Creating marketing games to increase audience engagement

Online games and competitions are an excellent vehicle for getting across key messages in your marketing campaigns. Different game engines can be customised to help you reach different marketing goals, from lead acquisition and data collection, to educating your audience and promoting new product lines.

The key reason marketing games are so successful in helping businesses achieve these ends? The key performance indicator in which games far and away surpass all other forms of marketing? Engagement rate.

Why marketing games?

Why can marketing games deliver so consistently on engagement rate compared to other forms of advertising content? Simple. You’re inviting your audience to play, to participate, to be part of something. Traditional adverts and promotions, be they in print, video, or online, either beg, bombard or harass their targets, or more often in an increasingly saturated digital environment, wash over them, or fade into the noise of every other brand. Conversely, who doesn’t want to play a game? Who isn’t scrolling through their phone on the train or the bus to divert themselves from the monotony of their commute?

Most people enjoy playing video games, and it’s the same mechanics used in video games which are put to work in marketing games to deliver on desired outcomes. If you create engaging scenarios that draw someone in, or create an exciting opportunity to earn a reward, or provide a user with some form of diversion, you can pull on various psychological levers and appeal to the human being’s natural cravings for challenge, discovery, and competition. You turn users into players, then players into customers.

Casual mobile games like Candy Crush and Pacman people play for the sake of playing, so why not create your own versions of these casual games to have your branding, to ask for some personal information with permission to contact, to invite them to follow your social media channels, and incentivise the transaction with a prize or a discount code? People are inclined to play anyway, so they might as well play in your own branded arena. This is where you can cultivate a captive audience that can engage in gaming developed to promote your business goals through specific calls to action.

Implementing a marketing games strategy

Implementing a marketing games strategy, and maintaining it – that is, acting on the data from one campaign to the next to see continual improvement and growth, is to arm your marketing department with a scimitar-sharp tool for engagement that comes with its own built in, near fully-automated whetstone. When you create games on a highly intuitive gamification platform like Drimify, with easy, real-time data collection through your dashboard, your marketing games strategy and overall approach to customer engagement can continually evolve and improve with minimal labour on your end.

For example, you can use games and competitions as touch points for customer journey optimisation, lead acquisition, or retention strategies. By collecting data, your company will be able to better understand its customer base and improve its retention rate. The gamified content allows you to collect key information about consumers, such as their contact details, preferences, which at scale and over time can also reveal market trends. This data can then be used to inform future marketing campaigns and other gamification projects, ultimately developing and improving your marketing games strategy and overall approach to customer engagement.

Marketing games creation: the basics

As previously mentioned, creating games is no longer a difficult task or astronomical investment for businesses looking for innovative and effective methods of engaging with consumers. Gamification platforms like Drimify make realising and releasing your marketing game ideas a simple and quick process. However, like any powerful resource, without proper planning, its full potential can be missed. Certain rules must be adhered to in order to ensure the best possible results for your marketing games.

So, here are 5 key steps you should always take when creating a new marketing game:

1. Plan your campaigns

Before you start creating marketing games, it is important to have a detailed plan in place in advance. This will help you prioritise your time and resources, and ensure that your efforts are moving your marketing game project along in the right way.

Plan your campaign with a clear editorial line. Afterall, all games on some level are just interactive stories. Even old-school arcade beat-’em-ups like Tekken followed narratives from version to version and character to character. In your marketing game, you’re telling two stories: the story of the game, and the story of what you’re promoting.

Through thorough planning and a clear roadmap, you allow your team to set out clear objectives, establish relevant key performance indicators (KPIs), and look at any historical data you have from previous gamification projects to see if there are any learnings to apply. With this approach, across different games or projects, your content will always be relevant, considered, and deliver a consistent (to improving) level of quality your market will come to expect.

