Elevate Your Marketing with Gamification

In our first-ever Brunch and Learn event we covered the topic of Gamification. Below, I’ve explored the key takeaways for any business considering Gamification as a way to elevate their marketing approach. 

It can bring great value to any business but understanding your audience and how it can work for you is the key to getting it off the ground. So, how do you know whether it’s right for your business and how to get started?

What is Gamification

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and principles to motivate people to achieve a goal, answer or prize. It leverages the psychological aspects of games, such as competition, rewards and achievements to enhance user experience and drive participation. 

Common techniques can include point scoring, leaderboards and challenges with progress tracking, or simple activities like spinning a wheel, scratching to win or submitting answers in a quiz.

All of these can help you gain better insight into what your customers are doing, their needs, and how they like to interact with your brand. It can be hard to gain detailed information about your audience but giving tasks or activities that feel engaging and enjoyable to the end user can reap huge benefits to your brand.

How to use Gamification

#1 Get to know your audience

Ask yourself, ‘Do you know your audience?’. Your first-party and zero-party data is rich in insights into who your customers are and can provide detailed insights into demographics and psychographics, which can then be layered with behavioural science to truly understand what makes them tick! 

Understanding your audience is key to implementing gamification effectively. Going beyond just demographics can significantly enhance the impact of your game. Psychographics delve into the values, beliefs, hobbies, and personalities of your audience, offering valuable insights for planning which segments are most likely to engage with your game.

Technographics also play a crucial role by providing insights into the devices your audience uses, the applications and software they prefer, and their digital behaviour. Incorporating this information helps ensure that your integration not only works well for your business but also boosts customer retention by aligning with their behaviours and preferences for future marketing campaigns.

#2 Help users find the right product 

A deeper understanding of your target audience can help you determine what type of integration can help you to achieve. In a world where third-party data is less accessible, collecting your own can be powerful. For example, are you trying to help users find the product that’s right for them? Our gamified quiz for Vo5 focused on exactly that, giving customers the chance to find the product best suited to their hair type. The game resulted in significant increases in conversions. 

#3 Increase brand awareness 

Are you aiming to boost engagement and awareness? Coca-Cola successfully used an air hockey game to increase loyalty and offer prizes. Our approach here combines two elements: an interactive air hockey game paired with a scratch card prize reveal upon completion. By layering these aspects, we drove engagement with the added incentive of winning.

This approach drives brand awareness by creating a memorable and interactive experience that encourages users to engage deeply with the brand. The combination of the air hockey game and the scratch card prize reveal keeps participants involved, making the brand experience more immersive. As players interact with the game and anticipate winning prizes, they associate the excitement and enjoyment with the brand, increasing the likelihood that they will remember and talk about it. This positive engagement spreads awareness organically, both through word of mouth and through social sharing, as users are motivated to share their experiences with others.

This game drove 15K plays in a 4-week period.

#4 Drive engagement

Gamification is a powerful tool, but it's essential to ensure that your customers are motivated to engage with your game. This starts with understanding your audience and targeting the right customers who are most likely to interact. It's important to create a game that is easily accessible and tailored to drive optimal engagement, whether it's a simple spin-the-wheel or a more dynamic air hockey experience.

Stonegate Group, the largest pub company in the UK, successfully leveraged gamification by offering gameplay within their pubs. This approach encouraged customers to engage while socialising with friends and family, with the added incentive of winning prizes. For instance, Captain Morgan’s spin-the-wheel game asked customers to choose their favourite cocktail flavour, which then led to a chance to win a cocktail. This strategy worked well in their physical spaces, providing a fun experience that also helped increase conversion through the game.

This particular game achieved over 60% voucher redemptions.

Boosting engagement, loyalty and retention with gamification

Customer journey

There are many benefits that can create strong results for engagement, loyalty and retention, each having its own strengths and strategies, but considering where in the customer journey you will implement this holds the key.

Not all businesses choose to activate it purely online, if a business has brick-and-mortar sites, the simple use of a QR code can drive engagement where conversions are more likely to take place. Take Stonegate Group for example, their Cracker Clash game was accessible via a QR code on printed table menus, which created engagement in-house and resulted in the conversion of their products. They later used this data to drive a retention strategy around customers' past food and beverage preferences by offering deals on popular cocktails.

This approach also considers loyalty, offering price savings to those who have engaged. You could also consider the effect of loyalty on existing customers, offering exclusivity of your game and even game extras to those who already have a high interest or engagement with your brand, as a reward.

B2C vs. B2B

Gamification can be for anyone, but ensuring it suits your brand is key. If your brand isn’t conversion-led, you may want to focus on how you can bring educational pieces into your game, to enhance brand awareness and business values. When thinking about differences in businesses, B2C can certainly be easier with a wider variety of activations but B2B can also harness the advantages - As part of our collective, Reflect Digital offers an interactional piece on the website where you can learn more about your values and motives with their Monkey, Lion, Dog questionnaire, which supports their wider behavioural science USP.

