You know what they say about video games – you can never stop with one play!
Gaming experiences are created to keep users hooked onto the game through score-keeping, competition, and bonuses. The intent is to keep the user playing the game.
Marketing campaigns that gain immense popularity have been inspired to imitate these experiences. It’s one reason gamification is increasingly being embraced in marketing campaigns.
It’s also why your marketing campaigns can perform better when they have the right gamification elements. Not only does it result in better audience engagement, but it encourages a better user experience through the use of gaming techniques designed to create and attract user interest and retain it for a long time.
What is a Gamification Experience?
There’s human psychology at work when we speak about gamification. It uses emotional drivers like scarcity, ownership, and unpredictability to encourage users to continue their interaction.
While it seems like a lot of work to narrow down on these emotional traits and make it work for you, what’s even more vital is understanding how it fits in your overall goal. If your product is an educational mobile app, gamification motivates users to return to the app and use it frequently.
If you have a food business, you can create loyalty programs like McDonald’s runs its monopoly program. It’s been around for the last 30 years. And if your business deals with fitness, there is no shortage of gamification examples to show you how many steps you need to run or the miles you have to cover.
Retail stores thrive on using gamification strategies to attract their audience and outnumber competition when competing with the same products.
How Do You Use Gamification in Marketing
Gamification is known to work equally well among all demographics. That’s also why it works for any product or service making it an ideal pick when considering different marketing strategies.
But gamification can’t work in isolation. You need to tie it to your marketing goals to make it work. Beyond words, it should move your audience to take action, engage with your content and create strong relationships.
Try adding a fun element to your options that makes it an enjoyable experience. Or include some motivating examples that push your users to be better versions of them. Rewards work as a strong factor in gamification, either building anticipation or making people excited to be a part of your campaign experience.
Along with human psychology, a few other factors play an essential role in influencing consumers and their state of mind.
Reasons Why Gamification Works in Marketing
Your product or service could solve the most complex problem. Still, unless your message simplifies it using your audience’s pain point, you’re probably shooting in the dark expecting gamification to work for your marketing goals. Let your brand message speak to your audience the way they expect to be heard.
Primarily, four chemicals create happiness. Also known as DOSE (Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphin), these chemicals create interest in your product or service.
Dopamine works to build anticipation and expectation. Oxytocin allows for social bonding that creates empathy. Serotonin regulates the feel-good factor. Endorphins get all these together, making your audience work harder, and pushing them to achieve what they set out to do.
A marketing campaign that contains elements that can trigger the secretion of these chemicals can induce joy, and in turn, encourage the audience to engage with your product better.
It grabs more eyeballs, generates cumulative interest, especially over time-bound marketing campaigns resulting in better ROI for your marketing campaigns.
These feelings trigger the intended audience, making them feel good about the attention to their immediate problems, goals, or desires and motivates them to take action.
How Do You Create A Right Gamification Campaign
Create a Campaign based on your Target Group
Creating suitable campaigns depends on your target group. Consider how they speak about how their problems affect their lives and how your product or service can solve them.
Then understand the primary motivations that enable them to take action. These motivations guide them in decision-making and taking steps to develop the right solution.
For example, one study shows that money is the main motivating factor for over 75% of entrepreneurs.
So, if you are a business that makes software tools for this audience, you will have to run campaigns that focus on how these business owners can make more money; or save them.
Source: Rytr.me
Create a Campaign based on your Marketing Channels
Gamification also works for different marketing channels. If your focus is on a specific channel instead of your product or service, use a gamification campaign to get results.
Affiliate Marketing: For example, the average commission rate is 5-30% in affiliate marketing. Here, the higher the motivation, the better is the expected outcome. Begin by creating an attractive starting rate and give them bumps in the commission rate based on the sales they make. This way, there is a competitive feeling; your affiliates are keen to perform better and motivated enough to make more sales.
Email Marketing: If email marketing features in your next marketing campaign, focus on creating anticipation and excitement in your offers. Start with the lead magnets. Create anticipation in the lead magnet you offer. Next, publish feel-good posts that make them want to read your content. And when it comes to your messaging, don’t miss out on empathy. Empathetic messaging can increase click-throughs making it easy to take your audience to the conversion stage.
Social Media: On social media, words like a gift, share or join are common. This helps create a sense of co-operation and encourages readers to take part. And if you are in the exploratory stage of your marketing campaign on social media, consider reaching out to your audience with ‘read,’ ‘search,’ ‘complete,’ and ‘view.’
Irrespective of whether you explore gamification on your target audience or marketing channels, consider personalization that can be a decider when executing such campaigns.
Personalizations work well, especially for mobile-based campaigns that have a higher rate of personal interaction. And don’t forget to use urgency as an essential tool to get people to act on your offer.
Creating a Seamless CX (Customer Experience)
‘Muda’ is a Japanese concept that emphasizes optimizing manufacturing processes by removing every step that does not directly add value to the outcome.
This is also applicable to marketing processes since any step or element that does not add value to the outcome can potentially distract and bring down conversions. A poorly executed gamification campaign can often lead to Muda, and end up distracting your users instead of taking them closer to the marketing outcome.
The truth here is that while collaborating as a team, there will be certain elements that act as waste as excess production or poor quality or trying to execute too many strategies that don’t go well together. While you might try to achieve too much too soon, your customers will have to bear the brunt of poor strategic planning and execution.
In such cases, focus on meeting the most crucial aspect of getting the audience motivated and interested in your offering. It will create awareness, build credibility, drive conversions and create customer loyalty in the customer journey.
Conclusion
Whether you operate as a sole owner or a large team, focus on building marketing campaigns that target the right users. And once you narrow down on the right users, keeping them engaged in the next step. Use gamification as the tool to explore how users relate and work with your product or service.
Because your business deeply understands your audience and their thought process, choosing the most appropriate motivating factors could be the difference between having a marketing campaign that’s a success or one that fails. It’s also one of the main reasons to focus on positioning your brand message to empathize with readers and their aspirations.
Since there is no inherent barrier concerning demographics or marketing channels, you can test which gamification marketing strategy works out the best.
While gamification does not entirely work alone to generate interest in your business, it’s essential to help your customers remember how your business serves them. Aligning your marketing goals to your audience and their pain points is one way to ensure gamification works for you.
And last but not the least, remember to consider how your customers feel once they use your product or service, letting you decide if your customer experience exceeds expectations or needs further work.
The rest is about reducing wastages and providing a superior experience to improve each customer journey stage.