10 Benefits to Gamifying Your Marketing

For good reason, marketers everywhere are looking for new and innovative ways to reach their target audiences. In fact, this goal has become even more challenging as consumers are turning away more than ever from traditional online advertising. In a recent survey, respondents stated that online ads have little or no influence on their behavior.

Gamification can provide the answer to the problems in traditional marketing. Gamification taps into the basic instinct for humans wanting to “play.” It also provides a way for all marketing campaigns to provide real value to the audience, as well as a positive digital experience.

Gamification marketing can help build a successful campaign for your company, one in which you build brand awareness, drive engagement to your brand, and develop a long-lasting loyalty program.

Build brand awareness

By using gamification, you can attract new customers in an original way and draw back old customers when they notice your branding, set against an innovative and fun campaign. Your audience, old or new, will experience your marketing campaign in a fun and interactive way — an experience that will leave your audience happy.

Happy audiences instantly spread the word about your brand in the form of social media mentions, as well as word-of-mouth marketing and online reviews. All these scenarios result in a stronger brand awareness than you can achieve in a traditional marketing campaign.

By exploiting rewards, points, ranks, leaderboards, and competition, you can encourage your audience to follow, share, and like your brand on social media. This way, with gamification marketing, you can increase your reach and, ultimately, your brand awareness.

Increase reach

No matter what kind of campaign you run, one of the main objectives will always be to gain new customers. It doesn’t matter what market segments you’re targeting or which sector your company works in, increasing your consumer reach will always be a fundamental part of your marketing.

Ideally, every company would have access to a marketing budget that would instantly bring its marketing campaign vision to the required audiences. With an unlimited budget, your market reach could be limitless; however, in the real world, most companies have limitations in terms of how far they can go with their marketing plans.

The brilliance of gamification marketing campaigns, in which everyday situations are turned into games, is in creating a layered and multifunctional campaign that naturally improves both audience engagement and brand reach.

Here are some of the ways reach can be increased through gamification:

• Word of mouth: Word-of-mouth marketing is more powerful than ever and it has only increased its dominance as a prominent motivator of social influence. Gamification is one of the most efficient ways to influence word of mouth; as your audience has fun and enjoys your campaign, they’ll talk about and share it. If the game options are developed properly, your audience will have an engaging and fun experience. This increases the chances that they’ll discuss it with people in their lives.
• Social media: Social media is the avenue by which almost all sharing trends take place. Social media has the unique ability to encourage sharing and even propel marketing campaigns from simply okay to full-on viral.

Gamification campaigns tend to do exceptionally well when it comes to going viral. The reason for this is simple: Games are perfect for encouraging social behavior. From incentives and rewards to collaboration and leaderboards, a well-developed campaign can become viral and return tremendous results.

• Incentivization: As your audience enjoys and engages with your campaign, they’ll need to be incentivized to share it, thereby increasing your reach. With gamification, incentives can take many forms. From awarding user-generated achievements to rewards, you can create the motivation required for your audience to promote your campaign in their social spheres.

Instantly appeal to a younger audience

Your business can build lifelong audiences if you manage to find ways to make your brand appealing to younger people. As the famous marketing rule goes, “If you brand them while they’re young, they’ll be your customers forever.”

As we’ve seen in recent years, younger audiences have been quick to adopt the newer digital and social technology revolutions. This makes gamification an even more important method of marketing if you want your campaign to appeal to young people. Gamification forces your marketing to practice creativity, which in turn creates an engaging and motivational platform for younger audiences.

Often obsessive about their phones and any new technology, younger audiences are naturally intrigued by gamification marketing. By promising a fun and engaging experience, your campaign will grab a younger audience’s attention instantly, the way Coca-Cola’s Shake It campaign did.

Drive engagement

If your marketing campaign is engaging, it will be worth sharing. Gamification can help drive this engagement so your audience can connect with your brand and campaign in a fun and engaging manner. However, there are certain methods you can use to ensure your gamification model drives engagement:

• Using rewards cleverly: To attract new audiences to your campaign, you need to offer them rewards for playing, purchasing, loyalty, and referrals.
• Educating audiences: Gamification can help your audience leave the campaign more educated on your business or product. Instead of creating a campaign that simply talks about the message you want to convey, embed the message into the game. This will compel your audience to read and understand the message as they have fun playing for their rewards.
• Promoting a new product or service: With a fun, informative game, you can introduce your new product or service to both current and new audiences. By installing discounts into the rewards, your audience will actively play until they gain the discount and make a purchase to redeem the reward.

