Why use competitions in your marketing campaigns?

Creating marketing games and online contests is an innovative online marketing technique that can increase engagement and encourage interactions with your community. Competitions also allow you to build your reputation by delivering fun, gamified experiences to users, and collect data to help you convert your audience into customers.

All businesses, from small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to large businesses such as Coca Cola, can, and regularly do, benefit from this marketing technique.

A successful marketing contest, in short, posits a prize that can be won, encouraging numerous users to enter for a chance at winning. By entering into the competition, users submit details, potentially opt-in to a marketing newsletter or perform some other desired action, and interact with the organising business’s content. The idea is that by encouraging mass participation, the organising business gains something more valuable than the prize or prizes they distribute.

The advantages of gamification for businesses

Marketing games and online contests fall under the umbrella term gamification, which is when you apply game mechanics to a typically less playful task. Giving people the opportunity to win, to interact, and to discover, all help to improve user engagement.

It’s the same principle by which people will turn themselves inside out at their local Park Run to beat their friend who’s at a comparable fitness level, or that sees weekend warriors “bring the thunder” in their local squash leagues. We’re hardwired to play, and hardwired to want to win.

For businesses, gamifying your marketing through online competitions can help:

1. Grow and engage your community
2. Collect data on your prospective or existing clients
3. Increase the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing strategy
4. Drive sales

Marketing games can help you to grow and engage your community

Online competitions allow you to create interactions with your communities across all of the media platforms that your business has a presence on. Modern gamified experiences created on a games creation platform like Drimify can easily be integrated across your social media platforms, in email newsletters, across websites, and even in QR codes for phygital campaigns (that’s marketing campaigns merging the best of your physical locations with your digital channels).

Although creating a competition may be easy in theory, the execution may prove a bit more complex, particularly if you’re wanting to deliver a modern online contest that will meet modern user expectations. Fortunately, with gamification platforms like Drimify, you have a broad range of premade, battle-tested game engines that you can customise to bring your online competition ideas to life.

A modern solution to customer engagement

A thoughtfully designed and professionally executed competition can have much more impact on a modern audience than simple written content with visual stills. They stand out to prospective clients because they are designed to catch the attention of the audience at a glance when scrolling through social media. They’re a modern solution.

The first TV advert in 1941, a commercial for the Bulova Watch company that aired during a football game, was a new solution to engage audiences participating in what would become an international passtime (it was a little ahead of the golden age of broadcast television but innovative nonetheless). In much the same way, an online competition is designed to take effect when people scroll through their social media accounts, which is the default setting of a lot of target users. Look on public transport, look at lines in coffee shops, look at people walking through the streets – they’re nearly all glued to their device, so that’s where you need to engage them.

The competitions best-suited to engage your community

Depending on your needs, you can opt for three types of marketing game:

1. Instant winner competitions like a Wheel of Fortune or a Scratch Card
   The participant finds out instantly if they have won a prize or not. It is a speedy game that avoids losing the participant’s attention while also collecting data. This type of contest is especially effective at supporting marketing campaigns focused on eCommerce, as they’re a great way to distribute promotional codes.
2. Quizzes or other question and answer-style games
   This is a way to create a real connection with your customers. By answering some questions about the brand’s products, or the niche the brand operates in (like sports or movies), the customer proves their knowledge of the brand, or superfan status. The company then offers a prize to participants with the best scores. It is a way to find brand ambassadors and collect high-quality data on existing and potential customers who are truly invested in the brand.
3. Classic games branded to your graphic charter, such as Pacman, Connect 4, or the Memory Game
   Participants try to get the best score to be as high up as possible on the leaderboard. At the end of the campaign, the top scorer(s) will win a prize. Make the most of participants’ competitive spirits and try to keep them occupied for a longer period by introducing more levels and intermediate screens. By doing so you can also educate users about your brand, and collect more data.

Competitions designed to collect data to better qualify your audience

Gamification in the form of an online competition makes for a highly effective component of a digital marketing strategy to collect user data. This information can help you to qualify your audience in order to target your marketing campaigns in the most efficient way possible moving forward.

Once the information has been collected, the job of sorting through the information and analysing it is essential if you want to make the most of it. That is what will allow you to develop a targeted marketing and commercial strategy.

How to quantify the ROI of a gamified marketing campaign?

It is always not straightforward to quantify the return on investment (ROI) on marketing games and competitions, but here are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can look at to assess your gamified campaigns:

Marketing game and online contest KPIs:

• Number of views
• Rate of participation
• Rate of completion (the number of people who have gone all the way to the end of the experience)

KPIs for your brand or website:

• Traffic generated on your site
• Bounce rate on your site
• Rate of conversion based on the number of participations (example: the number of downloads or purchases made on your eCommerce site)

How can you increase your chances of having a better ROI for your competition?

The ROI is also going to be very dependent on how well you promote your competition. In order to achieve the best results, you must do the legwork and ensure the competition is regularly promoted. You need to make the most of the various channels you have available to you:

• Social media
• Websites and apps
• Marketing newsletters and promotional emails
• If you have retail outlets, with posters and flyers featuring QR codes, but also by providing direct access to the competition via tablets or touchscreen displays
• Others depending on your business’s communications infrastructure

Drimify: the gamification platform that makes contest creation easy

Online contests are the modern solution to getting audiences to engage with your marketing campaigns. By offering people chances to win prizes, they’re more likely to engage with your content, more likely to learn about your brand, and more likely to follow on calls to action and ultimately, be converted and become customers.

Drimify provides businesses with a range of pre-made, tried and tested game engines that can be customised to create online contests easily – no coding knowledge and no technical expertise required.

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