Jigsaw puzzles for marketing? Connect with your customers
Resources
Marketing, branding, and advertising are all ultimately working to achieve one goal: to help connect your business and your customers.
This is the machine that generates awareness, conversion, and retention. It’s what creates revenue by driving sales.
But the very battlegrounds of these business functions are in a state of constant flux. With current mobile technology and the social media trends that have come with it, everyone’s competing in a ferocious attention economy.
A great way to cut through this oversaturated arena is gamification, and one highly effective aspect of this is with digital jigsaw puzzle marketing games.
In this article, we’ll talk about the jigsaw puzzle’s relevance to marketing, and how its efficacy in this area has evolved to tackle modern marketing challenges.
Jigsaw puzzles: Games built with function in mind
The jigsaw puzzle is sort of the original gamification experience.
Game engines like connect four, Pacman variations, and product recommendation quizzes are all relatively new in the grand scheme of things, and crosswords and word searches have their pen and paper counterparts from the 1900s, but the original wooden jigsaw was essentially working in the same way as it does today (digitally) as long ago as the 1760s!
Its original purpose was as an educational tool, for children to reassemble to help them learn geography, and the basic game mechanics remain unchanged in over 250 years.
A perfect fit with the world of marketing
Think back to the Mad Men-era of marketing… (Or at least research it as the odds are you can’t possibly remember it.)
Marketing was a catchy slogan and a striking visual. A classic poster that would one day be considered art.
In some ways, modern online jigsaw puzzles as gamification tools are an opportunity for marketers to flex their creative muscles and go back to a time when every campaign was an opportunity to create a work of art.
The game mechanics through whatever jigsaw puzzle making software you’re using will generate the all important data modern marketing requires, but the visual, or the reveal, is where you can create something with real emotional impact or cultural resonance (or at least brief a graphic designer to realise your vision of something to that effect).
Though this might sound like a bit of a hot take if you’re familiar with the jigsaw’s game, this isn’t even a particularly revolutionary way to use the mechanics of a puzzles.
In the early 1900s, a lot of travel companies used to create and giveaway physical jigsaws of new trains, new ocean liners, and even destinations as a way to advertise the means of transport and the locations as a form of promotion.
The modern approach to jigsaw puzzle marketing games
Of course, today, we’re creating our jigsaw puzzles for marketing on gamification platforms, and they’re digital versions with data collection forms and intermediate content screens, so while they don’t necessarily have the longevity of those old jigsaw puzzles, they’re much more cost effective to produce and have the major advantage of delivering quantifiable returns.
Any good enterprise-grade digital jigsaw creation software is going to give you statistics at a glance and a comprehensive data export for performance insights. This means you’re going to be able to assess how effective your digital marketing jigsaw puzzles are proving. Over time and campaigns you can optimise the sort of content and number of puzzle pieces to give an optimised digital experience to your target customer segments, and you can update your strategy accordingly.
(Also… no missing puzzle pieces. Not ever.)
A disruptor sent from the past to help change the future?
Sometimes, maybe modern problems require centuries-old solutions (albeit with a modern twist).
Against the doomscroll of modern social media, which is passive, and can be quite stress-inducing, the digital jigsaw marketing game is an invitation to participation and discovery.
Modern features unique to online jigsaw puzzle marketing games
An optimised digital jigsaw puzzle as a marketing solution engages the minds of target segments and can help redirect their focus onto your branding, products, and services. They can be deployed through direct links across social media and messaging services, embedded on website pages, integrated within loyalty apps, or even deployed in physical spaces through QR codes, making them highly adaptable to your resources and strategy.
In addition to the content on your start and end screens and intermediate screens, you can also include call to action buttons (CTAs) to send participants to your strategic website pages.
You could send them to blog posts to learn more about a topic or issue, product pages to encourage conversions, or to sign up to a loyalty programme.
Additionally, with Drimify’s jigsaw puzzle template, you can enable a leaderboard and utilise competition in your marketing games as an extra motivation for target segments to focus. The points are based on the speed at which players can complete the jigsaw, and you can reward high scorers with prizes to essentially soup up your digital marketing experience. You can even deliver online jigsaw puzzles daily for repeat engagements, and have an aggregated leaderboard.
The first steps to creating online marketing jigsaw puzzles
Ultimately, the online jigsaw puzzle game mechanic offers marketers a lot of possibilities, and something to set their brand apart, and deliver something more than just falling inline and copying what everyone else’s strategy to connect with their customers.
It’s also easier than ever before to make your online jigsaw puzzles through pre-made puzzle game engines.
However, the first step is in identifying how the puzzle game mechanic can best help your campaigns and fit into your overall marketing strategy. While gamification can be applied to pretty much every marketing challenge and help deliver better results, some games are better suited to some projects than others.
For some campaigns, the online jigsaw puzzle will be the go-to game engine to customise, and for the rest, the Drimify gamification platform has over 30 different game mechanics to customise spanning five different categories.
Want to know more?
