Marketing games and gamification for brands

Have you ever considered using gamification and games as part of your marketing strategy?

Well thought out, customised marketing games can be powerful tools for engaging customers, building your brand, and fostering loyalty.

In this article we’ll explore some of the ways marketers can use games to boost their branding and promotional efforts.

How can brands benefit from marketing games?

For brands looking to pique the interest of their target audiences and develop their image, marketing games offer an innovative and fun solution. Because they can be entertaining, they engage customers more effectively than traditional content. They’re not asking you to read, or to look, or to listen, they’re asking you to play. They’re an invitation.

For example, with a branded Quiz or a Crossword Puzzle, brands can create an interactive experience for players that can subtly raise awareness of their brand, products, and services, and paint them in the desired light. Do you want to be considered irreverent, edgy, funny, daring? Reflect that in the content and graphic design of your customised marketing games.

Digital marketing games are more engaging for consumers because they take the familiar tropes and mechanisms of video games to create a more engaging online experience. Additionally, by offering limited prizes, companies can encourage more people to participate and spread the word about their company. An online contest offering fun prizes and compelling gameplay will be shared far more frequently on social media platforms than a standard ad post.

Ultimately, with digital marketing games, companies have the opportunity to bring a fun gaming element into the customer engagement process and the buying journey. This improves the relationship between companies and their customers.

Why is gamification a pillar of brand marketing strategies?

Gamification has earned its stripes as a powerful tool to support brands in their communications strategies. The concept is based on the fact that people generally enjoy competition, challenge, discovery, and above all, winning.

Creating a digital environment where customers can compete against each other, challenge themselves with puzzles and quizzes, and potentially be rewarded with discounts and prizes gives businesses two important things. Firstly, it gives them an environment that incentivises their audience to follow, opt in, and share. Secondly, it allows them to subtly encourage players to interact with their products and services through gaming, in both the tone and with the energy that they want to reflect their brand. The marketing game, afterall, is essentially a gamified piece of content. Like videos and articles, a game can be customised and adjusted to serve different purposes, depending on your marketing games campaigns.

Our top 5 tips for using marketing games to support your brand

Gamification, used in the right way, is a highly effective method by which you can promote your products and services, engage your audience, and encourage them to take actions that are beneficial to your business goals. To get the most out of your marketing games, and to maximise their utility as part of your branding strategy, here are our 5 top tips to follow when implementing them:

1. Adapt the game mechanics

Avoid making the game too easy or too difficult. Look for a balance between challenge and reward that is appropriate for the target audience. This will keep your players active and engaged for longer, so they in turn interact with your messaging for longer.

You should also consider the game engine you’re using. If your brand is intellectual, discerning, such as a magazine or an online publication, maybe some sort of puzzle game, or a Wordsearch Puzzle would be most appropriate. If your brand is a sports team, is there a game engine on the Drimify platform that reflects the game your audience loves? We’ve got Football, Rugby, American Football, Handball, and Ice Hockey, as well as the more versatile Team Picker game engine that could be adapted to any team sport. If you’re marketing a fashion line, the Photo Contest could be a great way to encourage your target audience to creatively interact with your products, or the Product Recommendation Quiz could be customised to help match different items and looks to a user’s personal style and preferences.

2. Use positive reinforcement

Reward your players as they progress with badges, points, or virtual currency. A progress bar also allows players to see their progress in real time. These gamification mechanisms are commonly used in loyalty programmes and longer playable experiences and are very effective. If someone’s put so much time in to try and earn their free coffee or their free hat, or whatever external reward might be up for grabs, seeing how much time or labour they’ve invested, and how close they are to the goal, encourages them to keep going.

3. Promote your project

The more you promote it, the more likely you are to generate excitement and participation. If you create a game and then don’t push it on your social media channels, or keep pushing it on your email marketing, nothing will come of it.

You almost need to visualise your own virtual progress bar in this case: you’ve put so much into creating your marketing game, carefully considering your aims, writing the copy, creating the graphics, and quickly and easily putting it together on the Drimify platform… but if nobody sees it, nobody will play it, and it becomes a case of what might have been.

Your game needs oxygen to catch fire, so give it the push it needs, and watch it take off.

4. Collect and analyse the data

The information gathered through online marketing games to qualify and quantify its audience is essential to running an effective branding campaign and evolving your marketing game strategy. All games customised on the Drimify platform allow real-time data collection from your dashboard, making assessing your game’s performance against predetermined key performance indicators (KPIs) as simple as possible.

5. Learn from each experience, improve your next project

For the best results, gamification should not only be used for one-off campaigns. While a lot of the game engines on the Drimify platform offer repeatable successes, each new gamification project is a new adventure, a new frontier to be conquered. Minutiae and nuance from industry to industry, product launch to product launch, and brand to brand mean there will always be opportunities to apply learnings from one marketing game project to the next.

Additionally, when you repeat the process long term, you associate your brand with playfulness and innovation, and those are qualities any business should strive to have customers associate with their brand.

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