The benefits of gamification
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By incorporating game mechanics into our daily lives, we are able to motivate ourselves to do things we might not otherwise be motivated to do, so why not incorporate it into the business world? Why not make it a part of your corporate strategy?
Gamification refers to the use of game design elements in non-game contexts to make processes more efficient. By introducing game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards, and appealing to powerful human drivers like competitiveness, gamification makes for a very powerful tool for making any activity or process more fun, more interesting, and engaging.
What are the benefits of gamification for your business?
The benefits of gamification for your business are limitless, and when used correctly, and developed inline with best practices, mitigate any perceived constraints. Here are some examples:
Increasing engagement rates and improving the customer experience
A key benefit of using gamification for marketing purposes is its noticeable impact on customer relations. Gamifying marketing material creates marketing games: engaging, interactive forms of content that can be used to increase conversion rates, drive engagement, foster loyalty, and safeguard customer retention. Gamified experiences and content are more fun and more stimulating than traditional forms of marketing, and when it’s done well, customers come back for more.
By creating a more interactive and fun customer experience to support your products or services, it can have a huge impact on an organisation’s sales and growth. When you engage your customers with a gamified loyalty programme for example, where customers earn points and rewards for certain actions they take, such as purchasing a certain product, signing up for a newsletter, or giving you feedback, they are more likely to stay engaged with your business in the long term.
For a company’s marketing purposes, lost customers can be extremely difficult to get back. By adding game mechanics to the customer experience and throughout the buying process where possible, you can increase customer satisfaction rates in the long term.
Promoting brand awareness and corporate image
Similarly to the first benefit, gamification can also increase brand awareness and be used to maintain or update a business’s reputation.
However you formulate your marketing games, you can stand out from your competitors by demonstrating a more modern and up to date image in line with what today’s new consumers are looking for. Marketing games such as customised Photo Contests or Video Contests are incredibly shareable on social media platforms, so can go a long way to help you grow your audience and boost your reach.
Businesses that take long term approaches to their gamified marketing campaigns can associate their brand with new, exciting experiential marketing, and innovative campaigns that capture the public’s imagination. The long term approach to gamification is what ultimately leads to getting the most return on investment. Over time, and from campaign to campaign, through the data collection capabilities of modern online gamified content, you improve your approach. Over time you learn what sorts of game engines are most effective at engaging your target customers, and what sorts of rewards and purchasing incentives they’re most interested in..
Increasing employee engagement and productivity in business, training, and recruitment
At the corporate level, many companies use gamification to improve efficiencies across various business functions and promote collaborative work. Internal competitions related to KPI performance or other work factors can foster competition, and customised Surveys can be a great way to get a sense of any staffing issues or get a gauge on morale, and even to gather feedback on company direction and upcoming objectives. Internal gamification can foster employee loyalty, boost productivity, and help with motivation.
Employee training in the workplace typically takes the form of serious online games, where instead of more traditional training options, teams are given interactive, playable learning experiences. These can be used to teach employees new soft and technical skills, and have several advantages over the classic mentor-mentees, big group training session-style affairs. They offer much greater inclusion, as everyone is able to contribute and participate through any modern, web-enabled device. Through engaging game mechanics, they also make for more immersive, participatory training experiences. This means when they’re well designed, employees will engage with learning materials with higher concentration levels.
From a recruitment standpoint, serious games as part of the application process yields enormous gains for human resources (HR) departments. Consider the actual process of hiring talent in the modern world. Literally, hundreds of CVs for an entry level position. Hundreds of covering letters. Round of interviews, first online, then in person. Then the panel discussions, and narrowing down to the “right” candidate. But, were they right? Is the panel’s judgement so accurate? By utilising customised games, such as a Quiz, you can test aptitude, job specific knowledge, and even soft skills by posing scenarios to see how applicants would respond. The scoring of the games gives HR departments a universal truth. Not only does it give you a hardier set of scales upon which to measure the weight of an applicant’s talent, but it also shortens the hiring process, as it will make sifting out less suitable applicants a nearly automated process.
Motivating and empowering learners through their education
One of the main advantages of using gamification in education is the overall positive impact on learner motivation. Gamified lessons are particularly effective during the exam period, when teachers need to reinforce what they have been teaching for all term. By incorporating educational games such as quizzes into the learning experience, teachers have a digital tool to help reinforce what has been learned, and to highlight areas which require extra focus. Because the online learning game is a low stress, low stakes virtual environment, it doesn’t carry the extra anxiety that a formal test does, as while the teacher can assess performances in real time, the student can still replay the experience, and learn through repeatability.
Using gamification can also help the trainer or teacher to take into account the different learning rates of each student in a group. In a game setting, each learner can progress at their own pace, so a student who needs more time can do so without fear of being misjudged by their peers, and fast-moving learners aren’t left frustrated by having to wait for their peers.
Gamified educational content in the form of learning games, once created, can free up teachers to do other things. While the feedback from a game can identify students who are struggling and require extra attention, other students will be able to continue with their learning while the teacher sees to those needs. Over time, the data collection allows games to be improved.
Enjoy the many positive effects of gamification in your next campaign
There are no limits to what can be gamified to find new efficiencies. For business, for educators, for marketing, and more, when it comes to engaging audiences, gamification is the way to go.
To put it simply, the more engaged in a task an individual is, the higher their concentration levels, and the more motivated they are. This greatly improves their capacity to be effective or productive.
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