Using games to make your next marketing campaign successful
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When developing digital marketing campaigns for your business, finding innovative methods to keep ahead of your competition is essential. Depending on your strategy, as well as your resources and budget, in addition to classic ads and emailing lists, you could also incorporate more modern, potentially more impactful methods, like influencer marketing or marketing games to help promote your brand.
In this article we’ll talk in more detail about the necessary steps to make a marketing campaign successful, and look at how marketing games can be incorporated to effectively support more traditional marketing strategies.
What is a marketing campaign?
A marketing campaign is a communications strategy to promote a product, a service or an idea. It’s the first step in creating visibility and awareness around brands, communicating their culture and tone, and allowing them to maximise sales and profitability on specific product lines or offers. A campaign can be made up of various methods: marketing games being shared on social networks, TV and print ads, influencer marketing, advertising posters, mailing lists, and so on and so forth. Any way in which brands are trying to deliver content is probably part of a marketing campaign. When you walk past a shop and see their windows have changed and they have new graphics in place, that probably means they’ve started a new marketing campaign.
The main components of a successful campaign include market and audience research, choosing effective media channels through which to deliver messaging, monitoring and evaluating the response throughout the campaign, and making the necessary corrections to ensure that the objectives are achieved.
It is also important to set SMART objectives for your marketing campaign. What are you hoping to achieve? They need to be specific: is the aim of your campaign to maximise sales of a new item, or to drive footfall? They need to be measurable: will you be able to quantify success or failure when calculating return on investment (ROI)? They need to be achievable. If you’re an independent soft drinks producer, toppling Coca-Cola with your next marketing campaign probably isn’t going to happen. However, getting enough people to try and enjoy a new soda flavour for it to become a permanent line, might be, and that could lead to it getting stocked in more retailers and restaurants. They also need to be relevant: they need to make sense for your industry and for your business. And finally, they need to be time-bound. You need to have a set time frame for your marketing campaign, and for your campaign to achieve its goals (or fall short and be a learning exercise for next time).
What are marketing games? How can they help my campaign?
The best marketing strategies tailor their campaigns to their target markets, providing relevant content that connects and resonates with their audiences. From creatively written blog posts to social media advertising, a good campaign is a great way to promote products or services, beef up emailing lists, and drive overall growth.
With so many brands and businesses being so media savvy, so seamless with their copy, and effective in all the classic and established approaches, marketing games represent a fresh and innovative, and above all more engaging approach to reaching your target audience. A marketing game is essentially a gamified form of marketing content. You’re creating experiences to captivate your target audience. You’re inviting them to play with your brand, to play with your product, and to engage with what you’re selling.
Examples of marketing games include Quizzes, which could either be testing the player’s knowledge of brand trivia or pop culture in order to win a prize, or even a Product Recommendation Quiz which, when thoughtfully authored, almost acts as a digital salesperson, matching their needs with the most appropriate product in a range and educating them on minor details. You could also offer more casual game-style experiences, like a game of Pacman or Connect 4, but with the graphics tailored to your branding, and every aspect of the content designed to promote the key campaign messages.
How to maximise the success of a campaign in 5 steps
Creating a well thought out campaign strategy gives you the bones of a roadmap and can minimise any missteps or missed opportunities.
1. Define your target audience
Identifying a target audience is the first step in any marketing campaign, and is essential to its success. Knowing the characteristics, preferences and tendencies, of your potential consumer will allow you to develop a relevant message that will appropriately meet their needs. You’ll need to consider the age, location, lifestyle, occupation, tastes, and interests of your target customer when defining a customer profile.
By being specific in who you are trying to reach, you can save time, money and resources, while setting yourself up for the best chance of a worthwhile return on investment from your marketing activities.
2. Research the media they use most
Identifying the main channels your target audience uses can help you build successful campaigns while increasing ROI. Knowing where to direct your efforts nearly always makes your advertising more impactful and effective.
Studying the types of devices, platforms, and channels used by the profile of your target audience can pay dividends when optimising your campaign focuses. Understanding which media are preferred by certain sectors and profiles can open doors to growth, allowing companies to adjust their strategies accordingly.
3. Adapt the tone of voice to resonate with your target audience
Using the right tone of voice is essential to creating a successful marketing campaign. It is important to choose the right wording to influence the target audience and guide their decision-making process. By using the right language and tone, you can elicit the right emotions and responses. You’re trying to inspire confidence, authority, and professionalism to engage prospective customers in a positive way. This increases the likelihood that customers will trust your brand and be willing to take action. In addition, it can be a way to differentiate your branding from your competitors.
For example, take relatively newer craft breweries and the style of marketing that’s being used wholesale to appeal to younger beer drinkers. Younger people don’t want to drink tall cans of bitters and bests they saw their grandparents drinking, they’re drawn to outrageous product names, eye-catching graphics, and irreverent copy. This same style and tone that appeals to one demographic can completely turn off an older generation with more conservative aesthetics and sensibilities – generally speaking at least.
4. Make attractive visuals with a clear and undeniable call to action (CTA)
Visuals play a major role in all aspects of marketing and communications. In fact, studies show that customers are more likely to remember and act on visual content than on simple text. Creating compelling visuals for a marketing campaign can then help to attract potential customers and capture their attention. For this step, it is important to keep the visuals clean and concise, using balanced proportions of text and images so that they are both easily readable and aesthetically appealing.
It is also important to use a suitable call-to-action (CTA) to trigger the user to take the desired action, for example: “Play now.” It’s direct and unambiguous.
5. Set clear and precise KPIs to measure and optimise your campaign
Setting clear and precise key performance indicators (KPIs) for each component of your marketing campaign is essential to accurately measure how they are contributing to the overall project. KPIs allow you to identify which approaches are working and which need to be modified. By looking at quantitative and qualitative metrics, you can get an objective idea of how your overall strategy is performing.
In the context of your marketing game strategy, games authored on the Drimify platform allow for easy data collection from your dashboard from which to extract and analyse relevant KPIs, such as engagement rates and completion rates.
The added value of marketing games in modern marketing campaigns
As discussed earlier in this article, brands and companies invest a lot in their marketing efforts. The bigger the company, the more impressively armed their marketing departments will be, backed up by garrisons of copywriters and flanked by social media gurus and graphic design wizards – marketing games, by contrast, are battlefield levelling superpowers that are now more readily available to small and medium sized businesses than ever before.
By inviting your audience to take part in a playable experience, you not only have an effective way to deliver branded messaging, collect leads and data, and drive various other marketing objectives, but you have a tool that works overtime to bolster the other elements of your campaign. Games created on the Drimify platform integrate seamlessly for sharing as part of your social media strategy, can be reached by scanning QR codes for events or “phygital” strategies, and can be played on any modern device, meaning they not only work on smartphones as mobile gaming, but can be used on screens at events and as part of installations.
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