Complete Guide To Gamification In Marketing

The marketing strategy your business uses plays a significant role in the success you can achieve. Failure to implement the right marketing strategies could reduce your customer acquisition rate, leading to a loss. Even when marketing strategies are implemented, failure to effectively generate user engagement would render them useless and cause you to waste money.

In the modern day, many companies realize that they have to cater to a broad audience, regardless of their industry. Recent reports state that about 3.2 billion individuals globally consider themselves gamers.

This leads to a need for gamification elements to be added to businesses. Gamification marketing is a highly effective option that boosts user engagement and helps to improve your click-through rate. This article will help you understand how to implement gamification techniques in the marketing strategy you use for your business.

How Gamification In Marketing Can Help Your Campaigns

Before you decide to implement a gamification marketing strategy for your company, it is essential to understand what it is, how it works, and the benefits that you may notice when you opt for this type of digital marketing campaign.

Gamification is a term that refers to the addition of game elements into business operations. Regarding gamification marketing, we refer to the specific advertisements and other promotional strategies that the company uses to expose its products and services to a specified audience.

When you incorporate gamification, you essentially use an interactive marketing strategy. Gamification can be implemented on various platforms where you already have ad campaigns, such as Facebook, TikTok, and more. Marketing gamification is most common with social media advertising, but some companies also find success when they use specific gamification examples in newsletters that go out to existing loyal customers.

The significant benefits of gamification marketing involve better brand engagement. You can encourage users to click a button because they can feel familiar with the game-based elements they see in the ad.

This sparks interest among those who see the ads where you apply gamified marketing. There are different ways in which you can set up a gamification strategy – including the use of an interactive game, hide-and-seek pictures, a “spin the wheel” type of element, and more. Each of these comes with its own benefits that can help to make your marketing efforts more fruitful in the long run.

Types Of Gamification Marketing Options

Gamification essentially means adding more interactive “game like” elements into your marketing strategy. Now, there are different types of gamification strategies that you can use. You have to understand how they differ to ensure you opt for a strategy that is suitable for your business.

Here, we take a closer look at a few common gamification technique options that can be used to give users a fun experience as part of your ad campaigns:

• Games: You can decide to get a game developed specifically for your marketing purposes. A great example comes from the franchise KFC, which launched a mobile game called “The Great Bucket Hunt” in 2021. This was an AR game that awarded players for finding buckets while they played the game. You can use a game in various ways, even if it is an HTML game that you offer on your company’s website. The player must play through levels and get rewards based on scores, collectibles, or other measurable metrics.
• Interactive Ads: You can also choose to use interactive ads that allow players to click on certain parts of the advertisement, then reveal something underneath. For example, this could include a scratch card that reveals a prize when they move their cursor over it a couple of times.
• Image-Based Gamification: Some companies have also had success with images with a gamification element. For example, you could have an image with various colorful elements and add a small picture representing something related to your business. Ask viewers to find that one aspect and comment below what it is. You could then choose a random person from the comments to win a prize. This can help encourage engagement and boost your company’s presence on social media simultaneously.

Of course, these are only a couple of examples that you can refer to when you want to use gamified content as part of the marketing campaigns you launch.

Creativity among your marketing team and analyzing existing customer data can be very valuable when you want to gather ideas on how to improve user engagement through gamification. Note that these strategies are generally somewhat different from sales gamification.

Setting Up A Gamification Marketing Campaign

Once you decide to set up a gamification marketing strategy, the next step is actually to implement the campaign. You need to take certain steps to ensure the strategy is successful and gives you the results you expect from it.

In this section, we are going to take a closer look at a step-by-step system that you can follow.

Make sure you follow these in order to ensure you do not miss any important elements that you need to keep in mind to ensure you are able to achieve success. Each step helps you reach closer to the point where you are able to take action and actually utilize this type of marketing strategy for your own business.

Understand Your Target Audience

If you do not know who you are marketing your products to, it is incredibly difficult to set up ads that turn out successful. This is why you should first have a good understanding of your audience before you decide to use gamification as a strategy.

Start by considering whether a large portion of your audience actually plays games. You could send out an email to existing customers to study consumer behavior. Gamification makes sense in situations where you have an audience that enjoys fun experiences and can help to drive the business forward in most cases.

Even when you do notice that your customers are gamers, you still need to understand them more. Some people like to earn digital badges for completing tasks, whereas others may rather have a preference for virtual currency that they can exchange for a free ticket or something else of monetary value.

It is a good idea to look at any gamification campaigns that your competitors are using. If you can find any, try to determine how successful these are. You want to keep gamification simple but still have the ability to increase engagement and bring in more paying customers at the same time.

As you study your target audience, look at factors like the average age, gender, income status, marital status, and other data points that you are able to collect. These and more points can help you get a grasp on the type of gamification strategy they are most likely to enjoy.

Consider Your Company’s Goals

Every company has specific goals that they strive toward. This is something that you also need to take into account when you want to develop a gamified campaign.

A common goal is to bring in more sales, but try to be specific. Perhaps you want to focus on boosting the engagement of people on Facebook, or you want to use TikTok to secure leads due to the popularity it is gaining.

