By making advertising materials and creatives more engaging and interactive, gamification tools in marketing provide fun and increase customer interaction. In the age of social media, where the average person experiences constant information overload, the attention span of a person has dropped to 8 seconds, as confirmed by a study by Microsoft. Moreover, today people spend less than a minute searching for a particular topic before switching between screens.
Therefore, it is not surprising that lately, the overwhelming majority of marketers are favouring marketing gamification as a powerful tool to keep users' attention on content. After reading this article, you will learn what is gamification in marketing, how it works in different businesses, and how you can improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategies by implementing gamification elements.
To make marketing work effectively to attract and retain customers, today you have to use many different methods and techniques aimed at improved interaction. Recently, marketers are utilising gamification elements to make these interactions more engaging.
In simple terms, gamification is the application of game elements in processes that are not directly related to the game, such as marketing. For example, a certain brand decided to expand its user base and increase sales by offering its platform visitors the opportunity to take a quiz with a chance to win a prize. Since people instinctively want to participate and win prizes, this approach makes marketing campaigns more successful.
Here are some undeniable benefits of marketing gamification that are hard to overstate:
· It increases engagement with potential customers. Because people love games, they engage more with brands that add challenges, quizzes, tests with prizes and other elements.
· This allows you to distribute content faster and more effectively. By adding promotions and quizzes, you incentivise your audience to share posts with friends and acquaintances.
· You can boost your existing customers' loyalty to your brand. By rewarding your audience, you make your products and services more appealing in the eyes of your audience.
· You get even more data about your audience. With more accurate and detailed information, you can improve your marketing strategies and make them more personalised.
So, according to gamification theory, you can turn routine customer interactions into engaging experiences based on the desire for achievement and rewards.
Did you know that gamification elements in marketing are used in a variety of industries including retail, healthcare and education? Remember back in 1987 when McDonald's added elements of the Hasbro Monopoly game to its advertising campaign? Since game elements in advertising have been used for decades, there are several gamification strategies that have literally stood the test of time.
The truth is that most people see social media as a way to distract themselves from their daily routine and have fun rather than as a platform for ordering goods and services. Since standard adverts irritate most users, you should make your campaigns viral.
When promoting products through platforms like TikTok or Instagram, include interactive challenges and quizzes and offer a discount on future purchases. Invite users to post content with your branded hashtags to increase engagement. Finally, add spin-to-win games like Wheel of Fortune to increase excitement and drive more traffic to product pages.
Even if your product may appeal to a wide audience, it is unwise to work only on attracting new customers. That's why many brands use reward schemes aimed at increasing the loyalty of existing customers. Here are some strategies you can use to get your users to come back to you again and again:
· Add a tiered reward system like Starbucks so that your customers earn points and move up the status ladder to unlock exclusive privileges.
· Award comp points for a certain amount spent on your online platform with the ability to redeem those points for money or bonuses.
· Give surprises to randomly selected customers or for events such as the 10th purchase.
Using these techniques, you will be able to increase engagement and also significantly raise sales for your online business.
You probably often hear from marketers that content is king. However, by adding gamification elements, you can greatly increase the effectiveness of your text articles, videos, infographics, and more. For example, create an infographic depicting the path to achieving goals or provide access to exclusive content based on a level system. Finally, adding interactive and game-like elements - such as Easter egg hunts - to email newsletters can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.
Today, educators suggest adding gamification elements to the learning process to turn boring lessons into interactive games. This approach greatly enhances learning in children. And it also works well in digital marketing, despite the fact that the vast majority of your customers are adults.
Although B2B is about companies interacting with other companies, even here you can add more engagement and fun. For example, many SaaS companies offer learning platforms with gamification elements where customers go through learning trails and receive badges or certificates incentivising them to understand the product better.
Some brands add gamification to webinars by offering discounts and gifts to those who answer questions correctly in the middle or at the end of the event. In addition, KPI challenges where you reward your partners for their performance have recently been doing well.
By adding gamification elements, you can make even boring sales more fun for both customers and your employees:
· Use a seller leaderboard to reward those who close the most deals.
· Reward customers with points or cashback for leaving reviews or referring friends.
· Come up with missions for shoppers, such as a challenge to take a photo of a purchase and share it on social media.
Matching people's natural desires to achieve goals and rewards, gamification elements can significantly increase sales for your business.
It's hard to achieve success simply by adding a spinning wheel of giveaways or a quiz to your website. When creating a gamification strategy that really works, you need to consider the specifics of both your business and your target audience.
Below you will find 5 key components that make up almost any company created with a sound marketing gamification strategy:
· Clear goals you want to achieve, such as increasing engagement, increasing your brand's visibility online, or boosting sales.
· Well-designed game mechanics - such as a tiered loyalty scheme or a top-performing employee board - that take into account all the important aspects of your company.
· A narrative, i.e., a compelling story about how following a path (think of the infographic example above) will ensure success.
· Rewards that match your audience's preferences and incentivise potential customers to take targeted actions.
Try to keep your gamification campaign as simple as possible, as complicated rules for participation discourage average visitors.
The target audience can vary even among companies operating in the same niche. Therefore, create a gamification approach with your unique audience in mind. Below you will find a table with the key elements you need to consider to ensure proper personalisation.
So, you've launched a campaign with gamification elements and you want to evaluate its effectiveness. To do this, you need to focus on the following metrics:
· Engagement rate. Track the number of active users daily, how many of them participate in challenges, and how much time they spend on your platform.
· Conversion rate. To measure ROI, track the number of potential customers who perform targeted actions.
· Retention rate. Assess how often users who interact with gamification elements return to you.
· Revenue impact. Evaluate how much your sales have increased compared to the period when you ran campaigns without gamification.
In addition, find out how your users feel about the innovation, encouraging them to share their opinions on social media.
With new technologies, marketers are creating more and more effective game mechanics. By using artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can achieve better scores for the key metrics above.
Although powerful AI-based solutions have been with us for several years now, it's still surprising how well this tool works with large amounts of data. Because of this and its analytics capabilities, it enables deep user analysis, hyper-personalisation where adverts are tailored to each user, dynamic game scenarios and even highly accurate predictions of results. Given the impact of AI on the industry today, by utilising it, marketers will not only be able to more easily incorporate gamification elements into their strategies, but also increase their impact on potential customers.
In simple words, it is the dilution of your advertising campaigns with gaming elements such as challenges, competitions, spinning wheels with prizes, etc. to increase the engagement of potential and existing customers.
This tool makes interaction with your platform more active and enjoyable for users, as it hides marketing tools behind something that looks like fun.
Receiving various bonuses and rewards makes your users feel more important and meaningful and this in turn builds their loyalty to your company.
By making some mistakes - such as overly complex game rules - marketers can achieve the opposite effect. Therefore, it is necessary to develop gamification elements that are relevant to your audience, aim for a long-term impact and take feedback into account.
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