Have you ever stopped to think about what makes gaming so addicting? Even if you aren’t an avid gamer, you may have experienced the situation of sitting down to play a round or two of Candy Crush or Angry Birds, only to find yourself still sitting there, iPhone in hand, hours later.
Games, by their very nature, work because they entice you with progress. With just five more points you will reach the next level or your next goal, so you keep playing in hopes of reaching that reward. This sense of progress keeps you motivated to play.
Several successful marketers have capitalized on this by using game-like structures in their marketing efforts. Adding gaming features to your marketing is called gamification.
How Gamification Works
Gamification offers your target audience some sort of currency. Currencies are the rewards they complete by performing a certain task. This can be something as simple as a badge to post to your user profile and something more rewarding, such as a coupon. When used properly, they can improve the yield of your marketing efforts.
The deal-a-day sites, like Groupon, know how to do this quite well. Groupon offers an incentive, the deal of the hour or day, and then puts out a progress bar to show how many people have purchased. Users have to reach a certain level of purchases before the deal goes “live.” The currency, in this case, is the deal itself, while the game aspects are the reliance on other users and the progress bar showing the progress.
How to Incorporate Gamification into Your Marketing Plan
Gamification can work well, but only if it’s carefully incorporated into your marketing plan. Before we get caught up in “Shiny Object Syndrome,” let’s take a look at some ways to use this effectively.
1. Have a Goal
First and foremost, make sure you have a goal. Any time you add a marketing idea simply because others are having success with it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Set a goal, and then determine if gamification strategies will help you achieve it with your specific target audience.
2. Choose Meaningful Rewards
Gamification works because it rewards the user. Those rewards have to be meaningful. If the users don’t want the reward, they aren’t going to perform the action, and your efforts will be wasted. Know your audience and what motivates them, and offer that as the reward.
3. Create Your Funnel
Your gamification strategies need to funnel your users to a specific behavior. Your goal will determine what that behavior is, then your game mechanics need to create a clear path toward that behavior.
4. Create Something Simple
You don’t need to turn your page into the next World of Warcraft. Gamification and gaming are similar, but not the same. Simple strategies like challenges, levels, leader boards, points and badges can all work well to motivate, and these are all considered gamification. Keep it simple, easy to use and rewarding, and your users will play.
When done well, gamification can be a great addition to your marketing plan. Take the time to think through your goals, and see if it will work for you. Start rewarding your customers, and see how quickly you can see a return on your investment.
8 Responses
Wow. I’d never heard of gamification before. It’s really got my creative brain going. Thanks for the inspiration.
Thank Sophie, it’s a great way to create a community within a company, or a business model.
Quite the interesting topic here. Indeed, giving people achievements to have, as mentioned, some reward would encourage users to interact better.
Example giving from Facebook, profile completion progress, I believe some of us did enter extra information seeing that progress bar whereas we wouldn’t usually manually go and update it ourselves.
In classic e-Commerce websites, we waited as we purchased, and used our free coupons. From company side, they had kept another customer with the purchase, so it was a win-win.
I do also agree with @Yvonne Mueller, it’s so flexible that you can use “gamification” process almost anywhere. So simple the idea yet quite the useful one.
Thanks for the share!
P.S: There seems to be quite some other interesting blogs you have as well, I’m your new follower here now, I guess. 😛
Depending on your company, there are a number of techniques you can use to incorporate gamification into your marketing efforts. If your goal is to increase website engagement, try offering incentives to push users to complete certain tasks such as downloading a whitepaper, or watching a video of your product.
Great strategies. I’ve incorporated Vanilla Forums into my site, and they have a gamification system built right in (badges and benchmarks for users). I’ve been figuring out what badges to create to engage and build a fun environment.. it’s fun even to plan and build! 🙂
Unfortunately gaming is a must have politic. Our captalist world that always think in money only should die by the hand!
Gaming in market is something new. I am really satisfy with steps. And really thanks for your information.
SaaS gamification that focuses on hunting instincts engages users’ innate desire to seek, then discover, then chase, then overcome prey. To gamify your SaaS product or marketing, first decide what “prey” means to your users. Then define what it means to (1) seek, (2) discover, (3) chase and (4) overcome that prey.