Marketing games for business

Marketing games can be a great way to involve and engage users and customers while promoting your brand or business. To be effective, it must be aimed at your target audience, whether that’s business-2-customer (B2C) or business-2-business (B2B), be easy to understand, and above all, generate the desire to play. A successful marketing game is a playful way to convert a user into a potential customer and ultimately boost sales and grow your business.

Over the course of this article, we’ll run through the basics of how to use marketing games and gamification to help you reach your business goals.

The rise of marketing games and gamification

The emergence of gamification, especially in the format of online marketing games, is a trend that’s here to stay. They offer innovative solutions to businesses and brands striving to find new ways to engage their communities and drive more traffic to their websites and social media platforms. They can offer as much utility to fashion brands launching new lines as they can to restaurants running promotions to keep the customers coming in during quiet periods.

If used strategically and thoughtfully, marketing contests and games have the power to develop a connection between the brand and its audience that goes beyond traditional marketing methods.

Why do companies use marketing games?

A company will often use gamification to engage their audience and increase brand awareness. This marketing strategy is used to build connections, reward loyalty, and encourage positive consumer experiences. Because of the interactive nature of online games, prompting players to engage, make decisions, and submit information, they help companies obtain detailed data on their audience. Brands are able to learn more about the types of consumers they are attracting, and assess how successful their strategies are in generating quality leads and conversions, and adjust according to the data collected.

Participation in a game usually requires players to spend some time engaging with, or being exposed to the company’s product or service, which is a necessary component of an effective marketing campaign. In addition, when the winner(s) receive their prizes, they offer free promotion of the target products by being included in promotional material. and sharing content with their friends on social networks.

How does gamification work?

Games have proved to be effective components of digital marketing strategies due to their engaging nature. This is done by providing interactive gaming experiences that create a captivating simulation, and within that, a sense of excitement for players, while encouraging customers and prospects to think about the product or service while they play, ultimately generating positive associations that can lead to long-term loyalty.

The creative delivery of key brand messages and features through engaging game mechanics, coupled with compelling visuals, helps to ensure an enjoyable user experience that can live in the memories of players even after the game has ended. Brands also benefit from valuable feedback from players, as engagement in games and gameplay can provide insights into audience behaviour, which can guide the company’s future campaign efforts.

With a fun and effective marketing game or contest, companies have a powerful tool to win new customers and strengthen existing relationships.

Marketing games for recruitment

It may not strictly be marketing, per se, but recruitment is trying to convince an external audience to engage with your business, and qualify leads, so recruitment games have a lot of crossover with marketing games.

By introducing marketing games during the recruitment process, you can offer a point of difference from a user or applicant perspective, and strengthen your employer brand as being innovative and exciting. Using the same game mechanics that can motivate potential customers, you can motivate applicants to show their best qualities through a gamified application process. On the business end, for management, this can massively shorten the hiring cycle, as you have hard results at the end of say, a customised Quiz, or series of customised Quizzes, that can test not only job specific knowledge, but also their aptitude, and ability to apply the necessary knowledge to real-life situations.

If you’re recruiting through gamified means, it only makes sense to include games in your initial onboarding and training too. Games applied to training offer rich, immersive simulations in which more motivated users can get to grips with and experiment with new concepts and skills that will serve them working for your company.

Examples of successful marketing games

Heineken’s “Crack the US Open” campaign utilised Instagram’s grid feature to create a massive picture that worked as a big scavenger hunt. The beer giant posted clues on their social media accounts that invited their audience to solve riddles and follow the trail until ultimately finding the final picture within the grid, where they would comment with the keyword from the original clue to be entered into a prize draw. The bounty for the winner? A pair of tickets to the US Open men’s final which Heineken were sponsoring. The game served their event, put the name Heineken into the spotlight, and created some excitement and diversion for their audience, with the virality of it creating the opportunity to grow their audience and draw new followers to their social media accounts.

KFC Japan engaged users in a mobile game called “Shrimp Attack” to promote the addition of shrimp to its menu and generate excitement. In the game, players protect KFC’s chicken kingdom by slashing at attacking shrimps – the more shrimps you take down, the more points you earn. Not only did it thematically support their new shrimp-based products, but it also rewarded players with discount vouchers, giving them extra incentives to try the product, boosting sales. KFC Japan’s campaign had to be stopped halfway through its planned duration as their shrimp products completely sold out.

While these games are successful examples of gamification as a marketing tool, many other innovative uses of this type of media are being created every day. Companies are using social media scavenger hunts, all the way to augmented reality applications to drive engagement, attract new customers, and increase sales.

A source of traffic for your business

Creating an effective marketing game or contest that can generate engagement, stimulate interest, and encourage players to participate is a great way to not only promote specific products and promotions, but can also be an effective vehicle for growing your audience and acquiring leads. With so many different entities and brands battling so hard across different platforms for the public’s attention, interactive experiences that integrate seamlessly across platforms are the way forward for effective marketing campaigns.

Inviting your audience to play, connect, and engage can make your campaigns exciting and memorable. Regardless of if you’re targeting business clients or the public, if you can persuade your target customer to invest time interacting with your brand and product, they are far more likely to purchase or subscribe.

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