In the fast-paced, digital world of today, catching the interest of your audience and maintaining their engagement is crucial to a very successful marketing strategy. More and more, businesses that want to stand out head and shoulders from the competition look to innovative techniques for example gamification marketing. This compelling approach mixes the excitement of gaming together with traditional marketing principles in order to put together immersive, interactive content that keeps customers invested in your brand.
What Is Gamification For Marketing?
‘Gamification in marketing’ means leveraging the game-like elements of video games in order to push your business to your target customer. A fantastic example is including scratch-off tickets in email marketing campaigns. Businesses will send a virtual lottery ticket to subscribers who utilise their cursor to virtually “scratch off” and then reveal what’s underneath it. The outcomes could be discounts such as free shipping or merchandise.
Immediately, you will be able to see a number of clear positives. It’s engaging. You’re doing something different from the competition and giving your subscribers the opportunity to win something in return for their time.
There’s science behind why this is so successful. Experts are of the belief that gamification for marketing boosts dopamine in the brain, which results in a feeling of pleasure as well as positivity. This becomes an instant association with your business that shines a massive positive light on your brand. People start to associate that feeling with you which – at the same time – has a tonne of good side effects.
Using Gamification Improve Consumer Engagement
People’s relationships to traditional formats of online advertising have evolved. In spite of still being extremely effective in particular contents – such as building brand awareness as well as having an overriding “halo effect” – marketers are constantly looking for more successful ways of speaking to their audiences.
Quite a good number of people are actively concealing traditional ads through the usage of ad blockers, in particular young people. As people are moving far away from traditional advertising, and becoming more and more indifferent to traditional advertisements, brands are spotting the need to offer value and construct relationships with their customers.
Brands have to recognise the value of a number of touchpoints in the decision-making journey. Gamification offers a way for brands to construct relationships with their target audience and affect their decision-making journey. Consumers who were previously exposed to gamification are very open to it. In actual fact, 60% of consumers say that they would be far more likely to buy from a brand if they really enjoyed playing a game with it.
Gamification Marketing Increases Brand Loyalty
Collaborative gamified content drives users to visit the company website and then engage with the content continually to retain their position on the leaderboard display or – alternatively – win a lot more rewards. When brand loyalty grows and the user develops a representation for it, they are far more likely to make a purchase and promote it among their peers.
Gamification is exceptional in its ability to keep the brain engaged and appealing to people’s love of rewards, levelling up as well as competition. A fantastic example of this is the M&M’s eye spy online game, which was utilised in order promote their new pretzel-flavoured sweetie. The game was quite simple in that users needed to spot the lone pretzel. Almost like “Where’s Wally?” however with M&Ms. Shared on social media, the campaign spawned over 25 000 likes, 6 000 shares and 10 000 comments. The campaign found a novel way of cutting through the noise, forming awareness, and engaging an audience is an utterly unique way.
Increased Customer Retention
Customer retention is exceptionally important to the long-term success of any company. Gamification marketing can notably contribute to keeping your existing customers. By providing enjoyable, rewarding experiences via gamified marketing activities, you prompt customers to come back to your platform and keep on interacting with your brand.
Customers’ feelings of progress and achievement as they interact with your gamified content makes sure that they are kept motivated to remain involved with your brand, lowering the probability of them changing to competitors. Likewise, retained customers are far more likely to turn into brand advocates and share their positive experiences with other people so further supporting your customer base as well as fostering business growth.
Grow Brand Awareness
People love it when they have the chance to win things – just look at how popular sites like ZAR Casino online are. We’re always attracted to anything that is associated with a giveaway. Again, there’s plenty of psychology behind this concept.
The word “free” is frequently a death sentence in the marketing world as it can slash your email results, send you well-written communication to the spam folder or have your PPC campaigns sent to the blacklist. Fortunately, there are other ways to attract people to your brand without giving things away for free.
By incorporating gamification into your marketing campaigns, you are able to generate a rollercoaster of emotions. This boosts their connection with your brand and improves the chances of them telling someone else about you so bringing them back for more.
Make Data Collection Compliant With The GDPR
Data is the focus of most digital marketing campaigns as the more that you know about your current customers and target audience, the better you are able to focus your future campaigns. In 2018, the European Union instituted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which presents regulations about the way that data is handled across every single organisation collecting data in the EU. You might remember getting thousands of emails from a variety of brands asking you to “opt-in.” This left a lot of marketers being confused about the best way to capture data to shape their campaigns.
The deliberate data capture made possible via online games is a great way of gaining consensual, GDPR-compliant data, which can be included into your CRM. The real challenge is constructing a hook that is strong enough for someone to opt-in. There must be an incentive to offer their personal data, in a way which offers a fair value exchange. The challenge for marketers utilising gamification is finding a way of reaching the needs, desires as well as the interests of the audience that they want to target.
Brands employing gamification techniques can give users the chance to provide their information to have their name on a leaderboard, save a game’s progress or unlock various levels, for instance. This information can be utilised in order to track behaviour, motivations as well as the demographics of their users.