Engage B2B clients with marketing games

A very widely used engagement tool in the world of business-to-customer (B2C) marketing, gamification entails using interactive techniques and game mechanisms to encourage desired audience behaviours. By delivering a fun and interactive experience to users, the marketing game will typically lead to incentivising a purchase, capturing user data, or collecting personal information to identify and qualify leads.

The interactions and experiences delivered by a well-planned marketing game can create positive and memorable associations with the brand and company, encouraging users to return for subsequent experiences when businesses launch new campaigns. When gamifying a marketing campaign, you’re turning an audience into players, then winners, and ultimately, loyal customers. Repeating the cycle, and applying the learnings from one campaign to the next, is how brands become masters of gamifying their marketing, maximising engagements, and ultimately growing their businesses.

Gamification can be applied across all sectors, appeal to all demographics, and can be tailored to target all audience types. For example, there are games for pharmaceutical companies specifically targeting women over 55 years old, and other games designed to market sports cars, but to get to the focus of this article, what about using gamification to target other businesses? How can you utilise marketing games when trading business-to-business (B2B)?

In this article, we’ll run through various ways you can use marketing games to help you reach your goals when targeting business clients.

The interest of gamification for B2B Marketing

In the collective consciousness, in the same way that people think every police force has that one renegade maverick who plays by their own rules, and that IT is just a gang of automaton misfits asking, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” all day everyday,  B2B marketing is often perceived as boring, dry, and repetitive. From a marketer’s perspective, however, B2B marketing can be seen as being more elaborate and complex than its B2C counterpart.

Marketers working in the B2B space talk about the difficulty of carrying out marketing actions aimed at other companies due to the complexity of the targets, the nature of some of the products and services, and the market itself. The main challenges are: generating leads, improving their brand image, and most importantly: engaging and retaining business customers and partners. To address these, B2B marketers can either create marketing games to target the professionals who are the decision makers at their companies (or carry significant influence with the decision makers), or create games for mobiles and tablets to be used more broadly at trade shows and industry events.

To get the most out of gamification, as with all practices and methodologies, you have to use it in a way that is adapted to your company’s specific needs. This is as true when it comes to B2C marketing as it is when you’re working in B2B marketing. In addition, it is essential that you ensure the gamification elements that you use are suitable to achieve your targets and commercial objectives. Your marketing game’s implementation and performance must also be followed closely so necessary improvements can be made, and learnings applied to subsequent gamification projects.

The top 4 ways that gamification can provide a boost to your your B2B marketing

The possibilities of gamification, both across marketing and all aspects of business are unlimited. To play and involve ourselves in games is hardwired into our DNA as human beings.

However, as a starting point for bringing into effect your own ideas for gamified B2B marketing projects, here are our top 3 ways gamification can help you reach your goals:

1. Attract prospective clients and partner businesses

Are you pitching to a potential new client or partner? Using elements of gamification in your presentation could pique their interest and keep them engaged the whole way through.

Gamification done correctly is a driver of engagement and involvement, and generally, it encompasses an element of entertainment or a reward system that leaves participants feeling satisfied and wanting to participate all over again. As such, introducing games to your meetings and pitches are a great way to add variety to the experience of doing business with you. Making the experience stand out in your prospect’s mind could be what gives you the edge when they’re deciding if they want to do business with yourself or one of your competitors. Do you go with Johnny What’s his Name who delivered death by Powerpoint? Or do you go with the guys who reinforced their key points with a fun, multi-level, playable experience that ended with a Survey asking for feedback? Which business would you want to work with off the back of those two sentences?

Utilising a game format like the Dynamic Path™ gives you access to every game engine on the Drimify catalogue. You could use a combination of customised Quizzes, mini games, and interactive content to show your product or service in action, and demonstrate rather than tell them how your offering can solve their problems. Including something like a customised Survey asking for feedback at the end also goes to show you as a company that operates with growth mindsets. This is minor, but could carry some water when dealing with higher level entrepreneur types who will appreciate such high performer traits.

