Gamification implementation for better business results
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Gamification is a technique that’s gaining more and more traction by the day in marketing and human resource strategies in the business world. By using game design elements and mechanisms, typically mimicking video games, and applying them to less playful contexts such as human resources and marketing, greater user engagement rates can be achieved.
What do we mean by user engagement and why is that important? It’s important because it’s the lifeblood of everything people do. Every business, every human transaction or interaction even, is built on engagement. Engagement of the instigator in delivering their message in the most effective way possible, and engagement of their target: their audience. When people are more engaged, things just work better. As there is no better tool in the modern world when it comes to engaging audiences at scale than modern, online gamified experiences, it makes sense to implement gamification wherever there is room for improvement in an organisation pertaining to less than ideal engagement rates.
Effective implementation of gamification
Regardless of your objectives, be they educational or training, to supercharge your marketing campaigns, to boost user health and wellbeing, or to revitalise your human resources department (HR), there are a few common best practices or steps to adhere to in the implementation of any gamification project:
1. Establish a clear objective and know your target audience
To implement any business strategy, be it a gamification strategy or something else, you must first ask yourself the right questions: what are your objectives? Who is your target audience, and what are they looking for? To do this, you must study and analyse all your targets and potential prospects in order to better understand them and meet their expectations.
It’s important to note that gamification should not be used simply out of a desire to integrate a game into your project. Gamification is not a tool to entertain people, it’s a tool that can entertain people, but more accurately engages people as a means to your ends. If your objective, or challenge you’re looking to solve pertains to poor engagement levels, the odds are that the implementation of gamification techniques in some form will be an appropriate solution to move forward with.
For example, in corporate gamification, your objective might be to bring your teams together in a team building exercise, to help build interdepartmental relationships across different silos and working patterns. Here, gamification would be a great solution as it’s a good icebreaker and can be customised to foster teamwork and competition among groups. Maybe the objective is hiring better candidates. Here, gamification can be used to measure candidate aptitude, and work as a hard measure to support more traditional interview techniques and shorten the hiring cycle.
2. Offer a suitable gamification experience
Gamification can be adapted to all projects and all business sectors. However, the user experience must remain at the heart of your thinking and the content of the games you offer. You’re trying to use gamification to harness the power of positive emotions in the user, in order to get the most out of them.
Part of this is really putting a lot of thought into the user experience (UX) of your target audience. You need to make sure the difficulty level isn’t too high from the start so you don’t risk frustrating users. You have to find a balance between a game that is too complicated and too easy to keep the experience fun and enjoyable for everyone.
3. Choose the rewards system
Gamification in its simplest terms is motivating people to desired actions through fun, interactive experiences and rewards. When designing a gamification experience to implement to serve your business, you have to think about which system best suits your concept, and which will satisfy and motivate the users.
For this, the rewards do not need to be expensive, and can even be virtual: prizes, in-game skins, gift cards, discount codes, badges, the choice is endless. Setting up a programme of several accessible and intuitive games will make customers and employees want to participate, as long as they feel they can gain something from the experience.
To go further, why not also gamify the very process of setting up and managing your gamified project? By creating a Survey, which can easily and quickly be done on the Drimify games creation platform, you can effectively canvass your target audience or existing community with a questionnaire to help get an idea of what they would want – either in terms of a prize, or in terms of what they’ve enjoyed in other gamified experiences. You could also use a follow-up questionnaire to help you calculate the return on investment of your games, or even include it at the end if you were using Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ format to create a multi-level experience.
4. Promote and share your project effectively
The next significant step is communication about your project. The more you promote the game, the more likely you are to generate excitement and participation.
Broadcast your message on all your media, digital and non-digital, in order to arouse the interest and curiosity of as many people as possible. If it is an internal project, take advantage of your website and the company intranet to share the campaign with all the teams and collaborators of the company.
Social media is also a great platform to advertise and promote your campaign. In a marketing context, sharing your gamified content on social networks encourages your community to interact with your posts, and also serves as a way to grow your community, as players share their score, potentially inciting FOMO among their friends and followers.
5. Renew and refresh the gaming experience year round across multiple campaigns
Finally, for best results, gamification should not be used only for one-off experiences. When you renew the process over the long term, customers can come to associate your brand with a playful, innovative and up-to-date image.
Implementing games in your future projects and campaigns also allows you to take learnings from earlier gamification projects forward. While a gamification platform like Drimify gives you all the tools you need to easily and quickly create an effective gamification experience by customising tried-and-tested game engines, gamification is a complex art.
While you might achieve your objective on the first attempt, you can only maximise on what’s truly possible with practice, and data, and a long term commitment to the craft. Because every business’s target audience and desired objectives with gamification are so loaded with nuance and proprietary elements, people that have more experience with gamification tend to get better ROI out of their campaigns and projects than people who use it once or very occasionally. This applies whether your aims are business-related, educational, focused on health, or even something we haven’t mentioned. Because the possibilities are endless, and audience needs and expectations are constantly shifting, there is, quite simply, a lot to be learned through experience.
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