Corporate gamification: 5 areas to gamify for better results

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Gamification is a growing trend in business. It’s the process of using game mechanics and game design elements to make traditionally less fun or playful tasks more engaging. In broad terms we’re talking about points, badges, and leaderboards, and providing incentives for participation such as prizes and rewards, both in real life, and virtual, in the context of a gamified construct.

For the purposes of this article we’re looking at gamification being applied to corporate interests. In a corporate setting, gamification could be used for marketing products and services, recruitment, onboarding, training employees to learn new skills and add to their work-related knowledge, or even to incentivise job performance.

A really basic example of corporate gamification would be having a prize for the best KPI performance within a team over a set period of time, but the practice has moved on leaps and bounds. For a start, there have been huge advancements in technology. Every member of a target audience has a powerful smartphone and a home computer capable of supporting advanced game play. There exists an improved understanding of how gamification can motivate human beings towards desired actions, so the mechanics have become more nuanced in how they can be manipulated to achieve different business outcomes. Perhaps the biggest game changer though, is the accessibility of game creation that gamification platforms like Drimify have made possible. Now businesses of all sizes can easily create effective gamified experiences to serve their goals.

Where to focus your gamification efforts

There really is no limit to what you can achieve with gamification in the workplace. Making a game of something, or at least applying game elements to it, excites people. It awakens something preprogrammed in the human condition that desires competition, the desire for conquest, and a hunger for discovery and social interaction. Manipulating these motivations through engaging game mechanics engages people’s brains and demands interaction. It makes them more receptive to your messaging, and is ultimately a complex tool of persuasion.

Whether you’re persuading someone to buy a product, persuading an employee to better engage with an aspect of their job, or persuading a learner to practise a skill or retain memorise information to develop their knowledge of a subject, gamification offers superior engagement rates to any other method you care to name. That’s why gamification is being used across the board: language learning, sports and fitness, fem-tech, crypto-currencies and NFTs. It used to be thought of as a tool for education, training, and marketing, but now it’s making itself useful in nearly every aspect of daily life. However, just because it’s everywhere doesn’t make it any less potent. It’s still the most innovative tool for businesses looking for solutions to innovate across different functions and departments.

Over the course of this article, we’ll run through the top 5 areas where you can gamify to achieve better results for your corporate interests. This list is by no means exhaustive, but these are aspects that multiple businesses have applied gamification to with great success.

1. Revolutionise your marketing campaigns and increase sales

Gamification in the form of marketing games is a very effective method for highlighting your products and services, and ultimately boosting your sales. By gamifying your outgoing content, you’re introducing something to people’s social media feeds and inboxes that encourages them to participate with your brand. You’re inviting them to consider your products and services, and delivering an experience. This is far more likely to get their attention than traditional marketing.

Through a well designed marketing game, you have a channel through which you can distribute promotional codes, gifts, and prizes to reward and motivate both existing and potential customers.

For example, imagine you were a performance outdoor company introducing a new line of tents. You could put together a customised Product Recommendation Quiz that will help direct customers to the right model for their camping needs. Starting with the results, which would be the tents, you could ask questions about the kinds of conditions they camp in, and the seasons and weather they face, with their answers ultimately leading to the most suitable product in your lineup. This essentially acts as a digital sales person. You’re encouraging the customer to take on the role of a learner, and you’re engaging them with relevant product knowledge through your content. You can also include data capture forms to ask for things like names, email addresses and phone numbers, and send people who provide them a discount code as a thank you, which serves an extra incentive for them to buy.

2. Level up your event strategy

Gamifying your company’s offering at events is a great way to stand out from your competitors externally, and reward or engage your employees internally.

Whether you’re recruiting at a job fair, looking to build connections at B2B or industry events, or looking to team build or put in some quality training at corporate getaways, offering interactive experiences and games is a great way to boost audience engagement and get better results.

By having that participatory hook to the content at your stall, or your booth, or your getaway, it breaks the ice, and it gets people’s minds receptive to your messaging. At events for all sorts of purposes, people can have their guards up, and feel awkward, or even nervous, so delivering a fun experience that appeals to their competitive natures, or their desire for discovery is a great way to break through those barriers.

3. Make your human resources (HR) approach more efficient and improve your employer brand

With powerful gamification tools, you can use game mechanics to recruit much more efficiently, onboard more innovatively in a way that reduces turnover, and even improve your employer brand, which in turn will attract superior talent.

