Engage and grow your social media communities with marketing games

Social media platforms provide an essential outlet for businesses to promote their brand, connect with their customers, and grow their audience. The only business to customer (B2C) companies neglecting a social media presence are either extinct, a rare miracle, or precariously teetering on the brink of irrelevance.

Attracting followers on social media is one thing, but almost harder is maintaining that social media following. Social media is so established that it’s common practice for users to prune and curate their Instagram and Facebook feeds as their tastes and interests evolve. In fact, social media is such a dynamic, even volatile arena in which businesses are competing for audience attention, that failing to diversify your social media efforts across multiple platforms risks falling quickly behind the 8-ball when new platforms take off. Equally, focusing too heavily on one social media site could suddenly leave you with a lot of groundwork invested in content tailored to a ghosted platform. (Remember Myspace? Remember Bebo?)

To keep your social media communities engaged and interested, you can use innovative tools and techniques to encourage interaction and buy-in, such as gamification in the form of a marketing game strategy.

The role of the community manager and their responsibilities

Community management is a constantly evolving area of social media, and involves taking care of important communication strategies, particularly on networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In addition, community managers have relations with the company’s online audience within their purview. Community managers take charge of implementing these strategies, and managing company relations with online users.

Their tasks may vary depending on the company and its online presence, but they can generally be summarised as:

• Management of social networks with the creation of publication and posting strategies, benchmarking, and the creation of visual content
• Development of the brand image, and visibility on the internet within online communities
• Moderation of user comments and management of private messages to improve the relationship between the brand and its customers
• Fostering user participation in online events and marketing campaigns
• Taking charge and generating ideas regarding online collaborations with other brands and influencers

The aim of community management is to create and maintain an active and committed community around the brand, by promoting its values and creating a relationship of trust with customers through the content featured in their posts. It’s therefore within a community manager’s wheelhouse to take the lead on marketing game strategies, or at least collaborating in the process.

Gamification and marketing games: how do you integrate them into your digital communications?

Gamification consists of using game elements, typically from video games, and applying them to less obviously playful processes to make them more fun and engaging. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds, as marketing games platforms like Drimify allow you to customise tried and tested game engines to your needs. The mechanics of these pre-made games and online contests are a form of gamification used in the fields of marketing and communications to promote brands, products, and services, and work on any modern device, such as mobile phones, tablets, and computers.

To effectively integrate gamification and marketing games into your communications and media campaigns, it is important to:

• Clearly define the company’s objectives and target the right people
• Choose the type of game that best suits the company, its image, and its target audience
• Set up an attractive reward system to encourage users to participate and engage with the brand
• Measure the results to see if the gaming experience was successful, and to adjust the strategy, and future ones, accordingly

There are different ways to integrate gaming into your marketing campaigns. One of the most common is through competitions on social networks. This allows you to be more visible to internet users through shareability and excitement, and facilitates converting leads into customers through data collection and brand interaction, and can help direct traffic to your more strategic pages.

Due to how hyper connected the modern consumer is, constantly scrolling through social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, and how much content a typical person would scroll past in a day, incorporating marketing games in your social media content that they can easily click into and interact with is a great way to boost your overall engagements. It’s not an arty photograph of a product and some pie-in-the sky epithets (although they have their place when done well), or a short video (although again, these can be great), the marketing game is an invitation to play. Gamified content isn’t to say: “Here’s this cool thing we’ve made, ain’t it cool?” it’s saying, “Stop scrolling, and let’s take 5 minutes and have an experience.” It might sound fanciful, but essentially, you’re bonding with your target customer through a branded experience you’re providing. You’re breaking up their social media diet with something that’s just more fun, or more productive depending on the product or service and the tone of your content.

The dominance of social networks

Social networks have become an integral part of everyday life for most people in developed countries, and have played a key role in transforming the way we communicate and connect with others online. They have also had a significant impact on businesses. Because nearly every viable customer is on some combination of Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and will typically spend a lot more time scrolling on their mobile phone than sitting through TV adverts or flicking past campaigns in print, it’s necessary to make significant efforts to reach them on these platforms and arrest their attention through what you post.

Effective and impactful social media posts allow companies to engage with their community of followers, deliver quality content, and promote their brand in a targeted way to a large and diverse audience. Because of their popularity and reach, social networks are a must-have marketing tool for businesses of all sizes, especially for promoting your gamification projects and marketing game campaigns. Afterall, what good is a well-designed, perfectly customised game if nobody plays it? And what good is your social media if people keep scrolling past your content? If your game represents heat, and audience engagement is like fuel, then think of social media as the oxygen that lets your campaign breathe fire to spread your message far and wide. This is why any game created on the Drimify platform offers seamless integration for easy sharing across all social media platforms.

