Engage your audience with daily online jigsaw puzzles
Resources
It’s now more apparent than ever that being able to repeatedly engage with target audiences, day after day, is more conducive to influencing behaviours, encouraging desired actions, and building relationships.
Whether you’re trying to raise awareness among employees, or build positive associations with your brand for customers, serialised storytelling and messaging can be much more impactful for businesses than one-offs.
It’s why the golden age of television happened, it’s why every movie studio is trying to build franchises, and it’s why newspapers and websites offer up daily puzzles in the form of crosswords and Sudoku.
They’re regular hits of something fun. They’re something an audience can look forward to.
This is where the idea of delivering daily gamified jigsaws comes from, and that’s what this article is all about.
Benefits of daily jigsaws for communications and branding
If daily jigsaws seemed like a strange final turn for that intro to take, let us hit you with a surprising statistic. According to an Ipsos survey, one in every five Americans does a jigsaw puzzle either once a month, or more frequently.
The humble jigsaw puzzle may have a history of being a cheap pastime for the masses during the Great Depression, but it’s an enduring pastime, with origins in education, and enough present-day popularity to justify a $14 billion dollar global industry as of 2023.
So the first things to note are, they’re incredibly popular, and universally understood.
What’s gamification and how does the jigsaw puzzle fit in?
Gamification is using game mechanics to improve user engagement.
It’s basically inviting someone to play, but using levers like competition, social interaction, and discovery to achieve a desired outcome. You might use gamification to gain influence, to educate, or to encourage a specific action.
While the term wasn’t coined until 2002, the jigsaw puzzle might be the earliest example of modern gamification we have.
In the 1700s jigsaw puzzles – then called dissections – were being used to teach children geography, and in the early 1900s, jigsaws of new steam trains and ocean liners were being given away for promotional purposes by travel companies.
Modern gamified jigsaw puzzles are digital, can be played on any modern device connected to the internet, and can be built quickly and to a pro standard on no-code gamification solutions with jigsaw templates like Drimify.
What daily jigsaws can offer over other gamification experiences
While other puzzles like Wordle and crosswords can be used for daily engagement, the jigsaw puzzle offers you a more visual solution.
For example, if you’re wanting to incorporate your new branding, or you’re wanting to make the visual of a new product part of the gameplay, the jigsaw puzzle is very hard to beat.
When you try to reassemble an image, you’re so much more focused on the intricacies and the details of that image, so you’re then more susceptible to accompanying messaging through intermediate content screens. This is why jigsaws for education were such an instant hit in the 1700s.
When you take the puzzle template from a gamification platform like Drimify, you have a highly visual and popular game mechanic that offers the kind of gameplay that can slot neatly into someone’s daily routine. (Remember, one in five Americans are actively puzzle-ing monthly or more often, and given the globalisation of American culture, similar statistics will be true across the world.)
In fact, daily jigsaw apps are things that people are actively seeking out on the internet, so why not hijack this appetite with your marketing games?
How the Dynamic Path™ elevates the jigsaw puzzle
Jigsaw puzzle creation is easy, but it might have you wondering how you can go about making them a daily event for your audience in a cohesive way.
One option would be to host your customised online jigsaw puzzles on a dedicated page on your internet or intranet sites. You could change the embed code so you’re offering a different puzzle each day.
The only issue here is, how can participants catch up who missed day one? How do they all interconnect?
Let’s consider some possible use-cases:
- You want to offer a puzzle a day as part of a digital marketing advent calendar
- You’re promoting a range of new products and you want to spotlight a different one each day
- You’re soft launching your corporate rebranding with your staff over the course of a week
- You’re running a week-long jigsaw competition with your staff as part of an employee experience campaign (EX), with the top 10 puzzlers all being entered into a prize draw
- You want to deliver a multi-step gamification experience that mixes the jigsaw in with other puzzle games and game mechanics
This is where using an enterprise-grade gamification platform like Drimify really moves the needle. Because with Drimify, you get the Dynamic Path™
The Dynamic Path™ is one of our experience builders, which means you can combine game mechanics into a bigger experience. In the Dynamic Path’s™ case, the different game engines form steps that can denote a journey across different images.
For example, imagine you complete two games that are on a backdrop of an image of the earth. The next two steps are on the same image but zoomed in, then again for the next two, and the two after that, until the final step where the player could land on earth.
Equally, you could set it to form a visual of a calendar.
Either configuration allows you to unlock games and make them accessible by date, and make it so they have to be completed sequentially, or as they wish.
You can also enable a leaderboard, linking and aggregating player performances across all the puzzles or experiences played.
Start engaging your audience with daily jigsaw puzzles today
If you’re needing to communicate with internal or external audiences and you have a lot of imagery to get across, delivering daily jigsaw puzzles for marketing or for internal communications, or daily experiences featuring jigsaw puzzles, is easy on Drimify.
In addition to the Dynamic Path™ and the jigsaw puzzle template, there are more than 30 different game mechanics just waiting to be customised. Create a free account, and start building your daily jigsaw experience today.
Want to know more?
