How to use a marketing games platform

In the early 2000s marketing games were powerful promotional weapons that could only be found in the hands of large multinational corporations with the means to develop and implement them, and working at a scale that allowed them to take risks. It was a brave new world and marketing games proved to be an incredibly impactful new medium for delivering branded content and supporting campaigns.

Fast forward a few years and advances in both the internet and mobile technology means that marketing games are even more effective, more sophisticated, and far better understood by the agencies designing them. The biggest change, however, lay in their accessibility. The superpowers of gamification, the application of game mechanics to non-gaming contexts to motivate and engage, are now at everyone’s disposal. A small to medium-sized business (SME) is now just as capable of launching a highly professional marketing game to promote their products and services as the transnational behemoths.

“How?” I hear you ask. “Doesn’t creating a marketing game require coding knowledge and still take quite a long time?” From scratch, you’d be correct, but marketing games platforms like Drimify have made game creation easy. You can now customise an existing game engine with your copy, graphics, and messaging, and launch it and have all over your social media channels in minutes. No coding knowledge required.

What purpose do marketing games serve?

Marketing games are a modern solution for a saturated digital marketplace. Marketing games invite your target audience, or prospects, to become players. They invite participation and concentration by appealing to the human being’s innate desire to play: to experiment, to compete, to master, and interact.

If your content is playable, your audience will be far more focused and receptive to your messaging. You’re not asking them to read superfluous fluff, you’re asking them to solve a puzzle, to shoot a penalty, test their knowledge. By captivating their attention in gameplay, you can subtly get across your messaging through the copy and graphic style of the experience. You can also include data collection forms at different stages of the game, and again, because their energy is invested in the gameplay, they’re far more likely to share their data than if it was asked for by more traditional marketing methods. If you’re also offering the potential to win prizes, or offering promotional codes, you’re even more likely to collect pertinent customer data.

When you also consider the competitive and social elements of play, a well optimised marketing game has the potential to get shared a lot on social media. Where high scores on a leaderboard are there to be displayed, showing a good performance, or displaying mastery of a vogue and pertinent topic can act as social currency. Sharing and following can also be part of your call to action. For example, something like: “To be in with a chance of winning, share your score and follow us and tag us on Instagram,” does the job cleanly and efficiently.

How do I even start?

Of course, having access to a marketing games platform may give you the tools to easily realise your game: to see your ideas come together into an interactive playable format, but ideas don’t just come out of nowhere. Campaigns don’t leap out of brainstorms as fully formed brand ambassadoring assets.

Like any quality piece of content, a good marketing campaign takes planning, patience, and forethought to be successful in achieving its aims.

Here are the 3 key steps to bring your marketing games to life and make them effective:

1. Look for logical ways games can fit into your next marketing campaign

What game engines you can utilise and how you can utilise them depends massively on your brand and what industry you’re in. What is it you’re actually selling and how are you planning on selling it?

If you’re in a marketing department for a sports team for example, and you’re looking for a fun promotional idea, you could use a relevant game engine that mimics the mechanics of your sport. The Drimify platform has game engines based on football, American football, basketball, rugby, ice hockey, and handball. You can customise it to your kit, your colours, and your branding, and use it a number of ways and to support the pursuit of multiple goals. If you’re launching a new fashion line, or even a new line of tech, you could use our Product Recommendation Quiz to create a digital sales tool that matches a customer’s needs against what your products can do. These sorts of games are highly effective at adding value to the customer experience and can help shorten the sales cycle.

These two examples are just two ideas of many – there are a range of games on the platform to support your marketing goals, ranging from puzzles, to classic arcade games, to quizzes, and even multi-level playable experiences for longer duration campaigns. Playing with the demos, identifying which engines line up thematically with your brand and your campaign, and having as fleshed out a vision as possible can pay dividends in making your marketing game campaign successful.

2. Plan it thoroughly

Obvious, right? But let’s talk a bit about it anyway.

You need to think about what you’re wanting your games to achieve, and have a defined set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your marketing game, both during its run, and once its run is complete.

How can you create your game if you don’t know what you want it to achieve? Are you trying to launch a new product? If so, does your game educate your prospects about its key selling points? Does the user journey reflect the story you’re trying to tell? Are you trying to collect data? If you are, you want to think about what kind of data, include that on the data collection form, and consider where that screen goes: before the experience, after the experience, or between levels.

3. Promote it

Yes, your marketing game is out there to help you with promoting your brand, but for it to work, you need to give it a push. All games authored on the Drimify platform integrate seamlessly on social media and email, and can be accessed through QR codes.

Blast it on social media, put it in all your newsletters, and put the QR code in strategic places. If you have a bricks-and-mortar store, include it on shelves and posters, if you’re putting out print advertising, include the QR code there too. The more attention it gets, the greater the chance it can take off.

Think of your marketing game like a snowball rolling down a hill. It might need a push at first, and a little encouragement to take shape, but once it gets enough momentum it’ll take off and keep growing by itself.

4. Don’t be a 1-time marketing game creator, use a continuous marketing game strategy and be a pro

Nobody does something once and achieves everything they can in that area. You don’t play tennis once and go to a grand slam. You don’t complete the Couch 2 5k programme and enter the Olympics.

A marketing games platform like Drimify gives you the tools to make effective marketing games from day one, but through powerful data collection, you can analyse where your game was effective and where it could have been improved. If you continually create and release fresh games, and learn from one project to the next, you can truly make the most of the superpowers of gamification.

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