Tedious marketing tactics will not work anymore. It is time to adopt gamification marketing! Dive in!
In the world of digital marketing, gamification is a technique that involves adding gaming elements into a non-gaming context. The primary purpose of gamification marketing is to market the product or service in a fun and effective manner. It helps in capturing the attention of the users while entertaining them at the same time.
It becomes much easier for brands to build brand awareness among the target audience by incorporating fun gaming elements. The concept of gamification marketing is not alien to modern-day marketers. In fact, many companies have been implementing it to increase user engagement.
While it can be implemented in every industry, you need to structure gamification marketing foremostly. But how can you do that? Well, do not worry because we have got you covered. In this blog, we will shed light on five critical ways to structure gamification marketing. So without further ado, let’s get started. Stick with us and read on!
Familiarize Yourself with the Audience You Want to Target
The success and failure of your marketing campaign heavily depend on how effectively you target your audience. But for doing that, you first need to know who your target audience is.
Attracting leads without knowing them is close to impossible. If you think you can build a solid customer base without analyzing them thoroughly, you are probably under an illusion.
To engage the audience with your brand and persuade them to buy your product or service, you need to create specific content. Conduct your research and take time to understand the needs of your target audience. While researching, you should keep these things in mind:
- What your target demographics look for online?
- How can you fulfill these requirements?
Now, after familiarizing yourself with your target audience, this is the stage where you need to implement gamification marketing. Devise a game that is fun and should appeal to your target market. However, avoid getting caught up so much in your brand message that you forget to tap into the interest of your audience.
Have a Clear Vision and Set Your Goals Upfront
There are a couple of ways that your brand can benefit from gamification marketing. But heading forward without a proper plan or strategy is a bad idea. Launching a marketing campaign without identifying what your goals are is simply a dead end. To achieve clarity in your thoughts and goals, ask yourself the purpose of your campaign. Firstly and foremostly, you need to ask these types of questions from yourself:
- Is your purpose of implementing gamification marketing to educate customers about your new service or product?
- Do you want to create hype around your brand?
- Is your goal to sell the maximum amounts of products possible?
- Or do you want to build brand awareness?
Having a clear-cut vision and your priorities set help in giving your marketing campaign direction. Therefore, it is crucial to set your goals beforehand.
However, developing a marketing strategy is not a piece of cake. Creating a single strategy to attract customers, and fulfill their needs at the same time, will not work for you. Instead, you will require a gamification marketing campaign with a single purpose. Conveying your message with the help of a game can aid in shaping your decisions and achieving your business goals much more effectively.
So when you offer rewards to the people for their engagement with your game campaign, it does not only help you achieve your marketing objectives. But by doing this, you also tap into the motivational science behind gamification.
All in all, beginning with an objective in mind can help you create games and contests directed towards achieving a goal rather than hoping for something magical to happen. That is why it becomes crucial to have a goal.
Long-Term Sales Efforts and the Duration of Your Campaign
When we talk about the duration of a marketing campaign, there are two vital factors to consider:
- When should you launch your campaign?
- How long should you run it?
When the gamification marketing campaign is concerned, its duration should be around one and a half months (6 weeks). This time frame is suitable for a campaign to promote a certain product/brand. The good thing is that this time period is not enough for it to grow stale.
Do you want users to feel that they have all the time in the world to play your game or engage with your campaign? We know you do not. Instead, when engaging with your campaign, you want people to feel a sense of urgency. When people feel a sense of urgency, they tend to take rapid action. And this is what will work in your favor.
Further, you can also conduct a social media challenge or contest for your users. But make sure that this contest somehow aids in the growth of your sales. For instance, to benefit your sales from the social media contest, you can collect players’ data and email lists. This will help you to reach more and more people. And the greater the reach, the more the sales.
Keep Things Simple
The objective of gamification is to implement fun elements of a game into a promotion strategy. So, the mechanics of the game must be straightforward and simple to achieve maximum user engagement. Devising a hard to comprehend game with a complex set of rules will not appeal to the masses. And will eventually fail to achieve the goal.
Instead, looking for simpler ways to incorporate gamification into your content will help you reach a larger audience. Most people tend to compare the prizes/rewards when they are faced with a challenge. And if your game requires too much mental effort or thought to complete a challenge, customers are more likely to move on and leave it as it is. This will not only hinder your sales growth. But it will also result in low user engagement.
Therefore, the best thing to do is keep your contest or game as simple and convenient to play as possible. Keeping the game straightforward will make it easier for the users to know how to earn rewards and why they are essential.
Gamification might seem complex. But its success lies in simplicity. The sole purpose of gamification marketing is to hook the users. And persuade them to take specific actions. So focus on making the process as simple as you can. Remember that the harder you make the game for the users, the harder it will become to achieve the desired outcome.
Create Targeted Content and Promote it Across Relevant Platforms
Gamification marketing is not suitable for every platform. If it helps engage users across social media platforms, it is not certain that it can achieve the same on your website or in-store. Before launching your campaign, you need to analyze the relevant platforms your target market would be.
Having a massive population of 2.8 billion users, Facebook is still the leading platform for marketing purposes. Most of the companies create their Facebook pages and accounts to engage their target market. And make customers aware of their campaign.
Similarly, there is a Facebook-owned platform having 1 billion users called Instagram. It is another great platform to promote your business and drive engagement. Likewise, the third media channel is Twitter having a slightly different type of audience.
However, it all comes down to which channel you select to promote your business at the end of the day. Creating a game to capture the attention of the audience is all fine and great. But if you have not decided on a channel to promote it on, then your chances of running a successful gamification campaign are low. You may think of this as a minor detail. But you can lose the opportunity to gather data from a relevant channel if you ignore it.
Bottom Line
One of the essential things to structure gamification marketing is to know your audience. Moving forward without getting familiarized with your target market is like stepping in the pebbles. The next main thing is to set goals and have a clear vision. Further, gamify your rewards for increasing sales and try to keep things simple. And last but not least, promote your gamification marketing campaign across relevant media channels.
We hope that these essential tips will help you in promoting your campaign. If you are interested in reading more, check out this blog:
