Gamification is nothing new to us humans; it’s safe to say that we’ve been using gamification for a very long time now, long before the Internet came into play, whether it was getting rewards along the way for our results in school or getting some candy for powering through a visit at the dentists’ without making too much of a fuss. Likewise, marketers have been leveraging various types of gamification strategies over the years to grow their results and generate more sales.
But with the advent of the Internet and other new technology, gamification has grown considerably in popularity and marketers quickly took notice.
Not that it wasn’t used before – remember the uber-successful McDonald’s Monopoly game? – but now, gamification in marketing has become more accessible than ever, making marketing strategies more engaging and ultimately, more successful.
In this blog post, find out how to implement gamification in your content marketing strategy and discover useful tools to help you create engaging games.
What is gamification in marketing and why should you care?
Marketers can leverage gamification in various ways but at its core, gamification in marketing means leveraging gaming tactics to create more engaging marketing strategies.
Basically, it’s a way for marketers to make their campaigns more engaging by using challenges and rewards, just like with all the games you love/d to play.
But why, exactly, should you implement gamification in your content marketing strategies?
- First of all, because it’s much more fun for your audience: people aren’t just reading or viewing your content, they’re actively interacting with it and getting “rewards” along the way which motivates them to take part in your campaigns
- It helps boost engagement and type spent on site: gamification gives your visitors a much better reason to engage with you and your content and therefore, spend more time on your site. And that’s great news for businesses: it means better SEO, more leads and ultimately, more sales and customers. Plus, it can even help you generate more traffic – the better and more engaging your content is, the easier it is to get people to read it and engage with it
- It boosts sales: rewards are an amazing incentive – that’s why whenever McDonalds ran their Monopoly game, their sales went through the roof. For example, you can use mini-games in your content and offer various rewards that people can then use to buy your products (coupons, special offers, points and so on)
- It helps generate more leads: people are much more likely to respond to interactive content, as opposed to static content. That’s why gamification can help you attract a wider, more engaged audience, which then means more leads for your business; plus, a lot of types of games allow you to ask for people’s names and email addresses.
But how do you implement gamification in your content marketing strategies? It’s simple: by using the right tools to develop fun, interactive games that will help you reach your marketing objectives.
Here are some useful tools to help you implement gamification now and boost your engagement, leads and sales:
Easypromos
Easypromos are some of the well-known names in the online contest industry; but contests are just one part of their tool: they also offer numerous games and quiz apps (along with all kinds of contests and giveaways, of course), to help you gamify your content and generate better results from your marketing strategies.
To start with, they have 8 fun mini-games that you can use to engage your audience and boost brand awareness:
- Personalized puzzles including your logo and branding, to help you generate leads
- Branded memory and Match-It games to generate leads and increase brand and product recognition
- Word search games to help boost awareness and recognition
- Hidden objects games to boost engagement and awareness
- Photo games to help you collect user generated content
- Spin the wheel games to help you boost sales with discounts and vouchers in a very fun way
Plus, apart from all of these fun games, you can also create all kinds of quizzes – personality, knowledge, prediction quizzes and more – as well as create any kind of contest you can think of, for your website or your social media (photo and video contests, hashtag contests, giveaway and many more).
You’ll also find a plethora of ready-made, fully customizable templates that you can use to create all kinds of engaging, gamified experiences so it will literally take you minutes to set up and publish a game.
Gleam
Gleam is another powerful tool for businesses who want to keep growing; they offer a variety of apps to help you generate more leads, engage more users and make more sales.
You can use Gleam to:
- Easily set up and create all kinds of competitions, such as giveaways, social media contests and sweepstakes
- Create beautiful galleries curating and displaying your best content (as well as any user-generated content from your other marketing campaigns)
- Use targeted messaging and opt-in forms to generate more leads
- Leverage rewards to get people to take the actions you want them to take:
All you’ll need to do is grab the Rewards widget, which you can quickly customize and add it wherever you want to, on your website.
Then, choose what actions you want people to take – such as following you on social media, joining a webinar (as in the above screenshot), downloading something, signing up for your list, and so on – and the rewards you’re going to give away; for example:
- Special coupons
- Free downloads
- Special discount code
This is such an easy way to boost engagement and sales, all in one go – just by gamifying the process of offering special offers and other rewards.
Gametize
Gametize is a community engagement platform that helps you deliver a variety of interactive experiences for your audience, such as interactive challenges, leader board competitions and easily setting up achievements and rewards.
To use it, you can either start a game from scratch and build exactly what you want or (much easier!) use one of their ready-made templates to help:
Here are some examples of the types of games you can run, using Gametize:
- Create monthly challenges and mini-games to encourage people to participate and get points, prizes and special offers
- Get people to earn points (that they can then use to buy your products or services, for example, or get discounts) by getting them to learn more about your business
- Reward people for giving you feedback
- Set up advocacy and loyalty programs by using gamification and challenges
- Create games to help you promote your events, using challenges and rewards
Conclusion
Gamification can truly transform your content marketing strategy and help you generate better results, faster – it’s a highly efficient way to:
- Generate more engagement and raise brand awareness, as well as grow your social media followers and engagement