2. Make the people on the front line of your industry your ambassadors

So here’s one you might not have considered. Let’s say you have several different retailers all buying your products. As a marketer, that’s job done, right? I’d argue that’s only half the job done. Let’s expand the scenario and say you’re your territory’s distributor for a major sporting goods brand. You’re who all the local retailers go through for Brand X’s clothing and equipment. The thing is, those retailers are also selling Brand Y’s goods, and Brand Z’s goods. What does their brand spread actually look like? Is Brand X a big deal for them, and accounting for 20 to 30% of their sales, or is your horse more of a peripheral brand? Are they ordering as much from you as you would like? Who in their company do you think has the most influence over that brand spread, and can help you turn it in your favour? It’s the sales person on the shop floor.

Particularly for specialty retailers, where product knowledge, specialist advice, and getting the end customer to buy into the person who is selling to them counts for a lot, it’s the person who interacts with the customer who you want on your side, and marketing games can make a very effective vehicle to aid in these efforts. By customising an engaging long-form training game with the Dynamic Path™ format, similar to in the last example, you can give them the selling points and the vital information which will make it easier for them to sell your brand over the brand of your competitor.

There are two ways you could do this. You could either send this out to individual stores after your training reps visit, to help reinforce key points, or deliver the games at events where you host 1 or 2 staff members from each retailer. If you were sending this out remotely, and were unable to send a rep or host an event, you could even add a competitive element to it to incentivise participation, with a customised Quiz at the end to test everyone’s brand knowledge, with the winner receiving a premium outfit or piece of equipment. The gamification element is just one part of this puzzle, but it adds variety, and encourages broader engagement levels across this audience by tapping into the innate human appetites for challenge and discovery.

3. Stand head and shoulders above the sea of sameness at industry events

Events like trade shows are great opportunities to attract new customers and new partner brands. The issue? A whole host of your competitors are there for the exact same reason. Funnily enough, that’s why the trade show is happening. Trade show operators create networking heavens for different industries because there is such a great demand for this kind of opportunity. The mission is, how do you stand out and make your presence the one people remember?

Events can be really awkward, especially work-related ones, so having marketing games is a great way to not only break the ice, but to capitalise on the social aspects of gamification: competition, sharing, and discovery. There are a range of game engines that could be customised to serve your B2B marketing strategy at events, and you could either bring your own tablets or terminals for your audience to play on, or have them accessible through QR codes around the venue for people to scan and play on their phones.

The fact that the event will probably run through the course of the day means if you utilised a leaderboard, people might score high at the start of the day, come past, and see they’ve been knocked out of the top 10. So long as the game play is engaging, this encourages them to come back, have another go, and give you and your brand more time. The other obvious benefit is that it makes it easy to make and store contacts through the contact forms that you can set to appear at the start, in the middle, or at the end of a gamified experience.

4. Freshen up your social media content

This is an obvious tactic in B2C marketing, but it’s just as valid when your customers are other businesses. Every business with ambitions of remaining in business have their own social media channels, so it only makes sense to reach out to them there with your marketing games.

This is an area where something like a customised Product Recommendation Quiz could work really effectively. With this game engine you create answers in the forms of your products or services, then match them to the most appropriate multiple choice answers to questions about their needs. This is almost like a digital sales tool, in that your audience can talk about their needs, then instantly have those needs connected with your offering.

5. Boost engagement and retention

Ultimately, B2B marketing, while appealing to a different type of audience than B2C, is still requiring you to push for engagement and push for retention. From the perspective of a business looking to sell to other businesses, you need to look at your marketing as a method for explaining how your service is the solution to their problem, or how your products are the ones their customers want. You need to emphasise how you can help them boost their sales. You almost need to look at them as less of a customer, and more of a team mate, and encourage them to think similarly through the experiences and content you’re delivering.

You can reflect this in your marketing games customised to appeal to other businesses. When creating them on your Drimify dashboard, you’re communicating how you can solve this business problem, or about the important new feature of a new product you’re stocking which will satisfy certain customer types. When planned thoughtfully, marketing games are an incredibly versatile and effective tool for communicating with any audience, including other companies.

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