Inject fun into your brand

To put it simply, gamification makes fun and competition part of a marketing strategy. This is good news for your brand, because your gamification marketing campaign will actually generate fans — people who want to participate, follow, and share your brand.

Gamification can inspire user engagement in a more meaningful manner, which in turn fosters loyalty. The best example of this strategy can be seen in Starbucks Rewards. Loyal Starbucks customers can earn points and receive benefits. This entices customers to choose Starbucks over the competition.

Gamification forces your marketing team to think of more creative, fun elements for your campaign, which ensures all audiences will have an entertaining and engaging experience with your marketing strategy. By using fun elements in your marketing, you build customer loyalty.

Influence customer behavior

Gamification has a major advantage over normal marketing campaigns when it comes to influencing customer behavior. A gamification marketing campaign engages universal experiences such as stimulation and motivation, which allows you to influence customer behavior.

Gamification’s ability to influence behavior can help you build a stronger and broader social network for your brand, too. For instance, interactive gamification options such as quizzes are a great incentive for sharing with your social connections. The desire to earn rewards will encourage users to ask for help on their social networks, which will spread the word about your campaign and your brand.

Accrue big (customer) data

Big data offers insights from all kinds of structured and unstructured data sources to help improve how companies operate and interact with consumers. Gamification, which allows you to connect with your audience in a more interactive and intimate way, gathers valuable data that you can turn into new insights to create detailed market segments for future campaigns.

Gamification creates a lot of data that can be analyzed, especially when users are asked to sign in via a social network where a lot of your audience’s public data can be captured. More interestingly, this data can be integrated to provide context with all the other gamification data you’re storing.

You can also use gamification to better understand how your audience behaves and performs within the campaign. For example, look at how Netflix introduced the era of gamification of TV. By giving viewers an interactive choice of how the story pans out, Netflix was able to gather more information on each audience segment. This information could then be used to improve its future productions.

Personalize brand experiences

Gamification marketing can customize your brand’s message for your audience, creating a more personal experience during the campaign. Segmentation and personalization are critical to drive conversion, develop trust, and build customer loyalty. The more you tailor your marketing to your target group, the more effective your campaigns will be.

You can create custom game experiences targeted to specific audience segments and then develop these game experiences to your brand values. By doing this, your marketing campaign will connect with your audience on a deeper level.

Gamification allows for two types of personalization:

• Audience demographics: Select game options that appeal to the demographics you’re targeting. For example, if you’re aiming for people with young families, a game that they can play together with their kids would be ideal.
• Audience likes: If your audience share something in common (for example, an activity or type of entertainment), you can customize your game to feature this shared preference.

Build customer loyalty

Your audience is being bombarded by noise — options, offers, and advertising messages are everywhere. For your marketing to be successful, your campaign desperately needs to engage customers, retain their interest, and more important, develop loyalty. With so many options aggressively competing for your audience’s attention, this task is becoming more and more difficult.

Gamification can power effective customer loyalty programs, which creates a more valuable and sustaining customer relationship. When done well, gamification loyalty programs have an impressive impact. Identifying the right gamification strategy with the right rewards will elevate your loyalty program and keep your customers engaged.

Here are two tips to elevate your loyalty program:

• Introduce a competitive element. The idea of gamification is to offer some form of competition to your audience. This could be a leaderboard or badges for audiences to work toward.
• Introduce elite clubs. Being part of an elite club makes your audience feel like they share a special relationship with your brand, which goes a long way toward building loyalty. In gamification, this elite status is developed as an “achievement.” When customers achieve a particular goal, they become part of that exclusive set of customers with additional benefits.

Gather great customer feedback and research

Your audience is being inundated with brands and websites requesting feedback. Sadly, it has become rare to generate meaningful customer feedback for a traditional marketing campaign. This leaves you with no clear picture of what your audience feels about your company, your brand, and more important (in the short term), your campaign.

Gamification helps make the process simple by offering a more engaging and fun campaign, which increases response rates. Gamification generates an emotional and immediate response from your audience because they respond without thinking about the answer. So, even though your audience is being bombarded with requests for feedback, gamification helps your campaign stand out by making the process simple, seamless, and fun.

Focus on the following two areas:

• Playability: Concentrate on the overall playability of your game. The key here is to have a game that can be picked up easily and one that your audience will want to keep playing. Stay away from advanced 3D graphics and ultra-complex gameplay. Develop a game that is simple enough to appeal to the majority of your audience while maintaining a competitive edge.
• Rewarding feedback: If you want to encourage feedback, particularly over the long term, enabling your audience to earn points and rewards will be instrumental. Your audience will want to feel that their feedback is earning them privileges or rewards.