Personalisation

Having a game that is relatable and aligns with interests can drive the level of engagement. To make the integration beneficial firstly you need people to play and interact. Using your data to begin with, can help you to personalise your implementation. 

Personalisation can also later lead to strategies within other channels, like email. Rather than base your efforts on assumptions, results from your game can be used to help shape your marketing activity.  AS Monaco were able to take psychographic insight to reignite their fanbase by using our Prompt Technology™, identifying an understanding of the fanbase’s desires, frustrations and unmet needs. This was taken into their CRM to create highly receptive email marketing campaigns.

Testing

Testing helps you to dive into what your customers are doing and then analyse those results - when did they enter the game, how long were they in-game, did they complete the game and did they enter any information, like sign up form? Analysing these results can help you to adapt and test your strategy, do you need to change where the Gamification sits within the customer journey to increase engagement or do you need to tweak the finer details to ensure your customers are completing the game? 

Knowing your results is important to future planning and strategy direction. Key metrics such as page session, bounce rate and goal completion are good indicators of where you need to make improvements or where your successes sit.

Challenges

Like anything, Gamification can come with its challenges but this can be overcome with simple steps in understanding the audience and what your objectives are. 

Tech

There are plenty of ‘off the shelf’ platforms that allow you to implement it pretty smoothly, this could be a great starting point for brands who aren’t sure what their engagement could look like, or if they’re not sure if it's the right strategy; it’s a great way to test and find out what it looks like for your brand and whether it works within your marketing activity. 

However, these types of implementations, like a quiz or a spin-the-wheel interaction, are relatively simple and often lack the level of personalisation needed to truly reflect your brand, such as custom branding, colours, and themes. In contrast, a bespoke solution offers a much higher degree of sophistication in both technology and branding, allowing for a more tailored and immersive experience that aligns perfectly with your brand identity.

As part of the Human First Collective, we crafted a bespoke, immersive experience for HelloFresh users designed to drive engagement and foster brand loyalty. The game, "Catch & Cook," allowed users to 'catch' ingredient items in a virtual environment to complete a recipe. Each level unlocked a new and exciting recipe, motivating users to keep playing and enhancing their cooking skills.

Participants needed to complete all four plates, with one game released each week, to qualify for the final prize draw, which featured the ultimate trip to New York. They also had the flexibility to select which prize draw to enter, adding a personalised touch to the experience, with additional rewards like premium SMEG appliances. To boost participation and engagement, instant-win vouchers were also offered throughout the game.

By blending game elements with tangible rewards, "Catch & Cook" successfully engaged HelloFresh users, making the cooking experience fun and ensuring they remained connected with the brand.

Budget

Developing a bespoke integration can be costly, this can start from anywhere between £3000 and £5000, so it’s important to understand where and how this will add value to your brand.

If you’re unsure of whether to use your budget on a bespoke implementation, an off-the-shelf solution can help you to decipher if investing or increasing the budget into a bespoke piece of software will add value, you don’t want to rush into it.

What’s great with your own bespoke piece of software is that you can adapt and reuse. The individual elements can be adapted to your brand's goals and needs, so when analysing your results and strategising your next move, you can maximise ROI with just one initial piece of software, already catered to your brand.

A great way to help identify value is to follow these three steps - 

1. What is your key challenge

2. What are you trying to achieve

3. How can the game work for this

Developing and implementing Gamification can be complex and having support from the experts can be beneficial if you don’t have the knowledge or the resource. This is where LAB can bring its expertise to support and elevate your goals to the next level.

Key Takeaways

• Know your audience - Who are you trying to reach out to and how do you want them to engage with your brand? Utilising your first and zero-party data will give you valuable insight into who your audience is.

• What are you trying to achieve - be sure to have a clear strategy and ensure it is the right path for you, are you trying to drive engagement through brand awareness or are you looking to increase conversions?

• It’s not gimmicky - There are lots of different types of interactive pieces available when it comes to Gamification, this doesn’t have to be in the form of a game, it could be a quiz, an interactive scratch card or a spin-the-wheel activity.

• Use your results - It’s important to take your results and use these to drive your continued efforts. These results will give you a clear understanding of what and how your users are engaged and how you can implement that into your long-term business goals, considering engagement, loyalty and retention.

If you missed our first-ever Brunch & Learn event focusing on your questions about Gamification, don’t worry! You can watch the full webinar back here and see all the insights into elevating your marketing and engaging with your audience in innovative ways.

If you’re ready to level up your marketing strategy, we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch to speak to our team of experts at LAB.