Marketing games: effective tools for generating qualified leads and collecting data

Online marketing games make for an engaging experience for potential customers, while giving you an effective way to generate qualified leads and collect data for user insights. The principle is simple: you create a gamification experience, include a data collection screen, then launch the game to target your audience. As people play, filling in the strategically placed data collection forms, you gain more contacts, more leads, and are able to collect data and gain more insights about your audience.

But where do you begin? Fortunately, games creation platforms like Drimify carry numerous existing game engines for businesses and brands to customise to their exact needs, with the ability to collect data to run analytics in real time from your dashboard, so there’s no need for coding skills and a lengthy development period. All games created on the platform are designed mobile first, so work on all modern devices connected to the internet, so they’re giving your business a versatile tool that can target potential customers when they’re commuting or killing time on their lunch breaks, as easily as when they’re at home on their computers.

The rest of this article will run you through some of the theory and background information to help get you started creating your own gamified content to help reach your business goals.

Targeting specific audiences and measuring results with gamification

Gamification, in the form of marketing games and competitions, really demonstrates its power when it comes to collecting data to help businesses target specific demographics, as the result of each game allows you to effectively measure the impact of your content on the target audience. This allows new markets, new customers, and new user types to be tested, and gives you a quantitative method for evaluating new audience demographics. Through strategic marketing, online game content can be tailored precisely to help attract the qualified prospects and consumer types companies are looking for.

By offering incentives such as prizes or discounts at the conclusion of their marketing games, marketers are able to maximise the effectiveness of their interactive content and communications. In addition to creating a digital relationship with customers, competitions are great tools for directing an audience to a contact form, where details like names, phone numbers, dates of birth, and emails can be obtained. Through this end result, playful marketing experiences are able to deliver massive returns on investment for businesses.

Reaching customers effectively

As mentioned, businesses can use online marketing games to engage with their target audience and build brand awareness among users as part of their marketing strategy. This helps turn users into visitors to your website, and turns them into leads, who can in turn be converted into customers. Social media, and the shareability of marketing games across social media, is a great help to this process, and can dramatically increase the amount of information you can collect, so when considering analytics and data collection in your gamification projects, you should look at how you’re integrating them with your social media schedules.

These gamified interactive experiences ultimately offer customers a fun and memorable way to interact with brands, allowing them to learn about the products or services they are considering in a low-pressure way.

Top 3 examples of marketing games to generate qualified leads

Obviously, a key component of your marketing game strategy involves selecting the correct game engine to most effectively target your market. Any game engine on the Drimify platform can be used to collect data in real time, but here are 3 great examples and how they help your business from a lead generation and insight gathering perspective.

The Quiz: for challenging your audience while gathering insights

Quizzes are very popular and effective forms of interactive gamified content for generating leads and attracting attention for your brand. They allow businesses to engage potential customers in brand-relevant trivia challenges that can lead to winning prizes or being entered into prize draws, while potentially giving some user insights about their interests and needs through their answers.

For example, in the case of a soft drinks company, they could use some questions to test a player’s general knowledge, some to test their knowledge about the brand (and impart a little through the answers and intermediate screens), and some to ascertain how players feel about the brand – how likely are users to pick the company’s beverage over their closest rival’s? How many servings of the drink would users say they consume per week, and so on and so forth. Obviously, the contact form serves to collect the contact details and name, but there is that extra opportunity to get more user insights pertaining to customer behaviours and preferences in the case of a Quiz.

Instant win games: to entice, reward, and generate excitement

It is also possible to collect a lot of data to help your business through instant win games such as a Scratch Card or a Wheel of Fortune. These are a very popular form of promotional marketing game that leaves room for chance and luck. Thanks to the appeal of a chance to get an instant reward, instant win games are an excellent way to attract a lot of participants – you don’t need to be a brain box or a brand aficionado to push a button. Everyone has a chance to win, and everyone who tries their luck in the game will interact with your business, and potentially be converted into a loyal customer through the process, or as a result of the process.

Of course, if you did win the game, and you haven’t provided any personal information or contact information, how can you possibly claim your prize? Really, in any online marketing game involving the potential of winning a prize, data collection is built into the format.

Dynamic Path™: for multiple opportunities to engage your audience

The Dynamic Path™ is the most versatile game format in the Drimify platform. It allows you to use any of the game engines to form a multi-level gaming experience through which to engage players and generate user insights. This means you can stagger your data capture forms through your gamified content so they’re less overwhelming. If players want to keep playing, they need to either give more information, or answer more questions to help you with your analytics that will be used to inform strategic decisions.

The potential scale of the Dynamic Path™ format is enormous for a gamification experience. For example, it is used every year by businesses to build digital Advent Calendars, engaging customers over every day of December in a range of games. If you think about how much data and user insights such a large gamified experience can generate to help your business with analytics and strategy, you’ll get a sense of how much added value longer, more immersive gamification projects can yield, depending on your goals.

Be aware of local data protection laws

To collect all this data, you will need to comply with your local region’s data protection laws. These typically apply to any business handling or processing people’s personal data – such as their name, date of birth, and contact details – to ensure it’s handled fairly and in good faith.

At the very least it will be necessary to optimise your contact forms in order to obtain the user’s explicit consent to being contacted. Any business wishing to carry out marketing games or deliver any gamified content to their audience will encounter different regulations to comply with depending on their country and region. These should not be ignored as they can lead to fines and reputational damage to a brand.

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