Top 7 examples of marketing games to inspire your next campaign

Gamified content can be a highly effective component of marketing campaigns. By using gamification to promote a brand or product, businesses can create effective engagement and interaction with their online community, disseminate information in a fun and entertaining way, and offer rewards to encourage customer participation and loyalty.

Gamification simply means to apply game mechanics – think points, badges, and leaderboards – and apply them to traditionally non-gaming contexts. Think about what advertising and marketing looked like in the 60s, 70s, the 80s, and the 90s. It’s always been a creative, even playful field, but the aim? They’re trying to make money. Add value. Make an impact. Set trends. The business of marketing is not a game, but games can be a very effective marketing tool. To play is to give something your full attention and engage in something entertaining. A marketing game harnesses that attention and uses it to deliver key corporate messaging, generate leads, and contribute to broader business goals.

To illustrate how these mechanisms work, and to help make your next marketing campaign a success, we’ve put together 7 examples of marketing games that can easily be incorporated into your next marketing campaign.

1. The Quiz

The Quiz format is a highly versatile game engine on the Drimify platform that can be completely customised to engage and reward your target audience. Here are some of the benefits of using quizzes in your marketing and advertising campaigns:

• Quizzes allow you to collect valuable user data, allowing you to better direct your marketing messages and better understand the interests and needs of your audience
• They can be easily integrated into different platforms (a web page, a QR code, social media, etc.) and can be fully customised to match your brand and corporate identity
• Questions and intermediate screen options in the Quiz can be used to educate users and potential customers about your brand

The Quiz is a very effective tool to generate leads, draw attention to your brand and products, and better understand your prospects and customers. Also, everybody understands how quizzes work. You’re asked a question, you answer the question. The simplicity of it makes it universally appropriate across demographics, and makes it easy to rank players’ performances on a leaderboard, if for example, there were prizes on offer for the top scoring players in your game.

The answer formats to the Quiz can be made multiple choice, open answer (if you were looking to solicit customer feedback), or even ordered, if you were asking them to arrange a sequence of events in the order that they happened.

2. The Product Recommendation Quiz

This marketing game offers more utility to the customer than the others, and can greatly add to the user experience (UX) for people interacting with your company. This game is designed to be used when specifically marketing a line of products or services, where each item in the range is targeting a different user, or serving different customer needs. On the Drimify platform, you create a series of results first: these are the products. Then you write questions with multiple choice answers based on user needs. The multiple choice answers each score a point for a different result. After users have answered all the questions, based on their answers, the most appropriate product is recommended as a result.

For example, let’s imagine you’re selling sports watches for recreational athletes. You release a line of products, each hitting different price points and different features. The entry level watch does GPS and Glonass satellites, and can display up to 3 data fields on a single screen. The top end watch has advanced mapping and navigation features, and also has a solar panel to extend its already impressive battery life. One question could be, “What’s the longest event you would participate in?” The answers could range from “No more than 1 hour at a time,” to “Multi-day expeditions.” Clearly the latter answer would score for the top end product, and the former would score for the entry-level product. Similarly, the watches from top to bottom would have different available sports profiles, from just running and cycling, all the way up to golf, ski-ing, open water swimming, and even HALO jumps.

The key to designing this sort of marketing game effectively is to think like a salesperson, or like your top person in a customer facing position. If you’re a specialist retailer, it would probably be worth getting input from your best salespeople when designing the questions, and worth having them help in the testing phase.

3. Photo Contests

Photo Contests are a great marketing game for businesses for a couple of reasons. First, nearly everyone is walking around with a highly powered camera integrated into their smartphone, with younger generations snapping and visually documenting large portions of their waking lives. You’re not asking a lot of potential customers to take a picture of themselves using one of your products, or for their most creative composition around your installation, or for the most exciting picture of your event. They were probably going to take a similar photo anyway, but by entering it into a competition, they get a bit of social currency if their photo wins, or if people look at their photo when they’re voting for the winners.

