The unicorn of modern marketing – Gamification marketing
There are thousands of companies worldwide and everyone is doing at least some marketing. May it be digital, print, selling merch, television, radio or anything else. Everyone is doing the same thing and has been doing it for a long time.
Nowadays it is very hard to stand out from all of the marketing noise. Imagine walking around Times Square. There are gigantic billboards with bright advertisements. Every single one of them is screaming from the top of their digital lungs: buy this and that; why this is better; this product is more useful and so on. But how can you stand out with your marketing strategy? How can you actually be different from everyone else?
Believe it or not, the rare unicorn you are looking for is gamification marketing.
So… If you’ve been looking for how to spice up your marketing, you better keep reading.
What is gamification marketing?
Do you remember how addictive the Candy Crush game was? Maybe you remember how Flappy Bird took over the world and no one couldn’t stop playing? Or even a simple wheel of fortune at the city fair which you simply couldn’t walk past by.
The keyword in all of this is INTERACTION. As the definition says: Gamification marketing involves incorporating gaming elements into a non-gaming context to improve engagement levels and encourage users to take specific actions. To put it simply, gamification is using interactions and games on your website or app to encourage engagement.
Who wouldn’t like to win something? And the objective of any game is to win, right? So you’ll want to make sure to have a worthwhile offer at the end of your gamified interaction. Or at least a fun enough experience to get people playing over and over again.
The only limitation is your imagination. We offer you a gamification platform where you can build and launch your own branded game within only 30 minutes and without writing a single line of code! Insane, right?! But it really is like that. We have over 30 different game types for different kinds of occasions: holiday campaigns, eCommerce gamification, product launches, discount offers or even just brand promotions.
Related: Out-of-the-box marketing ideas and Quizzes for marketing
Benefits of gamification marketing
Gamification marketing isn’t only fun and games. Besides just a bit of added entertainment for customers, gamification also brings other measurable benefits to your business.
1. Increases user engagement
With the attention span of a modern person extremely short and the amount of content created on social media increasing, the value of customer engagement with your ad is extremely important. Gamification is all about interactive and fun content and as such a perfect way to engage your audience.
If a customer is willing to participate in a gamified element on your website that is 30-60 seconds long, it either shows that your game, product or offer was attractive enough to catch their attention.
Related: Customer engagement examples and Virtual conference engagement ideas
2. Builds brand awareness
Every company has a budget for marketing on different platforms. Even though everyone uses different media for their marketing, everyone knows that word-of-mouth is the best kind of marketing. And what could be an easier way to make people talk about your product or service than marketing games?
Gamification can help boost brand awareness by intriguing participants to share results with friends, challenging them to compete with each other and raffling out prizes as extra motivation to play your game.
AirBaltic created a simple trivia game about its travel destinations. After the campaign, they raffled out plane tickets to the winner’s desired destination. The game was created for the Baltic market and went viral on social media. They got thousands of gameplays with a click-through rate as high as 90% for the average of 5 campaigns.
3. Increases conversion rates
A basic marketing campaign consists of digital marketing on social media, some printed and digital posters outside, television and radio commercials. But it is all very basic and easy to ignore due to everyone doing exactly the same. A gamified marketing campaign however grabs the attention of customers.
With well-known lottery games like wheel of fortune and plinko you can easily make people win store credit or discount percentages. Another option is to make people compete with each other or test their knowledge and later raffle out different prizes.
4. Educates customers on products/services
Like traffic, gamification is a 2-way street to educate your customers.
For example, if you create a personality quiz to help customers choose the best-fit products, you are hearing the customer’s needs while also giving them information on what you offer. By using a simple trivia game you can showcase the uniqueness of your product or service.
The fact remains that when you use gamification to educate customers, it’s more likely to stick in their memory. Gamification is not just a poster or blog article they are scanning for answers. Instead, it makes the products and services feel more personal.
Check out our guide on how to use gamification in education.
5. Helps you collect leads in a non-intrusive way
Gamification helps you increase customer engagement and communicate your message. In addition, you can also collect information about the player while they are playing your game.
You can personalize your questions by asking about your customer’s personality type so your customer can find the right product. This means that you’ll have an idea of what they like and it will help in customizing future marketing campaigns, too! To make sure people are engaged with this process all throughout, set up a lead generation form at the beginning of any campaign – but don’t stop there…
All in all, the more you know about your customers, the better! It’s important to take time and make some notes on what they like or dislike so when it comes down to making decisions – such as which flavor should be served at an event – you don’t make any unfortunate mistakes.
How can you get started with gamification marketing?
There’s never been a better time to start your campaign. You can create an account and design it in minutes with our drag-and-drop builder! All you need are some ideas of what kind of campaigns work best for you, then launch away—you’ll be able to turn those first players into loyal fans before long enough that they will tell all their friends just how awesome this game really is.
If you need any additional help getting started, you can book a demo with our founder and CEO Kalev Kärpuk.
Originally published on June 15, 2022, updated on February 9, 2023.
