A short guide to gamification and marketing games

If you’re looking into gamification and marketing games, there’s a good chance you’re either looking to diversify your portfolio of marketing tools to move your brand ahead of your competition, or you’ve been running into challenges in your efforts to engage your audiences with traditional forms of content, and are looking to put more horsepower behind your campaigns.

The old-fashioned approaches to marketing just don’t hit the way they used to. Times have changed. Good copy, good imagery, professional video assets, solid email campaigns, a curated and active social media presence all supporting your brand’s voice and appearance – there’s no denying that these are all essential, but most businesses have these bases covered, and have them covered to an incredibly high level. These are the disciplines marketers have been practising for years and years. They’re teachable, textbook, repeatable to professional standards time and time again.

You’re looking for something innovative. Something dynamic, mercurial, modern, and impactful. Something that can get the attention of your customers, and something that will naturally evolve over time inline with your business needs. You’re looking to unlock the superpowers of gamification to supercharge your content and turn your marketing campaigns atomic.

What is gamification when applied to marketing?

Gamification is applying game mechanics and principles to different contexts in order to motivate and encourage desired behaviours. It is generally used by businesses to increase efficiency and increase engagement. It might be a cheesy play on words, but it’s accurate: when you’re playing the game of business, gamification, used in the right way, is like a cheat code. As a discipline, gamification can pretty much be applied anywhere: to help with corporate training and team building, to health, wellbeing and fitness, and for our purposes, to help with marketing and promotions.

Essentially, when applying gamification, you take something that isn’t fun, or that’s challenging in some way, and you turn it into a game. By turning it into a game, you’re leveraging a player’s will to win, or to complete an experience, to achieve desired outcomes. Marketing games are the end result of gamifying marketing – or at least, the final form of the means by which you can achieve your marketing objectives. Any marketing game idea ultimately boils down to getting a target audience to engage with your brand, product or services, and encouraging them to purchase or submit contact details with rewards. To start with, you attract users to your gamified content, engage them and make them players, and through the playable journey or experience, you bring them to a desired outcome, which will ultimately result in sales and growing your customer base. Think about it this way: getting people to pay attention to your business is difficult, but creating a marketing game to help do it for you is almost self-automating.

Potential customers can often be bored, or even immune to more traditional marketing methods. They’re inundated with a sea of sameness in content across various social media platforms and other forms of media day in, day out. When the same trick’s been pulled a thousand times you see it coming. How many times, in different niches, do you hear consumers calling innovations “just clever marketing” or claiming that they won’t fall for the latest model’s “marketing hype,” or bemoaning that certain labels on items mean you’re just “paying for the marketing.” When targeting business-2-business (B2B) clients, you’re almost coming up against an even more shrewd, more paranoid, more selective customer. In the latter case, they’re only approaching you as a means to an end. What you’re selling is an investment – it might be quite far removed from their big revenue makers. You need to hook them, and get them to buy into your offering and your brand.

How do marketing games increase engagement?

This is where marketing games earn their stripes. A marketing game is exactly that, a game. Creating a marketing game to target your audience is to invite them to play, to reward them, both with an experience and potentially with prizes, and allow them to participate and engage with your products or services. What do people do when they’re not working or involved in social activities? When they’re not having their attention taxed by an external factor, or being pursued by obligations and responsibilities? They play. It’s a thing people do when left to their own devices, so you’re moving your marketing into that space of fun.

Tapping into the potential of a favoured from of content

As discussed above, it’s a human being’s natural inclination to play. A huge section of the population identify as gamers, and even those who don’t will, at some point, have played video games, or at least play mobile games to kill time on the commute or while they’re waiting for appointments. Even people who don’t touch consoles, have a smartphone devoid of apps save the ones that came pre-programmed, and like to limit their screen time will either read books or watch movies or do sports – they’ll find themselves engaged by narratives and follow stories, or put in work to win or to master skills or do their best at local competitions. That curiosity, that thirst for discovery, is a motivation which, like the need for challenge and the desire to compete, is something that can be redirected through a marketing game.

Gamification is ultimately a combination of interactive marketing and storytelling, potentially including rewards, both in-game and material, to encourage users to participate. Over time, and with careful strategizing, gamification is a great way to build loyalty, as customers come to recognise you as an innovative brand that delivers engaging, gamified experiences, as well as great products or services.

Putting marketing games into practice

So, how do you begin to put marketing games into effect in order to help your marketing campaign and promote your brand? What’s the first step?

The good news is that marketing games are now accessible to all businesses due to games creation platforms like Drimify, from small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to large multinationals. You simply select the game engine that would be most appropriate for your campaign and customise it to your branding, your copy, and your objectives. There are a broad range to choose from, such as puzzles and Quizzes, to more casual mini games, familiar favourites like Pacman and Connect 4, but also sports-themed game engines, so you won’t struggle to find something that will work for your campaign.

