Digital Connect Four as a marketing tool: Top 4 use cases
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Connect Four is a fun and fast strategy game that anybody can play.
You’re just trying to connect four counters or chips before your opponent can – it’s all right there in the name!
And because of this simplicity, and because even a long game can take less than five minutes to play, and because the whole game grid can fit neatly onto a modern smartphone screen, it’s a perfect scaffolding upon which to build marketing games.
In this article, we’re going to talk in detail about how Connect Four games can help you in your marketing campaigns, ultimately running through the top four use cases.
How games like Connect Four are marketing cheat codes
If someone starts telling you about a new movie that’s coming out, it’s very easy to get turned off, lose interest, and start to feel your smartphone burning a hole in your pocket, begging you to dive headfirst into the doomscroll…
Even trailers cut to the portrait format and optimised for mobile cropping up on said doomscroll…
One swipe and they’re in the rear view mirror.
But let’s consider instead an invitation to play a simple and engaging game of Connect Four on your phone, except rather than the normal red and yellow counters that have been associated with it throughout the game’s history, they’re coded to the characters within the movie, and the background is in the style of the movie, and after you play and you’re waiting to see where you are on the leaderboard, there’s a trailer for the movie…
Suddenly the movie’s become a lot more interesting. Why? Because of gameplay. You got to interact with something and use your brain, and due to the visual language linking to the movie, at the right stage in the user journey, your interest was piqued enough to justify paying attention to something for more than three seconds.
You’re fighting a never-ending battle in the attention economy
Today, attention is king.
In marketing, you’re now competing with more than just your competitors. To get eyes on your branded messaging, you’re competing with anyone who’s willing to reach for the microphone and put themselves out there.
This is why game mechanics that are simple enough to be barrier-less to entry but sophisticated enough to be recurrently interesting are the modern marketer’s secret weapon.
Games will ALWAYS demand attention because they’re an invitation to play, and with the right execution, that attention can be redirected to consistently deliver on marketing objectives.
Top four use cases calling for digital Connect Four experiences
Gamification and marketing games of course account for more than just Connect Four, and can be adapted to fulfil marketing objectives across the entire pirate metrics frameworks, from acquisition through to retention and referral.
However, for the purposes of this article, we’re going to be looking at what we think are the four more compelling use cases for customising your own Connect Four experiences.
This list isn’t exhaustive, as depending on your branding and your project, there are no real limitations of how Connect Four could be utilised to connect your audience to your marketing goals. It’s all a question of imagination and execution, and tying a game involving its own strategies and approaches to game play to your concepts.
1. Driving brand awareness
The Connect Four game engine is a highly visual one. You have so many different elements to customise in addition to your start, finish, and intermediate screens.
You have your player and computer counters, and the game grid – which doesn’t sound like much, but you’re literally controlling the appearance of every playable aspect of the user experience.
This makes it ideal as a vehicle for driving brand awareness.
Think of the possibilities:
- Switching out the counters for bottle caps for beverage companies
- Incorporating character designs for new movies and shows
- Adapting them for sports marketing, such as jersey launches, using new kit colours and emblems
- Literally any circular product which can be represented by a counter
Then between the grid, the background, text buttons and logo, the full run of your branded colours can be combined in the most effective way.
The design is only half the battle: While looking a million dollars and delivering a premium experience is essential for effective gamification, you need to find ways to include the right messaging for it to be worth your time.
You can do this in your start and end screens, or even include intermediate content screens to gently educate participants about your brand.
Pro tip: Less is more when it comes to incorporating branded messaging in your marketing games. Stick to one major point, make it quickly in as few words as you can, and get players to your end screen where they can follow a call to action button (CTA) so your strategic web pages can capitalise on the positive impression your game has made.
2. Making apps more interactive and engaging
Whether it’s a loyalty app, or just a branded app that connects your users to your products and services, keeping users on the app, attracting users to the app, and re-engaging users over time is a constant goal, and this is a place where gamification in the form of digital Connect Four can come out swinging for the fences.
The digital Connect Four format for gamification – at least on the Drimify platform – is a one-player game. It’s the target user vs a computer of medium ability. How quickly players can beat the game, or how good of a fight they can put up ultimately determines their score, and this score is recorded on a leaderboard.
This enables you to embed both your Connect Four game and its leaderboard within an app, and when the campaign’s over, run a prize giveaway with only the top 20 participants.
This could be within the app and tied to loyalty points, or even used externally across social media and your websites to encourage new signups. (Perhaps for the app’s fourth birthday?)
3. Collecting data and generating leads
This one’s fair game for pretty much any gamification experience, but it’s an ideal use case for casual games like Connect Four where the game itself is especially compelling in its own right.
When you customise your digital Connect Four game on Drimify, you can include and define a data collection form either before or after the game (or some questions before, some after) depending on the exact user journey you’re looking to deliver.
This could be for demographic data to build your CRM database, preferential data to enrich your data sets, or even as part of more general market research, as you can include open questions, or even connect your Connect Four game to a survey using Drimify’s Combo™ experience builder.
4. Promoting products and special offers
The main thing here is including an intermediate content screen either before or after the game with a video and some text promoting a key benefit or two of a product or service, and making sure you include an appropriate CTA button to direct players to a product page or contact form on your end screen.
Beyond that, it’s all about tailoring the visuals and branding to your new product (while not forgetting the branding people know you for), and piquing players’ interests in as few words as possible on the start screen.
To really give this idea some gas, you could use the Combo™ to add an instant win game after Connect Four that potentially delivers one grand prize, but at the very least gives every participant a limited time discount code.
This way they travel through the Combo™ and the Connect Four content hyped about whatever you’re promoting, go all the way to the end for a chance to win, and receive that extra incentive to make a purchase with their limited time offer (with the exception of one or two players who won, and will now be brand fans anyway).
Food for thought: If you’re releasing the fourth iteration of a popular sneaker, or the fourth iteration of a must-have piece of tech, could Connect Four be more on brand? The answer is emphatically, no. The opportunity is staring you in the face.
How will a digital Connect Four marketing game help your brand?
Digital Connect Four marketing games can be used to do so much more than just what’s listed here, and for some brands, the number four, or even the very style of gameplay will offer playful and creative associations with their identity.
At a brainstorming stage, there are no wrong answers. The first step is to create your free Drimify account, and start building and experimenting with your first Connect Four game, and through testing, optimise your design and discover what’s possible.
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