Top 5 marketing games ideas for Christmas

Christmas is one of the most highly anticipated events of the year, by children and adults alike. Whether you see it as a religious holiday, or as an opportunity to wind down and spend time with friends and family, it’s probably the most significant event in any given year.

Most businesses tend to wrap up projects, or even go on a hiatus over the Christmas period, with the exceptions of retailers, both ecommerce and bricks-and-mortar stores, as well as bars and restaurants, who typically rely on the Christmas period to make a significant portion of their year’s budget.

Regardless of whether or not your industry’s temporarily slowing down or temporarily going into hyperdrive and expecting head-spinning sales volumes, Christmas is such a significant celebration that nearly all businesses take it as an opportunity to not only reward their employees for their hard work and contributions to the company, but to make big efforts at connecting with their clientele as well: Christmas in today’s world is mostly about building bonds and having fun. For this reason, gamification and marketing games make incredibly effective tools when it comes to connecting with audiences over the holiday season.

Use gamification to light up your Christmas campaign

If the Christmas lights have started going up in your neighbourhood, and the radio’s already getting festive and cracking out a little bit of the Bublé, and you haven’t sorted out your Christmas marketing campaigns yet, there isn’t a moment to lose. Even if the festive season is still 6 months away from kicking off, you almost can’t start soon enough because Christmas always comes around sooner than you think.

And on that subject, what are you going to do for your next Christmas campaign? How was last year’s? Did the big man in the green boots think about laying off the elves and hanging up his sack of toys, or was there room for improvement? Room for some interactivity, and more engaging content, perhaps? Could marketing games and gamification be the key to spicing up this year’s approach?

Gamification is the process of applying game mechanics to non-gaming contexts to make things more efficient, and encourage desired outcomes through play – in the case of marketing, this takes the form of marketing games. Instead of regular print, web, and video content, you can put your messaging into the form of an interactive game. You’re appealing to your audience’s desire for a challenge, and their motivation to compete and play, and using that to encourage desired behaviours which will ultimately lead to more sales.

There’s no time of year when people feel more deserving of taking a few minutes to themselves to have fun, so with that in mind, consider marketing games paired with Christmas campaigns comparable to a taste of the finest port imaginable to bring out the best of a deep, complex Stilton.

Our top 5 marketing game ideas for Christmas

Without any further a-do, let’s look at our top 5 marketing game ideas utilising the Drimify games creation platform to make the most of your Christmas campaigns:

1. Advent Calendar

This is our most popular style of game during the Christmas because an Advent Calendar lets you create an experience that engages with your audience throughout the festive season: a game for every day of December. The Advent Calendar utilises the following elements:

A Dynamic Path™ format, which allows you to create 24 or 25 games, levels, or experiences for every single day of the month
The option of utilising any game engine in the Drimify catalogue to make those levels, to customise with your branding, graphic design, and content

Each day of the calendar can offer points to players who rank on a scoreboard, which then allows you to hold a prize draw at the end to reward the top players with gifts. Equally, you can make each day of your Advent Calendar experience offer its own opportunities to win prizes. This way, you’re encouraging more users to play as they have more chances to win a gift and be rewarded for their participation.

Mix the types of games to tailor the experience you want to give your customers

The Drimify catalogue gives you the option to combine different game mechanics to create an optimal, totally personalised experience, with something new every day to add variety across your campaign. The Dynamic Path™ allows you to combine multiple game engines to create longer form experiences that allow greater interaction with your customers, and more opportunities to collect data and learn about their habits and preferences.

Depending on your product or service, and depending on the tone you were looking to strike with your Advent Calendar, you could do a mix of instant winner games, question and answer style games, and intermediate pop-up content. How you skewed the balance would depend on the aims of your campaign, your brand, your product, and your target audience.

This variety lets you create a completely unique experience that you can adapt, modify, or tailor to your liking. The data collection in real-time from your Drimify dashboard will allow you to assess which games hit the mark, and which games don’t resonate as well with your target audience, by analysing key performance indicators (KPIs) like engagement rate and participation rate. With so many variables in play with a 24 or 25-level marketing game, while running such a campaign next Christmas might score a B-plus in terms of achieving your campaign targets, the data you collect over time will allow you to be far more effective and impactful with subsequent Christmas campaigns.

2. Santa’s Wheel of Fortune

Use the Wheel of Fortune game engine to offer gifts over a number of weeks, with new prizes and different rewards on the line. The Wheel of Fortune is a very popular instant win game engine where users spin a wheel covered in potential prizes – if the wheel stops at the cursor on a certain prize, they win. Because of the visual of seeing what could be seconds away from being theirs, it creates a real sense of excitement and anticipation, and the visual format of the game encourages them to consider your brand’s graphic design and offerings as they play.

You can also offer a “100% winner game” of the Wheel of Fortune engine, which will use this mechanism as a guaranteed reward system. To make the 100% winner game profitable, you can ask participants to complete a task during the game experience, such as leaving a rating, creating an account on your website, or even making some of the prizes promotional codes to incentivise purchasing.

3. A Christmas-themed Slot Machine

This competition adopts the same principle as the Wheel of Fortune, but instead of a wheel, users push a button, and the graphics display dials like slot machines in arcades.

Like the Wheel of Fortune, this is a fully customisable instant win-style game, where you can ask players for information, capture data, and reward them for participating with prizes.

4. A festive Memory Game

In this game, players must find matching pairs of cards as quickly as possible by flipping them over, and memorising their locations. It encourages users to focus on the visuals of different products, services, or features of your business. You can have additional custom content appear on the screen throughout game play to reinforce your brand and campaign messages.

The Memory Game engine is based on a points system, and therefore allows you to set up a leaderboard to reward the best players. You can hold a prize draw among the top-scoring players for big prizes, and you could even send out a discount code with the relevant terms and conditions as a thank you to all players who submitted their contact details.

5. A letter to Santa Survey: find out what your customers really want for Christmas

You can come up with all kinds of original concepts around which to customise the Survey, but around Christmas time, one approach would be to almost customise it to serve as a sort of interactive letter to Santa.

Say for example, you were a company creating outlandish, limited edition breakfast cereals. You could put out a survey with multiple choice questions asking which flavours or concepts you were considering bringing to market to assess which one would satisfy the greatest demand. You could also include an open question to ask for original ideas, with prizes for any original ideas you end up developing and making.

To reward all participants for their contributions, you can hold a prize draw to give them a chance to win gifts, particularly with one grand prize if possible – the grand prize (let’s say a year’s supply of their favourite cereal that you manufacture for our example) is the bait that creates traction and excitement. You could even announce the winners on Christmas Eve to create anticipation and piggy-back on the inherent excitement of the Christmas season.

Easily create your Christmas marketing games on Drimify

Create your gamified Christmas marketing experiences in minutes on the Drimify gamification platform. Easily customise a range of tried-and-trusted game engines to give your next Christmas campaign a touch of Christmas magic.

Any games you create work across all modern web-enabled devices, and can be accessible through links or QR codes, making them easy to integrate across online channels, in print publications, and on posters, as well as in your physical stores and premises. They also all support real-time data collection through your dashboard, and allow you to include contact forms at different stages to ask for personal information like email addresses to grow your contacts list. Marketing games are the perfect accompaniment to bring your Christmas campaigns to life, and deliver more effective engagement at the most competitive time of the year.

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