Top 3 examples of marketing games to complement your social media campaigns

When designing your gamification projects, you will want to consider the needs and goals of your social media strategy, and what role you want marketing games to play in helping with those. Whether the aim is boosting sales, growing your contacts list, or driving web traffic to your commercial pages; such ambitions will factor into what game engine you choose, what prizes (if any) will be up for grabs, and how you configure the various available features.

There are numerous game engines on the Drimify gamification platform that you can easily customise with your own graphics and branding to incorporate into your social media strategies, but here are three classics that offer a lot of versatility and carry track records of repeatable success.

1. The instant win game to generate excitement, collect data, and reward your audience

Who doesn’t want to win a grand prize? Even a 2nd or 3rd tier freebie is nice. Offering your audience the chance to win something with a game like a Wheel of Fortune or a Scratch Card is easy to make, and is accessible to all audiences. Whether you’re spinning a wheel or swiping to scratch and reveal, the experience delivers a rush of excitement as you see what might be in store for you.

Such a game works well on social media, as people can easily interact with such an experience – it’s very quick, and through data collection forms, intermediate screens, and your end screen, it’s easy to ask for personal information and issue a CTA.

2. A Quiz around your brand, or around trivia related to your product, service, or promotion

This is another one carrying that universal appeal and universal accessibility. The Quiz format on Drimify can be customised to have open ended answers, multiple choice answers, or even ordered answers based on values – within limits, you can configure your Quiz anyway you like. You can also include intermediate screens that can subtly educate and motivate your audience regarding your brand and regarding the product or service you’re promoting.

3. The Dynamic Path™ to customise a journey over multiple levels, or across longer time frames

The Dynamic Path™ is the MVP on the Drimify roster. It gives you access to any game engine in the catalogue to create multiple levels or steps to your gamified experience. You can customise a marketing pathway where the player chooses what order to play the games in, or have it so one level unlocks another, or even have each level unlocked on specific dates if you want your campaign to deliver a sustained playable experience over a number of days.

The latter option of having levels unlocked on specific dates feeds into one of the key strategies of cultivating a healthy social media account: post regular quality content. Being able to post and remind your community to check in on the day’s playable experience keeps your account active in the minds of your community, and multiplies the odds of it getting shared, and having your audience grow – particularly if you have a running leaderboard for a grand prize at the end.

Repeats lead to re-Tweets: gamify long-term for the best results

So you’re this far in and you’re thinking, Sure, gamification, marketing games, love it! We’ll make a game and see how it lands. That’s a great start, and while you could well have that game be relatively successful in achieving its goals and justifying its implementation, if you think about it, you know that you’d just be scratching the surface of what’s possible.

You really want to think of gamification as a marketing superpower, and if this is your first time using gamification, think about every superhero movie you’ve seen, or comic book you’ve read. Was Peter Parker ready to run through the Sinister 6 the day after he got bitten by the radioactive spider? Of course he wasn’t. Sure, he was turbocharged enough to outperform any regular human at any contest you care to suggest, but it took practice before he was ready to face down the big bads. The same is true of a business applying gamification to their marketing games.

When you create a game on the Drimify platform, you’re collecting user data and analytics every time a user interacts with it. Over time, this gives you information to inform your ongoing approach to gamification and how that feeds into your social media strategy. You learn what sort of interactive content works well with your audience, what doesn’t work so well in your industry, and as a result, you will be able to identify shifts in audience behaviour and appetites. One approach may really catch fire for one campaign and wildly outperform expectations, which could be repeated down the line for similar results. With every campaign, you’ll get a little better wielding the superpowers of gamification, and as you gain experience points, you’ll get a little closer to becoming a master.

The marketing games solution

Marketing games and competitions represent an effective solution to engage online communities of followers across social networks, and to generate interest in your brand or product. On social networks, users are looking for diversion, and what better way to divert them by inviting them to play? By offering, for example, a Quiz, instant win games, 5 minutes of Pacman, or a minute out of their commute to shoot as many free throws as they can, you can make them into players, and effectively divert their attention to your brand. This makes for a welcome change to videos and pictures, which while still essential components of any social media strategy, are not as interactive, and can’t deliver the same level of engagement as a well designed game.

By offering rewards to users who participate and measuring the results, companies can use marketing games to engage their communities on social networks in a cost-effective way to help them achieve their marketing goals.

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