Online jigsaw puzzles: Missing piece of your comms strategy?
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You remember jigsaw puzzles?
Winter evenings at your grandparents’ house putting together a 1,000 piece tableau of a field perhaps? Finally getting to the end of one only to have a little brother or sister have a meltdown and toss your hours of work onto the floor, with a key piece or two destined to get hoovered up and prove a major point of frustration in the future…
Well the fact of the matter is, jigsaws have evolved. From their advent in the 1700s as a toy for the wealthy and a tool for educating children in geography, to ultimately becoming a multi-billion dollar global market, with multiple jigsaw puzzles in most homes, with all sorts of visuals to put together, appealing to dissectologists of all ages and with all sorts of interests.
“Dissectologists?” you ask…
Yes, dissectologists. Believe it or not, that’s the actual term for people who enjoy jigsaws. And here’s the thing: they’re everywhere.
According to an Ipsos survey, 48% of Americans enjoy a jigsaw puzzle once a year, and 19% will puzzle monthly or more frequently. If we take the US as one of the biggest possible sample sizes for modern society, you can anticipate similar interest in most territories,
And because there are such a large number of dissectologists walking around, buying products, requiring services, and working in gainful employment, gamification in the form of modern online jigsaw puzzles is a great way to engage target audiences. This attention can be used to raise awareness, encourage knowledge acquisition, and influence users to take desired actions.
And as a major plus: no missing pieces! Not ever.
Why gamification matters in modern marketing and internal communications
The modern communications landscape is wildly ahead of where it was at the start of the century. Technology is advancing so quickly every year that if you took a communications professional from the late 90s and time-travelled them and put them in the equivalent of their job today, they simply wouldn’t have the skills or the information to figure out how to be effective.
If you had one morning to train them on a single tool to make an impact in their job, the best return on investment (ROI) would likely be to train them up on how to use a modern gamification platform.
It’s simple, it’s intuitive, and in a few hours they could turn out professional level gamification experiences loaded with branded messaging and with calls to action (CTA) to direct motivated segments of audiences to strategic pages – whether that’s to connect on LinkedIn or to go to a product page with a promotional code in hand.
On the audience end, gamified experiences cut through the doomscroll. It’s not a home made portrait video ad with a bad AI voiceover or a person with zero media training or charisma trying to sell you hair loss cream or their reinvention of the electric toothbrush – can your fingers scroll fast enough? Have they ever worked? – it’s a genuine quid pro, an invitation to participate and have some fun.
But in addition to the fun of game play, you can include intermediate screens and pop-ups, which sprinkle in branded messaging, and data collection forms, where you can collect demographic data and personal preferences for data enrichment, and of course – the end screen CTA button to complete the gamified user journey and send them to where you need them to go.
The online jigsaw puzzle game engine, which can be customised into a broad range of configurations on the Drimify gamification platform, offers a highly visual form of gamification, with its format giving it all sorts of unique capabilities, ready to be released to an existing receptive audience of dissectologists.
How online jigsaw puzzles drive audience engagement
So… unique capabilities of the jigsaw puzzle? Let’s get into those
What is a jigsaw puzzle really? It’s essentially a picture, broken into pieces, which you need people to rearrange. This makes it unique among gamification experiences when it comes to getting an audience to focus on a visual.
Your branding, your new product, your new facility – put it into jigsaw puzzle pieces if you want to sear the visual in your audience’s consciousness.
Enhancing dwell time and interaction
Depending on exactly how many puzzle pieces you break your gamified online jigsaw puzzle into will determine how long you want participants to spend focusing on your main image.
With the Drimify gamification platform, the online jigsaw puzzle app allows you to define how many puzzle pieces you want your puzzle to be.
More pieces increases the level of challenge and likely the average game duration, but even though challenge is good, you need to consider the specific use case of your jigsaw puzzle game.
If it’s a marketing game people are playing on their phone, they’ll only play for so long before they get frustrated, so it needs to have enough puzzle pieces to not be too easy, but not so many that it’s an overly fiddly user experience (UX).
