Marketing games for product launches

Product launches require a large and co-ordinated marketing effort. Unless you can travel back in time and somehow get a patent on the wheel, you’re competing against other businesses producing comparable products, who want to win just as badly as you do. If you manufacture cars, or bikes, or electronics, or develop software – pretty much anything – your new products, and your ability to innovate and compete to be relevant contenders on the market, are the means by which your business lives and dies.

For example, when any of the fast food giants release a new burger or side, they promote them relentlessly: that launch is the main focus of their marketing efforts, because if they didn’t promote them, people would just stick to the classics, and sales would be relatively static. They wouldn’t be thinking about the Szechuan Chicken McNugget Sauce, or that your outlets have started doing hashbrowns, or has dropped a new breakfast sub. If they weren’t being promoted, who would know? Most importantly, for people who are bored of the menu staples, or have never been a fan, it puts the golden arches or the Colonel back into their minds, and can maybe attract new customers, or regain some lost ones.

A trick you often see the fast food giants use in their marketing is gamification and marketing games – applying game mechanics to generate engagement around products and processes, but what you might not realise, is that gamification is no longer the reserve of gargantuan multinationals with enormous advertising budgets. Thanks to the rise of marketing games platforms like Drimify, easy and fuss-free marketing game creation is a superpower accessible to small and medium-sized businesses. If you’re looking to level up your marketing approach when launching new products, this article is for you.

How do you successfully launch a new product or service?

As already mentioned, businesses live and die by the launch of new products and services. Whether you’re adding a product to your line, or completely overhauling your offering, you need to sell what you’re launching. New products need to succeed to justify what’s been invested into their development and production. You need to use every weapon at your disposal to make your launches a success.

Marketing games created on the Drimify platform can be played on any modern device, such as on mobile, tablets, or computers, and they can seamlessly integrate across social media and email, and even be accessed through QR codes at events or advertising installations. This gives them a lot of versatility when using them in service of product launches, as they can support other aspects of your marketing campaign, like your social media strategy, and promotional events.

Here are 5 game engines that can easily be customised to aid the marketing campaign behind your next product launch:

1. The Survey

The Survey is an excellent tool for collecting useful data at various stages of a product’s life cycle. They can be used during your research and development phases, and also after launch campaigns are over, as a method of assessing customer satisfaction, and learning about developments in consumer appetites.

While all game engines on the Drimify games creation platform allow you to collect personal information, the whole aim of the Survey is to gain user input – both as a method to calculate return on investment (ROI), and as a way to help improve future projects.

2. The Quiz

The Quiz allows you to adapt branded content to a question and answer format that can be multiple choice, open, or ordered, and gives you further options around placing intermediate screens that can deliver key messages at optimum times during the experience. You can have a leaderboard, with the game’s winners potentially getting a prize, or an option to share their high score for a chance to be entered into a prize draw.

Obviously, the nature of the content plays a massive impact in how effective it will be in promoting your new product. It needs to be a relevant quiz, and thematically fit the parameters of your campaign. One manner in which it could be especially effective is if you were releasing the 10th or 20th version of a product – celebrating a key milestone or a key release as a company. Assuming you had achieved a lot of success, and had a lot of fans of older iterations, you could put together a trivia quiz, with the highest scorers set to win a limited number of the newest version.

This would work especially well with something like a casual trainer, or a designer bag, as these are collectible items that people get really excited about, and take pride in being experts in. (If your new product fits into a category that could be a specialist subject on Mastermind, this approach could work really well as an aspect of your marketing campaign for new launches.)

3. Instant win games

These are really simple: give your target audience opportunities to instantly win prizes. Some prizes could be discount codes to apply to your newly launched product to incentivise early adopters, a limited number could be iterations of the newly launched product itself. By having the possibility of a player, or even a handful of players, winning the top prize, more people will want to play.

4. A Photo Contest

The Photo Contest is a highly visual, highly shareable marketing game that can pay huge dividends in getting lots of people looking at and interacting with your product.

You customise the copy, the parameters, and the graphic design elements to your brand, then share it on your social media and online channels to get it in front of as many people as possible. The brief could be to ask players to take pictures of a series of installations you’ve put in place highlighting your new product, or to compose pictures of themselves enjoying your new product. This game engine then invites participants to vote for the winning photograph, or even video.

The Photo Contest asks your audience to get creative, and asks them back to have their say on who wins, so there’s twice the opportunity to have them interacting with your content. The winning images can also make for great additional content to share on your social media channels and websites when announcing the winners, or encouraging your audience to vote.

5. A Dynamic Path experience™

The Dynamic Path™ gives you access to every game engine in the Drimify catalogue to tell your new product’s story across multiple levels. 

The more casual arcade-style games could deliver variety, and fun, while some levels could be more content heavy Quizzes, and some could even just take the form of informative videos.

If your product is highly technical, this approach allows you to explain in more detail why it’s so good, how it’s been developed to improve upon the outgoing version, and educate prospects on some of its more advanced features. You could even include opportunities to win prizes on some of the levels to give players more chances to win, and more incentives to keep engaging with the ideas behind your new release.

Gamify your product launch for maximum impact

Using marketing games to make your product launch a memorable and enjoyable experience is a great way to achieve maximum impact with a newly released good or service. It’s the most effective digital method of getting your audience’s attention, and encouraging them to engage with a new idea or solution.

Ultimately, a marketing game to support a product launch may be just one element of the overall marketing strategy, but the potential of well-thought out games to not only drive engagement and encourage sales, but also to support your accompanying social media strategy, and capture personal information to generate leads, makes it the secret sauce that creates real synergy across your marketing campaign.

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