All the games are built mobile first, so will work across smartphones, tablets, and home computers, and all integrate seamlessly across social media, or can be shared by QR codes. Modern online marketing games are powerful tools to engage audiences, are highly versatile in terms of how they can be integrated into marketing campaigns, and make for easy data collection through contact forms that can be placed at strategic points in a customised experience. A gamified approach to marketing is ultimately the most effective method to engage modern, hyper-connected users in your marketing messaging, and is an essential addition to any marketers toolkit to help with boosting sales and promoting business growth.

Best practices for using gamification in marketing campaigns

Of course, like anything that carries a lot of potential, there are best practices to get your gamified content efforts into the top percentile. In gamification, a good idea, catchy copy, and some compelling visuals will take you so far, but due diligence to the finer details are key in connecting that raw magic to your audience, and leveraging that engagement to secure your goals, be they client loyalty, customer conversion, or other marketing considerations.

You need to think about how your product or service can be connected to your audience through the game to make your users players, and ultimately convert them into customers, and increase sales.

Due consideration to user experience and design of a game

The user experience (UX) is really the building blocks of anything when it comes to dealing with customers or targeting a specific audience. When considering UX you’re looking for bugs, pinch points, and blockers – essentially anything that’s going to frustrate or discourage your user from playing through your gamified content and acting on your desired intentions..

Is your game simple, does it all look correct and play the way you expect? Let test users play through the experience and see if they run into any problems. When you’re the creator or customiser of a marketing game, it can be difficult to identify issues, so this is an area where you need other perspectives.

Additionally, is the game engine suitable and cohesive to your idea and your campaign? For example, if you’re marketing a new high powered water pistol to children, a customised Crossword Puzzle is the wrong game engine to customise. The game play should be simple and appropriate to your target audience.

A clearly defined goal and purpose around which to create your marketing game

The key to developing an effective marketing game (in fact, to all gamification projects) is having a clearly defined goal and purpose. The clearer and more developed the vision, and the more you’ve thought about the experience you’re looking to deliver, and the parameters by which you’ll judge its success, the better your game will perform. It’s as simple as that.

Knowing before anything else what you want your marketing game to achieve is the key to getting the most out of it. Yes, you’re delivering a playful, engaging experience, but gamification is leveraging game mechanics to deliver on specific objectives and outcomes. Games for the sake of fun are great, but that’s not the exercise. You’re harnessing the power of marketing games and gamification to boost your business by getting eyes on a product, highlighting a service, collecting user data, or helping to foster loyalty – or maybe something else. So long as you have a clearly defined purpose, whatever that may be, and you treat that as your north star at every stage of development and planning, it’ll serve you well.

Integration with broader marketing campaigns and overall strategy

In space, no one can hear you scream, and in a marketing vacuum, not many people are going to play your game… a great marketing game that looks a million dollars and ticks all the necessary boxes on paper is fantastic, but if it exists in isolation, as a one off, as if in a silo from the rest of your marketing campaigns, its potential is dramatically limited. People need to see your game to be able to engage with it. As much as it promotes your product and helps the rest of your overall marketing strategy, it needs to be promoted and advertised itself: both in your email campaigns like newsletters, and on all your social media platforms so it can be shared in order to spread your message.

You must also consider that when releasing your marketing game, if it’s not cohesive with the rest of your marketing materials, it could create a disconnect when communicating with your audience. For example, if you released a customised Product Recommendation Quiz to promote your new range of hiking shoes, but the rest of your marketing materials focused on new clothing lines, it would just be a bit odd looking – how would your broader campaign strategy support your game, and vice versa?

For the best results, you should look at gamification in the form of marketing games as a staple of your overall marketing strategy, and integrate it accordingly when planning your campaigns. Because all games created on the Drimify platform allow you track KPIs like engagement rate and participation rate, as well as other metrics, you can easily draw learnings from one marketing game to apply to your next marketing game, or take learnings from one gamification project and apply them to a subsequent gamification project of a similar scope.

The final word on effectively using gamification in marketing

Ultimately, marketing games are the modern innovative digital tool that allows marketers to create real engagement with their target customers. Engaging, playable experiences allow you as a business to pull on psychological levers to motivate users towards desired outcomes. These versatile online marketing tools are designed in a mobile-first way, so are easily accessed by people on their mobile phones, as well as on tablets, and their home computers.

This interactive approach to marketing content is far more effective than traditional marketing strategies and tools alone, and can greatly augment your success rate when it comes to achieving marketing goals and boosting business growth.

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