Secondly, the Photo Contest really puts the onus on the customer, or user to create the content and do most of the hard work. After you’ve customised the Photo Contest format on the Drimify platform, making your copy and the graphic style represent your brand and your aims, it’s up to your users to enter their photos and vote for the winners. Because players are competing – potentially for prizes – and they have amazingly capable cameras, the odds are you’ll have great promotional imagery after the campaign is over.

4. Video Contests

Up the ante on the Photo Contest by introducing a Video Contest game instead. This kind of marketing game offers the same advantages as the Photo Contest game, but by using video, you can encourage your audience to be even more creative. Again, all modern mobile phones have powerful video capabilities, and most have rudimentary video editing software, so while this may have sounded like an exclusionary marketing campaign in the early 2010s, now everyone has the technology to play and contribute to a gamification experience like the Video Contest.

Consider the possibilities. Hypothetically, if you were creating a marketing game to support a streaming platform specialising in classic movies, or the release of a highly anticipated movie, you could create a Video Contest where the brief is for users to create a short film on their smartphones where they recreate iconic scenes. If it’s a horror movie, or some other specific genre, you can obviously tailor the brief further.

Like with the Photo Contest game, this gives you great user generated social media content through which to further promote and support the game, and the broader marketing campaign.

5. Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune is an instant win-style game that’s really exactly what it sounds like. In this game, a wheel containing different prizes is “spun” by pushing a button, and players have the chance to win a prize if it stops on the cursor. For example, a luxury car manufacturer could use the Wheel of Fortune game in its showroom to give visitors and customers the chance to win test drive previews of new and premium models. By offering rewards to participants, the company can create engagement and interest in their brand while educating users about their products.

6. The Memory Game

The Memory Game is even more self explanatory than the Wheel of Fortune. Players flip cards over, with the aim of flipping over a matching pair sequentially. You could customise the game to have exact matches: say images of your products, or even have them try to match an image of your product with a description, or an obvious partner product.

For example, a cosmetics company used the Memory Game to promote its range and inform users about the different ingredients in its products. The game consisted of presenting a series of cosmetic ingredients on the screen, then hiding these ingredients and asking users to find them. By successfully finding all the ingredients, players received rewards, including free samples and discount coupons. With this Memory Game, the company was able to promote its products while entertaining, educating, and rewarding players.

7. The Dynamic Path™

The Dynamic Path™ is a long-form experience that includes a journey with different stages. It allows businesses to create more immersive playable marketing experiences by giving them access to every game engine on the Drimify platform when creating different levels. It is a very effective tool for more advanced gamification operations or for campaigns over extended periods, such as a Christmas Advent Calendar-style promotion. Through the operation of this game, it is possible to bring the customer back to the brand’s platform over multiple days for different gamified promotions.

Utilising the Dynamic Path™ format can be very effective for inviting customers to interact with a new product range, or for discovering (or rediscovering) a brand’s values. The versatility and potential scale of this format gives it utility for longer customer journeys, or even for marketing related to recruitment.

Find the right game for your brand

Although marketing games are an effective strategy to animate an online community and engage users, it is important to choose the right game engine for your needs. What kind of customer are you trying to appeal to? Is it someone who’s competitive, and wants to challenge themselves in a game, and climb a leaderboard? Is it a customer who’s more interested in the social, sharing aspect of a game? In which case, maybe a Photo Contest would be most appropriate, as opposed to a game where players are out to finish as high up in the rankings as possible.

In addition to the 7 examples mentioned in this article, there are many other possibilities such as Whack a Mole, Candy Crush, Connect 4, and various word and puzzle games, and more. It’s worth playing through the platform’s demos, and looking at some of our case studies to help you identify comparable projects, or ones that can serve as jumping off points. Different games will gel better with some campaigns than others – for example: if you’re creating a campaign for a sports team, we may well have a game engine that fits in with your sport, such as the Basketball or Football (games), which simulate free throw and penalty shootout competitions.

The bottom line with marketing games is that they empower companies to create engagement and interaction with their communities more effectively, and create more chances for your messaging and content to be shared across social media platforms than more traditional marketing. If you’re looking to animate your online community and grow your audience, gamification and marketing games should be a serious consideration.

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