Top 4 marketing games ideas with examples

Anything a company does to promote the buying or selling of a product or service falls under the remit of marketing. When prehistoric man first started bartering animal skins and alike for food, they weren’t too fussed about their individual brand or reputation as honest brokers. Content probably wasn’t even a concept. Around 1500 BCE however, traders started to sign their products to indicate to buyers, “I produced this, and if you come back to me, you can get goods of a comparable quality.” In essence, the logo was born, and so too was marketing and the concept of a brand.

Fast forward 3,500 years and the marketing game would be unrecognisable to those Mesopotamian traders who first started rolling the veritable snowball that is marketing. It would probably blow the socks off the Mad Men-types from the “creative revolution” who contributed so much to its current direction too.

The marketing world now is saturated by talented people and practised competence. Every business with any ambition does the classic forms of content well. They have their own graphic design, their own style of copy, and their own corporate (or less corporate) tone of voice on social media, their website, and through email newsletters. So how do you cut through today’s relentless stream of corporate messaging and advertising? How do you make your marketing campaigns and content count and reach your customers?

Whether your content marketing strategy is doing well but you’re looking to innovate and get the jump on your competition, or even if it’s not doing so well, and you feel like a Mesopatamian trader whose fallen through a wormhole into the 21st century, and you’re looking for the MacGuffin that can level the playing field your opponents are on (preferably while they’re playing) and give you back the advantage, we’ve got your answer right here. Marketing games.

Marketing games ideas

Marketing games have been around for a little while now. They’re a form of interactive, digital content that exists under the umbrella of gamification, which is the strategy of applying game mechanics to non-gaming contexts to motivate desired outcomes from an audience by making them fun. So if you’re marketing your product, you create a game around the right narrative, imagery, and copy, then encourage potential customers to play. Through the virtual world of the marketing game, people are interacting with your brand, thinking about your offering, and having a fun and positive experience they can associate with your business. Somewhere in the mix, you incentivise those people to purchase your product, ask for personal information to add to your contacts list, and in a nutshell, that’s how you boost audience engagement through the gamification of marketing.

“Could you elaborate?” I hear you ask. “What if I’m not selling products, per se? What about promoting a movie? Or my new exclusive dating app to connect like-minded seafarers who work unsociable hours? What if my products are really high ticket items and my brand is super premium? Is a game really going to help sell such a big purchase?”

No problem at all. Read on for our top 4 online marketing game ideas, with some examples to serve as starting points to help with your own gamified marketing strategy:

1. The marketing game that could be used to promote anything

Instant win games are exactly that: your audience pushes a digital button or pulls a virtual lever for a chance to win a prize. This concept is nothing new. Instant win games have been a staple of casinos for decades. Because of this, instant win marketing games carry mass appeal, as everyone knows how they work, and it’s almost impossible to find any ambiguity in the format. They’re an easy piece of interactive content to implement, easy to put together, and can be used to market anything. (And because they work on any web-enabled device, they can be used anywhere on a smartphone as easily as they can on a home computer.)

In the form of an online marketing game, you have a few options for how to present your instant win game if you’re using the Drimify gamification platform. You could opt for the Wheel of Fortune format, where the player spins a wheel displaying various prizes. If the wheel stops on a prize, they win that prize. Alternatively, you could customise a Scratch Card, which works just like a real scratch card, except they swipe their screen, or move their cursor over the card to reveal their prize (if they’ve won). The highly visual nature of these two options adds an element of tension, anticipation, and fun, as they can see the prize or prizes as they come tantalisingly within reach.

Any of the interactive marketing games you customise on the Drimify platform allow you to place data collection forms either at the start or at the end of the experience. If for example, the prize is a promotional code they can redeem to purchase your product at a better price, they’ll need to submit contact information to receive it and redeem it. By having 1 or 2 large or grand prizes, your audience is incentivised to try their luck by playing. The simplicity of these sorts of marketing games means they can be used whatever you sell, whether you’re a business selling designer hats, or if you’re a travel agent selling holidays.

