events not only allows you to influence behaviours of attendees and achieve better results through greater engagement levels, but also to deliver a more memorable experience.

What is gamification, and how does it work at events?

Gamification is to apply game-like mechanics to non-gaming contexts. Whether your event is something you’re organising for other stakeholders in your industry, a launch party for a new product or service, or if your involvement is your business having a booth or stall at a trade show, adding game mechanics through marketing games is a great way to break down social barriers and encourage interaction and engagement with the key brand messages you’re trying to deliver.

Think about your experience at any organised event. You’re interacting with people you’ve never met. Either you’re trying to sell something to them, or they’re trying to sell something to you, or they might even be your competitors. It can make for very stiff, sometimes quite awkward social interactions at the beginning. By introducing games – whatever they are – you’re making things playful. You’re introducing game mechanisms that encourage competition, foster interaction, and drive communication. They break down social barriers. They occupy and divert nervous energy, and through intelligent, well-considered marketing game creation, you can redirect that energy to engaging with your event’s key messages.

The 4 advantages of gamifed events

Gamified events offer your business 4 key advantages over events with no gaming mechanics:

1. They deliver a memorable experience by empowering you to deploy experiential marketing

Have you ever attended a trade show or industry event that has seemingly countless booths vying for your time and attention? Of those events, how many booths do you remember the next day? Maybe a handful? Maybe less? Which ones stick in your mind?

The odds are, if any of them involved an interactive experience, that’ll be the one you remember. All the variations of company man Johnny Mouthpiece espousing X, Y and Z and giving you a leaflet you’d immediately lose tend to merge into one, but the booth that delivers an experience is the one you’ll keep in mind. The businesses that invest not just in having a presence at an event, but take the time to distil their message into an interactive, playable experience are the ones who get remembered, and have the best chance of achieving their event-related goals.

Consider how you can use the event space to work with your interactive marketing games. You could use the Dynamic Path™ engine on the Drimify platform to create a multi-level playable experience, with different levels accessible by QR codes located around the event space. You could even include riddles and clues that ask players to go to different booths and areas, and interact with different physical components of the event. Of course, this all needs to be planned in a narratively cohesive way to tell the story you’re wanting to tell to serve your goals as a business. This approach is called “experiential marketing” – you’re getting your messaging across through an engaging experience as opposed to bombarding them or boring them.

2. They can better convey your image as a brand

Brand image is more than just a simple logo which identifies your company, product or service. It’s a combination of elements that consumers link together based on each interaction they have had with your business. When consumers buy a product or service, they are not only buying that product or service. They are also buying into what that company represents. That’s why it’s important to design and plan events in a way that conveys exactly what your brand represents in order to spread your message effectively.

You could argue that advantage 2 is really a twist on advantage 1, but it’s not. A memorable experience is one thing, but becoming a brand that’s synonymous with exciting, playable event experiences has so many more positive benefits for your company. If you gamify your next event, analyse the data, make a considered analysis of your key performance indicators (KPIs), and apply those learnings to your next event games project, you’ll improve, and your reputation as an innovative, exciting company will continue to grow. It becomes part of your company’s brand. This makes you more attractive as a collaborator, a vendor, and can contribute to your employer brand too.

3. They bring out the most in your guests

Events are an interaction, not a performance. You’re not getting on a stage and singing your company song, you’re hosting customers, clients, colleagues, and other industry stakeholders. Events vary in their aims but fundamentally, they’re an opportunity for interactions, engagements, and transactions. Using gamification allows you to magnify and maximise the desired engagements of your function.

Games can be the unifying theme of your event whilst facilitating interaction among players. Human beings are competitive by nature. By using the concept of “personal records” or a leaderboard in your event games, you can incentivise users to return to your booth to give your gamified experiences their best efforts throughout the duration of your event. If you as a guest played a game at the start of an event and reached the top of the leaderboard, but came back halfway and saw you were out of the top 10, what would you say? I’d say, “Game on,” roll up my sleeves, and take another shot. If gamification is implemented correctly, it will encourage your audience to be more active. It’s an icebreaker that can get people out of their shells, let their guards down, and engage with your messaging.

4. They make collecting data and making new contacts far easier

At a lot of corporate events, a big aim is to get people to sign up, to subscribe, and to make new contacts and expand mailing lists. Going in, particularly in more business to business (B2B) environments, a lot of attendees know the script, and can have their social armour activated and be highly selective in who they give their details to. If there are a multitude of booths trying to get their message out there, savvy attendees are only going to give their information to the most impressive and relevant. Marketing games are a secret weapon in this endeavour.

Whether they scan a QR code to access your game, or whether they play at a touch-screen terminal you provide, you can include contact forms to ask for personal information and consent to be contacted at various stages of your gamified experiences. If there’s the potential for prizes, they’re doubly incentivised to sign up. Also, by engaging them in a playable experience, you’re fostering some social interaction, and subtly making your brand more attractive as an entity to be involved with.

Get off the sidelines, and take your event to the next level

Add real value to your events programme with gamified content. Try our demos and don’t hesitate to get in touch with us to make the most of our expertise. The Drimify team is at your service to discuss your event gaming project.

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