The essential mechanics for a successful marketing game

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Marketing games and competitions are a great way to work on your brand’s image and get messages across all media formats to reach your customers. Whether it’s your website page, emailing lists, by SMS, social networks, platforms or other applications, customised marketing games make fantastic tools for engaging with audiences.

There are numerous marketing game mechanics at your disposal to bring your marketing game ideas to life, allowing you to create highly tailored, playable experiences for your customers and prospects that can help to serve your campaign goals. With more or less sophisticated game mechanics, they can be used to generate consumer engagement, gain audience loyalty, build communities, and collect important data about your targets. Each one is designed to elicit a specific reaction or outcome from players.

The different game mechanics at your disposal

Gamification is built around different game mechanics and elements that drive the action forward. You can generate interaction, commitment, and loyalty among all types of potential players: prospects, consumers, employees, audiences, or even other businesses if you’re focused on business to business (B2B).

You can combine these mechanics in an almost infinite number of ways to create a wide range of gamification experiences depending on your needs and objectives, and your target customer. Here are some of the key mechanics to make your marketing games and experiences successful:

Points

Points are one of the most reliable and important elements in any gamification project, and because of this, most examples of marketing games will operate on some kind of points system. Using a points system when the user completes a task or mission allows you to reward and measure a participant’s interaction within a game. The more tasks they play, win or complete, the more points they earn, and the more experience and rewards they gain.

In addition, points play an essential role in determining the player’s level and position in your marketing games and competitions, which factors into your game’s leaderboard.

Badges

In the field of gamification a badge is a visual reward that recognises the achievements or milestones reached by players. The mechanics are based on awarding badges to mark progress and recognise a player’s efforts. For example: by completing tasks, reaching certain levels, acquiring skills, or participating in events.

Badges can be a powerful motivator for players and users, giving them a sense of achievement and recognition for their relative mastery of the game. They also serve to represent the player’s status and place in the game.

Rewards

By interacting with the marketing game or contest, winning participants get rewards and gifts for their achievements which motivate them to continue playing the game, and continue the activity or task at hand. Rewards can take different forms, and can also be real or virtual. However, for effective marketing games, they should always be adapted to the level of difficulty of the tasks performed. Let the punishment fit the crime, but so too let the reward be fitting of the achievement.

At a certain stage, a set number of points earned could be exchanged for rewards or prizes. This will not only encourage the winners to keep playing, but also other players to come back and try to win more rewards. If you see it’s possible to win say, a new state of the art watch by playing a 5-minute marketing game on your smartphone, even though you know the odds are wildly against you also winning that watch, or equivalent top-level prize, for 5 minutes of your commute, that outside chance is a little extra incentive to engage. Maybe you win a tee shirt, maybe you win a nifty hat, maybe you just end up buying the watch anyway as it’s all you can now think about.

Levels

The points earned do not only lead to rewards, but also to status. Levels can play two important roles in gamification systems: they indicate progress, and they convey status. Status reflects the player’s experience and corresponds to the player’s level in the game. The more experienced the player is, the higher their level is, and therefore the more access they have to new benefits and rewards. A level system therefore enhances the player’s progress and makes it easier to see how far they have progressed and what tasks remain to be completed.

There are two types of levels:

• Game levels: advancing levels of the game increase in complexity and challenge, or at least add variety. The creation of different levels of play must be interesting and fun enough to keep the player engaged, but with increasing difficulty or added variety so that they are not frustrated or bored. You want them to keep playing to advance to the next level.
• Player levels: the level of each player according to their skills, activity in the game, and experience gained in the game.

The leaderboard

The leaderboard feature appeals to a player’s desire to compete and defeat other players through a higher ranking, both during and at the end of the competition. The purpose of a leaderboard is to show players where they stand in relation to others. The fact that some of them gain skills and rewards will make other players want to reach their level or even surpass them. They should therefore be allowed to see their progress and position in relation to others by means of a ranking to develop their competitiveness.

Those who are at the top appreciate the recognition it brings, while for others the ranking shows them where they stand in relation to their peers. Often, the mere presence of a ranking can trigger the desire to play. The simple goal of climbing the rankings is a powerful motivation to continue.

The progress bar

Creating the desire to progress and stay motivated is why a progress bar is a key mechanism in gamification. A progress bar is a visual representation of a player’s progress towards a goal: it engages the player by showing them how hard they have worked and what they’ve already invested in the game. It can be used to track the completion of tasks, their advancing player level, earning rewards, or achieving other in-game goals.

Challenges

These game mechanics require users to perform a prescribed set of actions, following a guided path of your design. A mission, challenge, or quest can involve a single step or several steps (for example, creating an account on your website, or following you on social networks to receive clues). Setting up a challenge to overcome creates positive emotions where players feel valued for their effort.

Create the marketing game you need

With Drimify, the game engines and their various mechanics are all at your disposal to tailor to your marketing objectives, whether that’s a one-off game to promote a specific product, range or service, or a Dynamic Path™ experience that allows you to create multiple levels, utilising as many game engines on the Drimify platform as you need for a longer, more varied and immersive campaign. Ultimately, bringing effective gamification elements and marketing games to your campaigns is adding serious firepower to your existing marketing artillery.

When gamifying your approach to marketing, there are many types of games and mechanics that can be manipulated to achieve your goals. With a little creativity and some strategic thinking, you can create engaging, playable experiences that will deliver excitement, create interaction with your brand, grow your audience, and help drive conversion.

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