Building brand affinity through interactive play
Playing is fun, and jigsaws are fun (some people may hate on jigsaws, but remember, it’s a multi-billion dollar market – the mob has spoken), so when you nail the challenge-level for your audience, you can associate the fun of play with your branding or product.
Encouraging repeat visits and long-term loyalty
Remember that one in five Americans (and presumably similar stats the world over) are enjoying jigsaws so much it’s a monthly or more frequent activity for them. It’s already a baked-in audience that’s enjoying this gameplay regularly.
This only backs up the assertion that gamification works best when applied regularly. Frequent gamification experiences condition an audience to keep coming back for that dopamine hit of a fun game.
Applicable to internal and external projects
It may most obviously stick out as a good marketing game concept, but that’s only half the story.
There are now whole departments in big companies devoted to employee experience, or EX, and fundamentally, internal comms and external comms boil down to very similar challenges with very similar solutions.
Your employees love to play as much as your external audiences, so online jigsaw puzzles can play their part in your EX and HR initiatives. Think corporate rebranding, corporate social responsibility campaigns (CSR), modules of gamified product training, and digital advent calendars over Christmas to get across important messages while rewarding staff.
Use cases: Online jigsaw puzzles in action
So we get the theory, now let’s talk online jigsaw puzzles in legitimate business practice.
This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the ways gamification in the form of online puzzles can be used to support business goals.
Interactive campaigns for product launches
What is a product launch if not a reveal, and isn’t that ultimately a jigsaw?
Whether it’s a highly anticipated new trainer/ sneaker, or a new piece of tech that’s completely reinventing its category, the puzzle is an interactive way to reveal a visual.
You could also use the medium in a humorous way, to show your product being used in subversive contexts. For example: a tech product being used by famous historical figures, or a can of soda or chips being consumed (in colour) in a black and white photo from the past.
The only limitations to how you present your product in a jigsaw is imagination.
Puzzles to add variety to loyalty programmes
The key to loyalty programmes is variety, and using fresh ways to engage your loyal customers on a regular basis.
Online jigsaw puzzles built on the Drimify gamification platform allow you to embed them on landing pages, or integrate them within loyalty apps.
You can also use the CTA buttons at the end of jigsaw puzzles to send participants to sign up and download your loyalty app.
Using custom jigsaw puzzles for employee engagement and internal comms
Jigsaw puzzles can be a great way to add an interactive visual element to CSR projects, illustrating a sustainability or charitable project you want your employees to feel a part of.
They’re also a strong option for gaining buy-in on branding updates.
How often does a brand switch up their logo or branding in a way that leaves their staff wondering, “Why?” and “Why weren’t we told?”
Pop-ups and intermediates can be used to educate staff on why specific elements of a rebrand have occurred, making them feel informed and part of the journey – a key element of maintaining and generating buy-in with your employees.
Jigsaw puzzles to add to gamified learning programmes
The jigsaw puzzle is perhaps the oldest form of modern gamification, as the first jigsaw was literally made to teach children about geography – a puzzle to be completed with a specific learning outcome.
Because it encourages participants to pay attention, you can customise online jigsaw puzzles as a learning aid to reinforce key teaching outcomes, whether it’s a scientific diagram, a map, or something for art, in a gallery or a museum.
Puzzles to gamify in-person and digital events
The jigsaw puzzle app on Drimify is also a points-based game engine. This means you can use it to add a competitive element to events – both in-person on big touch screen terminals, or digitally.
You can enable a leaderboard and display it on its own screen to generate interest, or have them form part of a bigger experience of multiple games with a global leaderboard and guests’ aggregate scores, with each one opening by a password guests can find at specific locations. The latter option is a great way to encourage people to explore the entire venue and visit all the different areas.
Integrating jigsaw puzzles into your communications strategy: Next steps
If you’re ready to try integrating online jigsaw puzzles into your next communications strategy, the first step is to set up your free Drimify account, where you can build your puzzle and see what it’s all about before setting up your plan.
The puzzle is just one piece of the bigger picture that is gamification – the technique of using play to engage audiences to either get across a message, convey a learning outcome, or influence a desired action, in the service of pursuing concrete organisational objectives.
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