2. Games to appeal to aficionados in specialty areas

There are a number of products and services businesses sell which appeal to a certain “expert” type of audience. For example, look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. They gave their viewers almost no context going into Infinity War, essentially the 19th movie of the franchise. While not carrying the most cerebral plot in cinematic history, this would have been a tough movie to follow (or suspend disbelief to) without a working knowledge of most of the previous 18 movies. This movie made more than $640 million in its opening weekend, and its sequel (the 20th) made well clear of $1.2 billion. These movies were made for a well-versed audience of people, and over 20 movies, and if you factor in all the source material, they had a lot of trivia.

A great way to help promote either movie would have been to customise a Quiz. With something carrying so much trivia, and such a motivated fanbase, you could go quite deep with the questions to make it challenging for people, and make getting a perfect score an impressive feat. These types of online marketing games are always fun when the content is good, and incredibly shareable on social media, and if using them to promote a film or a TV show, you could even have a leaderboard to give away prizes, or high scorers who submit their contact details to be entered into a prize draw.

You could just as easily adapt the Quiz format to serve a campaign selling luxury watches, or, if you’re the sponsor of a sporting event, you could include a Quiz customised to test your audience’s knowledge of their team or of their sport. In that second example, you could use the marketing game to not only promote your sponsored event, but use it as a chance to grow your audience by engaging with your collaborating brand’s audience. Because you’re not competitors, and because what’s good for the sponsor is good for the event, they’ll probably be happy to put it out on their social media and email campaigns, again, boosting your own reach and audience.

3. Themed puzzles and branded casual games to engage audiences in a challenge

Do you like puzzles? Us too. Who doesn’t like to solve problems? You could easily create a branded or themed online Crossword Puzzle, or a game of 2048 to just provide your audience with an experience. This can be a really effective way to reach potential customers on social media and get a message or a promotion out there, and in the process, hit them with something to give their brains a workout. With word-based games, like the Word Search and the Crossword, you can make the words and the clues thematically link to your brand as well.

Depending on your audience, you could help generate better engagement with more casual customised online games like Candy Crush, Pacman, or Connect 4 – familiar classics that quickly engross players on their phones, and can encourage them to submit personal information, and engage with your business. These kinds of marketing games can all be utilised as levels for the Advent Calendar format: a long-form Christmas game where businesses can deliver a multi-level experience that engages players over every day of December. (Equally, the Digital Calendar format could be used to build a gamified marketing campaign around any significant date, be it Halloween, or Easter, or even something like World Whisky Day or Record Store Day, which carries a passionate and motivated customer base and offers a clear commercial opportunity.)

4. Games that connect people with the right products and services

This final idea is one that doesn’t necessarily have to use prizes to incentivise participation. This sort of marketing game essentially shortens the sales cycle, acting as a bridge between a customer’s needs and your offering. We’re talking about customising a Product Recommendation Quiz.

With this marketing game engine, you’re creating results in the forms of products, and having them match against the most appropriate multiple choice answers to questions which ask about what a customer wants and needs. For example, let’s take the high ticket items from the premium brand we talked about at the beginning of this article. Let’s pretend they’re a range of action cameras – the kind you see people using for sports, and when you see people get steady video footage when they’re jumping into the sea on holiday.

Some customers may want waterproof action cameras, some customers may want more durable action cameras, some customers may value greater connectivity and more memory, and some may value a higher quality of picture or better onboard image stabilisation. By asking customers about what they want from their camera, you can match them with the right product, and educate them about your offering at the same time. This puts your line of action cameras 5 steps ahead of the rival action camera company who didn’t make their own marketing game.

Boost your campaign by bringing your marketing game ideas to life easily

There are several marketing game engines available to customise on the Drimify platform. There is no “best” marketing game, but some will be more suitable for your campaign, strategy, and product offerings than others. The 4 ideas presented here can just be looked at as a starting point to let your own creativity flow from when creating your own gamification projects.

Wherever your imagination takes you with your games, whatever the aims of your marketing strategy are, and the idea you settle on to develop, gamification gives you a tool to customise fun marketing experiences that will effectively engage your audiences with your products and services. They work online on all modern devices, allow easy and effective data collection, and can tap into innate motivations within all customers.

Online marketing games and gamified, interactive content are the modern solutions for effectively promoting the buying and selling of goods and services. These highly effective digital assets work across all industries, and can be applied across all aspects of marketing and promotion to help deliver better sales results.

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