Chapter 1

Gamifying Your Marketing Strategy

IN THIS CHAPTER

Seeing how gamification works in marketing

Identifying what sets gamification apart

Determining which gamification elements will work for you

Thanks to the rise of gamification, marketing campaigns around the world have become increasingly more engaging. Gamification marketing campaigns offer your audience an experience, not just content.

Building gamification elements into your marketing will give your next campaign a serious advantage. Gamification enhances user experience and increases your audience's engagement. Another advantage of gamification is that your audience will be more inclined to interact with and share your campaign.

The application of gamification elements in business is catching on fast. Gartner research projects that more than 70 percent of Forbes Global organizations will have at least one game-based application, and that half of all companies that manage innovation processes will have "gamified" them. This opens a wonderful opportunity for you and your team to drive specific behaviors and motivate audiences to perform tasks that would require a lot of effort and time in a non-gamified campaign.

In this chapter, I look at how gamification can help with your marketing and then explore how it gives your campaign an advantage over traditional forms of marketing.

Seeing What Gamification Can Do in Marketing

Using gaming elements in your marketing campaign may sound strange at first. But in my 15 years of gamification and marketing experience, I've found that gamification is a highly effective marketing strategy, no matter which industry a brand is in.

When you gamify your campaign, your audience will have fun interacting with your brand, which means your company will increase its overall engagement. It's a win-win situation!

The ultimate goal for gamification is to drive your marketing objective to collect big data. I explore this subject in great depth in Chapter 11. But for now, just now that you can analyze big data to glean insights that can lead to better decisions and strategic business moves for your company. So, it's not just about giving your audience a fun experience - it's about gathering data about your audience while they're having fun.

In the following sections, I explain what exactly gamification is, tell you how you can gamify your marketing, and share some examples of successful gamification marketing campaigns.

Understanding gamification

Gamification is simply the process of applying techniques and concepts usually found in games to something outside of games - in this case, your marketing campaign. Chances are, even if you've never heard of gamification marketing before, you've experienced a gamification marketing campaign, whether you realized it or not.

Gamification can be as simple as incorporating badges or achievement elements (you can find this in the Starbucks Rewards campaign; see Chapter 15). On the other end of the spectrum, you can develop a fully integrated gamification campaign, as when McDonald's and Hasbro teamed up to create the McDonald's Monopoly game.

Adding gamification elements even to a negative situation can make things a little better. For instance, when Google's Chrome web browser can't load a page for some reason, it presents the user with a simple yet highly engaging minigame, as shown in Figure 1-1.

FIGURE 1-1: Google added a T. rex side-scrolling minigame to its Chrome web browser.

Gamifying your marketing

Gamification elements can be based off a number of game types that have their own gamification elements, such as trophies, badges, or rewards (see Chapter 2).

In my experience, when marketing content incorporates gamification elements, audience engagement increases. This increase in engagement means that your audience will not only remember your campaign, but also share it with their friends and family on social media. This means you have a bigger potential to increase your brand's awareness to a far larger audience.

When you expose a gamification marketing campaign to your audience, they'll start to think more about your brand, which can lead to a huge increase in newsletter subscriptions and can even lead to purchases of one or more products or services related to the campaign.

The most effective result of gamification marketing is that your conversion rates will spike as audiences become motivated to complete tasks for rewards.

Looking at some examples of gamification

Chapter 15 is all about real-life case studies of gamification marketing campaigns. Let me whet your appetite with just a couple additional examples from brands you've probably heard of:

• Verizon Wireless: Verizon enjoyed a 30 percent increase in login rates due to its gamification campaign. The company did this by adding leaderboards, badges, and social media integration, among other gamification elements, to its website. With this campaign, Verizon managed to engage with its customers on a much closer level.

  More than 50 percent of the site's users participated in the new gamification features. And users who took advantage of the social integration spent 30 percent more time on the site and generated 15 percent more page views than users who used the traditional login method.

• Volkswagen Group: Volkswagen invited its consumers in China, one of its largest and most important markets, to help the company develop new versions of the "people's car." Participants were given gamification tools to help them easily design their new vehicle, and they were able to post their designs online. The designs were then open for others to view and rate.

  The results were tracked on leaderboards so that contestants and the general public could see how the competing designs were faring. Within ten weeks, the online crowd-sourcing campaign had received more than 50,000 ideas! By the end of the campaign's first year, at least 33 million people had visited the site, and the general public had chosen three winning concepts.

  This campaign owes its success to the fact that Volkswagen recognized that participation in a popular business initiative needs to be not only enticing and rewarding but also engaging and fun. Because Volkswagen's marketing team using gamification, the campaign went viral in China.

Understanding How Gamification Differs from Other Online Marketing Tactics

When I first started consulting on gamification marketing, traditional marketers viewed gamification as just a temporary fad that wouldn't last. Today, gamification is one of the most profitable forms of marketing worldwide, with engagement from millions of audience members.

Gamification marketing can be very profitable and lucrative for your company. Over the years, I've helped and witnessed companies from all industries successfully implement gamification elements into their campaigns.

In the following sections, I walk you through the advantages of gamification and show you how you can take your user experience to the next level.

Looking at the advantages of gamification

Gamification provides the answer to problems inherent in traditional marketing. Gamification taps into the basic instinct humans have of wanting to play and compete. It also provides a way for all marketing campaigns to provide real value to their audience and a positive digital experience.

When you use gamification techniques, you'll build brand awareness, drive engagement to your brand, and develop a long-lasting loyalty program.

Here are some of the advantages gamification has over traditional marketing:

• It enables you to put some fun into your brand or message. Gamification incorporates elements of fun and competition in any marketing strategy. This is good news for your brand, because your gamification marketing campaign will actively draw people who want to participate, follow, and share your brand's message.

• It enables you to get better and more meaningful feedback. Sadly, we're all inundated with requests for feedback from websites these days. Because of this, generating meaningful customer feedback for a traditional marketing campaign is rare. If you rely on traditional marketing techniques, you'll likely have no clear picture of how your audience feels about your company, brand, and campaign.

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

• It generates loyalty. Your audience is inundated with all forms of noise - special deals, offers, and advertising messages everywhere they look. In order for your marketing campaign to be successful, it needs to engage customers, retain their interest, and develop loyalty. With so many options aggressively competing for your audience's attention, this task is becoming more and more...