How to use marketing games to engage audiences

The internet is a very busy, very saturated place for marketers and customers alike. Social media gurus, SEO wizards, and creative agencies fully dedicated to creating copy and content line the digital walls of cyberspace in endless variations of corporate messaging and marketing materials, promoting products and brands in the same way they have done for years.

The challenge lies in differentiation. To engage potential customers, you need to offer something different in your content. You need to offer users a new experience. You’re looking for a better, more innovative way of expressing your identity as a brand and connecting your audience to your product. You want your marketing campaign to be impactful, but how can you compete against so much noise?

The answer could be through gamification and online marketing games. For the same level of effort and resources, in terms of engagement, when you create a marketing game, you can level up your campaign from just a drop in the ocean to a veritable extinction-level event meteorite.

Defining marketing games and the value they add

Marketing games are an example of gamification: applying game mechanics and principles to typically less playful contexts to motivate desired user and audience outcomes. In the case of marketing, think instant win games, puzzles, and quizzes. Ideas for marketing games can vary greatly, but are all on some level online interactive experiences that encourage users to engage with your brand, incentivise purchasing, and allow you to collect data.

A gamified approach to your marketing campaigns, or at least a gamified aspect of it in the form of marketing games, cuts through the noise and offers potential customers that new experience. Users are invited to play through your content, and by extension, play with your brand. A potential consumer is not being told X, Y and Z. They’re discovering it through a customised experience, through engagement by playing your game that’s supporting your broader marketing campaign.

How customers interact with a brand

How do you interact with the brands that you love? Probably by following their social media accounts, and you might be on a few email newsletter lists if you’re a loyal customer. Now think about this: what about the brands you don’t know yet that might be providing just the kind of product or service you’re looking for? How do you interact with them, or how do they interact with you? That’s a harder question to answer, as in most cases potential audiences have their guards up, or are numbed to traditional, legacy marketing methods.

Again, it comes down to how much noise there is. So many businesses are competing so ferociously on the marketing front for their share of the available audience. They can’t afford not to. Good branding is like having a well presented shop window in today’s highly digital environment full of hyper-connected consumers. Whether you’re selling goods or services, appealing to customers or working business-to-business (B2B), the burden is on you as the service provider, manufacturer, or retailer to catch the attention of prospects, deliver a great user experience (UX) in the process, and ultimately drive business growth.

That first step is key: catch the attention of prospects. You need to engage them, to capture their attention. Inviting them to participate in a game is inviting them to take some time to themselves and ultimately, play. People naturally want to play anyway, it’s why the average person will happily turn themselves inside out to beat their friends at badminton, or go life and death in a game of Scrabble, or even hours upon hours upon hours playing video games (the average adult gamer reportedly spends more than 8 hours per week playing video games).

Leveraging game mechanics in content to produce desired customer actions

The mechanics that make a recreational game of badminton, Scrabble, and video games so addictive, and the motivations that encourage people to take themselves to their limits and commit such vast amounts of their free time to playing, are the same ones you can capitalise on by creating marketing games.

Gamification is taking a person’s desires for challenge, discovery, and social interaction, and applying a narrative framework to them. Through that framework the marketing game fosters audience engagement: it’s a combination of storytelling, incentives, and engaging interactions, which can motivate players or users towards desired actions or outcomes. This is how gamification can add significant value to your marketing campaign.

A marketing game is ultimately still content, it still tells your brand story and promotes your product. It’s just a highly interactive, more immersive version of it. Because it creates a participatory experience, it’s more effective at connecting your audience with your desired message. They’re experiencing something so their attention is brought into focus. The game makes them more aware and heightens concentration.

Stand out from the competition by making your content interactive and fun

The Drimify gamification platform gives you numerous game engines of varying types which can be easily customised to create your own marketing games to help serve your marketing campaign. Whether it’s to incentivise purchases or visits with discount codes, grow your mailing list or boost your social media communities through data collection and calls to action, or even just to effectively match your customers with the right products, marketing games are the modern solution that can more effectively engage audiences.

All the games you can customise on Drimify are playable on any modern device connected to the internet, including smart phones, tablets, and home computers, and can even work on touch screen terminals that can be set up onsite at events or in stores. You can engage your audience in mobile marketing gaming while they’re on their commute, or killing time on their lunch breaks, as easily as you can if they’re working from home. Customised marketing games are a modern solution for a modern audience.

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