Engage your audience with gamification on your next podcast

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Who doesn’t have a podcast these days? You hear a lot of made-up-sounding statistics like, “Last year in the United States, the number of new podcasts launched exceeded the number of Toyota Corollas sold,” or other such banal comparisons that have you scratching your head trying to figure out if that’s a surprisingly large number, or a surprisingly small number. The point they’re trying to make is that there are a lot of podcasts, and that it’s a relatively saturated market, but why is that? How did we get here?

Statistically speaking, in the mid 2010s, most people didn’t know what a podcast was, even though the idea was technically invented in 2000. The Joe Rogan Experience, the most downloaded and prolific podcast in history, didn’t technically start until 2009, with early episodes being a long way off the production values even first-time vloggers and amateur podcasters can achieve with today’s accessible technology.

Today, you can literally record and edit a rudimentary podcast on your phone – it’ll probably sound like it was recorded inside a pencil case, but that won’t necessarily stop you getting downloads if your conversations add listener value, your “on air” banter is top draw, and, and this is one of the biggest ANDs ever committed to text, you can find a niche or a gap and connect with an audience. If nobody’s listening, you’re just talking to yourself and recording it.

What’s the challenge when it comes to finding an audience with your podcast?

In some ways, it sounds like it should be easy. When people are in the gym, running on a treadmill, or on public transport, they can just pop in their headphones and listen to your podcast, right? But there are 1.3 million podcasts recorded in English? Whatever your niche, that sounds crowded. For context, in 2021, there were an estimated 800,000 TV shows available to watch across streaming and traditional TV platforms, so there are considerably less options TV-wise than podcast-wise, and they’ve been making TV for a lot longer than we’ve been making podcasts.

The challenge lies in standing out and actually engaging people. You’re asking people not to spend time, but to spend life. Another thing to bear in mind is that a podcast is part of people’s mental diet: it goes into their brains, and can be incredibly influential with charismatic and persuasive hosts. Therefore, people are understandably selective about what they’ll give their time to.

With audience engagement being the name of the game, and differentiating your offering from what will be a sea of sameness in your particular niche, you should think about incorporating gamification.

Use gamification in your next podcast

Gamification is the application of game mechanics and principles to typically non-gaming contexts. By gamifying something, you can increase audience engagement by inviting them to participate instead of washing over them passively, and you can appeal to their intrinsic motivations: their hunger for competition, their thirst for a challenge, and even their natural curiosity and yearnings for discovery.

Ultimately, gamification can be applied to any area where audience engagement will improve something. You can gamify education to better motivate learners, whether that’s for corporate training, something skill-based like music tuition, or something more academic, like science. Businesses use it in the corporate world for more effective recruitment, onboarding and training, and it’s particularly effective when it comes to marketing.

Find your audience

Marketing your podcast is the first objective where gamification could be a great help. Ultimately, you need to market your podcast in some way, otherwise nobody will know it exists. When there were about 10 podcasts globally that served each particular niche, you could probably count on word of mouth, but in the history of podcasting, those days are pre-Jurassic.

Say you’re a specialist retailer and you want to know if launching a podcast would be something that’s worth your time and resources as a business to do. The first step would be to customise a Survey on the Drimify gamification platform, tailoring it to find out about your current audience’s appetite for podcasts in your niche, and getting an idea of what kind of shows they enjoy (if any). This could be distributed on social media, to you followers, and also to people in social media special interest groups pertaining to your niche.

As a business, your main aims for launching a podcast can vary from:

• Adding value for your your customers through specialist advice
• Put a personality and face (or voice) to your brand
• Generate revenue, either through sponsored episodes, promoting particular products, or offering incentives to listeners
• Educating your target audience

How do you gamify your podcast?

First of all, think about your goals and how to proceed. You obviously need to know a few things about your target audience. People react differently to games depending on their age, personality and other factors. Before applying gamification techniques, you must first understand the results you want to achieve by adding gamification to your marketing programme.

It is obviously crucial to understand the target audience to match any gamification experiences you create to their expectations in order to capture their attention.

Setting up your games

Then comes the crucial step of deciding what kind of game you want to create. Do you want to create a game where listeners turned players compete against each other? Perhaps you want to give players a chance to win prizes? Or maybe you want to let the players explore a story together? Once you have decided on the type of game you want to create, you need to decide on the type of mechanics you want to put in place.

There are many different types of game mechanics, and some work better than others depending on the type of game you are creating, and obviously, some fit better with the format of the podcast and the topic of the episode concerned. For example, if you are creating games where players compete against each other, you can choose an audio quiz, which is suitable for an auditory medium, to involve as many people as possible, and also test your audience’s knowledge of the subject matter.

You could use customised Quizzes and Polls during your podcast, or even create an online game trail where users can participate and earn points offline, before crowning the winner in a prize draw. The possibilities for gamification are endless, as demonstrated by the ID10T Podcast with Chris Hardwick (formerly The Nerdist Podcast), a weekly show featuring interviews with celebrities, comedians, writers, musicians, artists, and filmmakers. Each week, the hosts play a trivia game where listeners compete to answer questions correctly.

The Tim Ferriss Show is another example of a gamified podcast, in the form of a series of daily interviews hosted by Tim Ferris, author of the book, The 4 Hour Work Week. Listeners earn points every time they listen to the show and can redeem these points for prizes. He has already done a podcast with Jane McGonigal, an American game designer and author, who is promoting gamification on the world stage.

Gamify your podcasts with a few clicks

These types of events, with live or pre-recorded content, can be done in conjunction with the Drimify gamification platform. By creating interactive mini-games, you can include your audience by delivering an interactive experience that connects them to your show.

Gamification is an innovative and interactive strategy to engage your podcast audience by increasing interaction with your content. It is also an easy way to source and introduce relevant new topics that will keep listeners coming back for more.

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