Through the recruitment process

Let’s start with recruiting more efficiently. Think of the hours you lose as a business considering candidates that simply aren’t up to the task, but have all the necessary qualifications. Think of the hours you also spend sifting through candidates who are neck and neck on paper, and give similarly excellent interviews. How do you not only make the right decision about who to hire, but also make the process faster? The answer is gamification. By including gamified content as part of the application process, you can make far more accurate assessments of a potential hires capabilities. This means you bring less candidates to the interview stage, and have more data to separate the winning candidates if they all shine in the interview process.

Through the onboarding process

By also gamifying your onboarding process, you remove the need to devote quite as many hours to training new staff. By having them follow a customised Dynamic Path™ – that’s a format that gives you access to every game on the Drimify games creation platform – you can send them on a learning journey that can be played on a tablet, a smartphone, or a computer. This frees up trainers or tutors to assess in real time how new hires are getting on, and means you can spot and remedy potential issues that could lead to expensive staff turnover more efficiently. It’s also a playful way to introduce new recruits to your company, and induct them in the right way.

Employer branding

Gamification is also a great way to showcase your company culture and values to attract new talent. Ultimately, gamification is a combination of interactivity and storytelling. It’s content. It’s an opportunity for you to control the narrative around your business, both in recruitment games, and in training games within the business. Effective and innovative gamification projects for recruitment that tell your story the right way makes you more attractive than other brands.

There’s also a practical element to this approach to recruitment. Does the applicant want to fill out the 10-page form, then get asked to submit their CV and covering letter anyway, AND also then study a series of competencies and write a load of STAR-based answers to try and get in the door, or would they rather engage in a series of customised Quizzes, that can quickly and accurately answer for an employer whether someone has the right knowledge, qualifications, and judgement to join the team. Taking the time to put this into place delivers a better user experience (UX) to potential new hires. It respects the applicant’s time as much as it serves the recruiting business, which in turn, will lead to more applicants finishing their applications and submitting them.

4. Give your employees the best upskilling opportunities through serious games

Gamification when applied to corporate training takes the form of serious games. Serious games are games with a serious purpose. They might be fun and engaging, but they’re not for entertainment.

Utilising serious games when training and upskilling your employees allows you to introduce learners to new ideas and concepts, and through simulated scenarios, allows them to experiment with those new ideas. Essentially, you’re giving your teams a virtual sandbox in which to engage with scenarios, make decisions, potentially make mistakes, but have no consequences. They give people the opportunity to learn by doing. This is great for developing soft skills.

5. Improve the customer journey

Is anything more crucial to your corporate interests than your customer’s journey? No. Your product, your service, your staff – nothing exists without the customer. Whether they have a problem your business solves, or they have an appetite your business can satisfy, they come first, and the crux of any business’s relationship with its customers is the customer journey.

Gamification allows you to enhance the customer experience in a fun and original way that can have a strong impact on users. Your audience will remember your products and services better, or have a more positive opinion of them, if the customer journey is good. While you wouldn’t necessarily eat at a restaurant that makes bad food but has great service, lousy service after the best meal in the world is going to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

In addition to allowing you to create marketing games that encourage and incentivise sales, some perhaps even at the point of sale, gamification also facilitates the measurement of customer satisfaction rates by using a customised Survey. Customising a survey, and inviting customers to evaluate their experience, can allow you to identify customer journey issues, and ultimately improve your approach. They also show that you, as a business, care about your customer’s needs. Whether your customer is a member of the public or even another business, retaining a customer is a lot easier than attracting a new one, so putting effort into this area is a good way to foster loyalty.

How do you evaluate the impact of gamification on your business?

You can evaluate the impact of gamification on your business through your Drimify dashboard. This gives you data from your gamified projects in real time. You will be able to measure engagement rate, retention rate, and also conversion rate.

Engagement rate

This is the number of customers or users who participate in the experiences and games you offer them, compared to the reach of your communications. This is an excellent statistic for assessing how relevant your operation is to your audience. If the engagement rate exceeds 100%, it means that your audience wanted to repeat the experience and that you have succeeded in releasing an addictive piece of gamified content.

Retention rate

This is the number of users who return from one campaign to the next. In principle, if your gamification actions are well conducted and well constructed, this number increases from campaign to campaign, as your audience gets used to playing with your brand and its products or services. This applies to both the internal and external communication of your company, and can therefore concern your employees as much as your customers.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the ultimate goal. In a marketing approach, it is the stage when a prospect is converted into a customer, or when an existing customer renews their purchase. On the other hand, in an internal communications approach, it refers to the increased contribution of employees to the activities offered, but also to the creation of team cohesion. The conversion rate is the numerical proof that your approach has worked and is proving effective.

Are you ready to boost your business with gamification?

If you want gamification to take your business to new levels and dimensions, and better serve your corporate interests, contact our team of experts who can help you with your project.

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