2. Choose the right game mechanics

The important thing is to customise a game engine that’s as thematically relevant to the promotion of your brand, product or service as possible for maximum impact. If it’s for say, marketing related to an ice hockey team, you could customise the Ice Hockey game, and invite your audience to try and sling pucks past the goalie to win tickets or merchandise. If you were promoting a new range of fashionable sunglasses, maybe a Photo Contest would be more appropriate, as you could challenge your audience to recreate an iconic look, or take a selfie with the best summer vibes backdrop.

A good game should be fun to play and should also have a clear objective. The objective of a marketing game should be to attract the attention of your target market and convert them into customers. You need to make sure that your game reflects your brand’s tone and style, and that it is eye-catching enough to attract customers.

3. Use powerful, on-brand graphic design

Graphic design is an essential part of any element of your marketing campaign, and online games and contests are no exception. The visual elements you choose will determine whether your community will pay attention to them and what they think of your business and what they associate with your brand. Let your creativity speak for itself and produce quality graphics that appropriately stage your brand or product.

4. Promote it

If nobody knows about your marketing game, it can be the best designed, most on-the-money execution of interactive content in the history of product promotion, but it’ll count for nothing. While marketing games will aid your promotional strategy, you need to promote it to get things started. Put it on your socials, send out the QR code in your mailing lists, put it on billboards and in magazines: the more people get to playing the more chances it has to take off and deliver on its potential return on investment (ROI).

Developing an effective promotion strategy across all your communication channels and media is obviously necessary to generate interest and curiosity from customers and prospects: websites, social networks, mobile applications, QR codes, and so on and so forth. It’s essential before your campaign starts to get the ball rolling, but also during and after, to announce the end of the game, and also to announce the winners.

Scarcity creates demand. Run your games year round but vary them to keep them fresh and exciting. In the marketing landscape, a good and addictive game is like a rare seasonal fruit – it’s great fresh, but the same motivations that get people excited about your game are the same motivations that lead people to stop playing that game and move onto the next one. People crave diversion, and with your marketing game, you’re catering to that craving. This should be factored in your approach to any marketing game project.

5. Measure its performance and study KPIs

Also consider KPIs, both during, and after your game has finished its run. Does something need adjusting? Is there a level where players are stopping the experience? Play through it yourself and see if you can figure out why.

Ultimately, there is no perfect way to create marketing games. Try different mechanics and examples of marketing games to test and see what works best for your business and gets you closest to your goals. Learn from every project to improve your approach in designing the next marketing game. Like anything in life, the person who has tried and failed, tried and done OK, and tried and knocked it out of the park becomes the expert. Gamification platforms like Drimify give you the tools and the infrastructure to make an effective first attempt at a marketing game, but the real power of such platforms lies in their data collection and performance monitoring capabilities. There is always room for improvement in your approach, and with games created on Drimify, you get the roadmap to make that improvement with every new project you start.

The importance of engagement rate, the key indicator

There is no doubt that the engagement rate is one of the most important indicators for measuring the success of a marketing game, or even your whole marketing campaign. This figure measures the interaction of users with a piece of content. It is usually obtained by dividing the total number of interactions, such as game participations, by the total number of impressions or views. The result allows companies to measure a piece of content’s effectiveness, but also to identify potential opportunities to improve engagement. A high rate is a sign that users are interested in what you have to offer, that they have in fact become players, and is a good indicator of customer conversion.

This rate can obviously vary from one campaign to another, depending on the game mechanics used, the rewards involved, the subject matter or the context. It is therefore important to constantly monitor and analyse the data so that you can adjust your approach to campaigns if necessary, in order to achieve your objectives and achieve a higher rate of engagement.

Its importance in gamification goes beyond simply keeping users engaged. The more users are engaged in a game, the more likely they are to share it with a friend or family member, or with all their contacts or followers on social media. Engagement rates are also often directly correlated with a company’s customer conversion rates. The more you can turn your customers and prospects into active and engaged gamers, the more revenue you can generate through sales, and the healthier that bottom line.

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