While the end goal is generally more profitable, you should also focus on setting up smaller achievements to aim for as well.

Here are a few examples of potential goals that you might strive toward with a gamified campaign:

• Boost engagement on the social media page
• Increase leads for your marketing emails
• Reach a specific number of followers on a social media platform
• Get a specific number of people to download your mobile application
• Increase your sales by a certain percentage within a specified period of time
• To gather data related to your audience’s behavior in order to optimize future campaigns more effectively.

You do not necessarily have to focus on only a single goal. You could perhaps want to achieve a 10,000 follower count on TikTok with your campaign but also grow your email list by 15,000 in the same period. These goals can be tracked. You can monitor the goals individually and together to assess the performance of a gamified marketing technique.

Determine The Most Suitable Incentives

Let’s face it; people love free stuff. That’s where the incentive part of gamified content in your marketing strategy comes into the picture.

When you decide to use gamified strategies in your marketing campaign, you have to consider what type of incentive you are willing to offer your customers.

This is also where the versatility of gamification marketing really plays an advantageous role. Not everyone wants to perform tasks for something of monetary value. There are several individuals who will enjoy other gamified content, such as the ability to collect digital badges. Thus, you should really try to be creative here.

Think about whether you want to offer something digital or rather rewards that are physically usable. This can help you develop an incentive strategy that works for your brand and campaign.

Loyalty reward programs are quite popular. With a loyalty program, the customer may be provided with incentives for supporting your business. This type of reward should be offered for in-store sales and digital sales. You can then set up a campaign that allows customers an opportunity to win points on their loyalty cards when they perform certain tasks.

Market these particular gamification ads to your existing audience and followers – while promoting a “sign up bonus point” system for those who are not following your page. This can help get more people on board for the loyalty program.

You can also decide to offer something like desktop computers, smartphones, or even a product that your company manufactures as a prize. In this case, every person who uses the gamified content will not receive the prize – but rather a select few, which you usually choose randomly.

Using Augmented Reality With Gamification Marketing

Augmented Reality, also known as AR, has been receiving a significant increase in interest over the past couple of years. The current value of the AR market is estimated to be around $3.5 billion. By the year 2024, it is also estimated that around 1.73 billion people will have used augmented reality.

Augmented reality is not just for gaming. Many companies have already delved into AR technology in order to engage with their users and improve their marketing campaigns. Augmented reality also gives you the ability to add some extra gamification elements to the marketing strategy that you are looking to use.

There are different ways in which you can use augmented reality as a way to add a gamification element to your marketing strategy.

While you can create your own dedicated app like KFC in a previous example we discussed, this can be quite costly. For a smaller business, the best gamification technique when it comes to the use of AR might rather be to utilize existing platforms that offer augmented reality technology. For example, you can set up a branded Effect on the popular TikTok app.

This will help you get exposure at a lower cost to your business. If you do well, then you might even find that your effect goes viral – and this is something that would greatly enhance the overall exposure you get from the entire campaign.

There are other platforms that also allow you to implement AR into your ad campaigns. Make sure you explore all of the options that are available.

Consider where your target audience is most active, then decide to go with this particular platform. Targeting multiple platforms is also a good idea, but consider starting with a single one first to see how it goes. This way, you can effectively determine if AR gamification marketing is a good idea for your business and the industry you serve.

How To Keep Things Simple, Yet Effective

One major problem that some companies face when they try to get new customers onboard through gamification marketing is that they overcomplicate things. To grow brand awareness, you need to ensure users will have a fun experience and not feel confused about what they are expected to do.

Gamified campaigns, even when they do involve the design of a mini-game, should not include every single element that you see in mobile and video games. Instead, they should be kept simple and to the point.

Allow the user to collect items and show them their score. You can add a leaderboard, but you don’t really need more than this to keep the users engaged. Apart from this factor, hiring highly skilled developers for a more advanced project and gamified content could set your business back thousands of dollars.

To keep things simple, make sure you look at the campaign from the customer’s perspective.

Add a progress bar that helps them track their performance if applicable and clearly shows any points that they have accumulated. Make sure you clearly state the rules of the gamification marketing campaign that you are running – this can also help to avoid confusion or conflict later on when someone doesn’t understand why they didn’t receive a particular gift or reward.

When you develop an image-based “gamified” ad strategy, don’t make the pictures you post on social media feel too complicated for the viewer. This can make it difficult for them to find that “hidden” item, so the chances of people commenting on the post are reduced.

Gamify your Marketing Team

A gamification strategy in your marketing campaign can help to create better engagement among viewers. It is a great option to also get people to stay on your ads for longer and can go a long way in increasing your click-through rates.

BUT! Did you know you can also use gamification to motivate your Marketing Team?!

With Spinify, you can gamify your Marketing Team’s goals and KPIs and throw them up on the big screen for your whole team to follow. Create competitions out of KPIs and goals and see which team members can hit the target first on the leaderboard. You can even reward positive behaviors and milestones with badges and incentives. Book a demo today and see how you can motivate your teams’ performance with Spinify!