Gamification: defining your target audience

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Whatever the business function and whatever the industry, gamification offers an innovative solution to audience engagement which can help you reach your goals faster.

Gamification can appeal to everyone

Who is the target audience for gamification? In a word, everyone. Playing comes naturally to human beings. It’s a real source of energy and positive emotions. It’s what gets our attention, and is the most effective method for getting the best out of us.

Gamification is essentially mimicking and harnessing video game mechanics to tap into a user’s desire for competition and discovery, to motivate them towards a desired action or outcome. Because video games are so popular, and have been for such a long time, putting digital marketing, training, and educational purposes (among other things) into the form of a gaming experience is a great way to bring your content to a preferred medium for users.

The idea that videogames are just for kids is so wildly outdated now. Gaming demographics show that gamers come in all ages, and the percentage of gamers in more advanced age brackets will continue to grow as the generations that grew up on video games get older. Essentially, modern online video games are already a familiar format to users of most ages, and it won’t be long before they become a universally preferred (or at least accepted) medium.

Gamifying across different sectors and business functions requires different approaches

How do you get the most out of your gamification projects? How do you maximise user engagement to best serve your goals?

Perhaps the most important, most fundamental building block in any gamification project, in fact, any project full stop – is to define your target audience. Anything and everything you do in business is for someone. If someone will pay you for something, it’s because they want it, they can use it, or they can sell it themselves. There is always an end user to serve, to cater to, and to appeal to. How you best appeal to that end user determines everything about your work, from the product design, all the way to how you sell your product or service, or how you promote and educate around its merits.

In this article we’ll talk about how gamification can be incorporated to effectively appeal to different types of target audience across different business functions. Obviously, there is a lot of nuance from target audience to target audience. What one driver wants from a Ford contradicts what another driver wants in a Ferrari, what one customer wants from their Manolo Blahniks contradicts what another customer wants from their Vapourfly 2s. Two car manufacturers, two pairs of shoes, but the average target customer for each one is very different. For the sake of brevity, this will take a much broader focus.

For professional training and business

Gamification is a powerful tool to help companies improve productivity, increase employee satisfaction, and create a positive company culture. There are many ways to apply gamification to your business or workplace strategy. For example, you can give out points for completing tasks and reaching certain goals, and for those with the highest number of points, give them access to a competition to win rewards. You can also create a leaderboard where everyone can see how they stack up against each other, and even keep a little competition going between the players. Workplaces can be competitive places, and if you have high performers working for you, they will naturally be competitive amongst themselves, so it may be worth trying to tap into those competitive natures to boost performance.

Games also make learning more interactive and engaging for trainees. By using game mechanics in new employee inductions or further training requirements, you can create a fun experience that makes users more receptive to messaging, is more labour efficient as it doesn’t require as much face-to-face teaching, and allows learners a certain autonomy over their own development. .

Not only does gamification help employees learn more effectively, but it can also reduce turnover and help to build a more engaged workforce. Utilising a gamification platform like Drimify, with optional agency services, makes it easy to create and launch effective programmes of corporate training.

For user experience and customer loyalty

Gamification can be used as a marketing tool in the form of marketing games. In fact, there might be more high profile examples of gamification in marketing than in any other sector, partly due to the public-facing nature of marketing, but no doubt in some part due to the effectiveness of gamification in generating customer engagement quickly. Through content and external communications that are more playful and interactive, games can help you more effectively catch the attention of your target customers, give you the opportunity to educate them about your offering’s merits, and boost sales.

In marketing, gamification can also help you to develop your community, especially online and on social networks. Because interactive gamified content can be used to encourage customers to compete, and contribute their own creativity (such as in a customised Photo Contest or Video Contest), they make for far more shareable pieces of digital content than more traditional media, that is consumed or interacted with passively.

Gamified experiences created on the Drimify gamification platform offers powerful data collection. As well as the answers people give to customised Quizzes or Surveys, or their scores in games, you can see things like participation rate and engagement rate, so you can monitor how your marketing game has performed. This is incredibly useful when it comes to developing your approach to gamification. By incorporating a gamification strategy year round, and regularly using games and gamified experiences to engage users and gather data, you can learn more about what appeals to your target audience. This not only lets you improve your gamification strategy, but can have positive impacts across your business.

For education and teaching

Gamification can also be used in education as a way to make learning more fun and engaging for students. Because games offer quick feedback cycles, they can keep learners motivated and engaged throughout their learning journeys.

Regardless of whether a student is a kid at school, or an adult undergoing corporate training, gamified learning is particularly useful in situations where people are struggling to learn a concept or develop a new skill. For example, if someone needs to learn how to use a new piece of software, but doesn’t have the patience or perseverance to just figure it out, a gamified experience can autonomously help them learn faster, and better retain what they’ve learned than through traditional methods. This is because educational games create a virtual learning environment where users can learn through repeatability. They can make mistakes and apply learnings from falling short on multiple attempts.

Target and engage your audience in any sector with gamification

A gamified framework will allow you to boost engagement and target a wide range of users, but the key to getting the most out of gamification is to know your target audience.

While nobody knows your target audience better than you, gamification, effectively applied, can help you learn even more about them, and better appeal to them. The data collection functionality of games created on the Drimify platform can not only help you in terms of what works from a content perspective, but even in terms of informing your future product design and service offerings.

As much as gamification is a tool to engage your audience, it’s also a means to learn who your audience is, and monitor how their tastes and needs are evolving.

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