Key takeaways:
- As the marketing world is evolving constantly one of the aspects of Marketing in gamification which gives you proper customer engagement.
- Everyone like games and there is a huge market for gaming all over the world
- Traditional marketing which includes mass marketing will have a lesser impact on customers than the personalized gamified advertisements
- There are several benefits when you implant gamified versions such as you gather customers’ data and information with their consent without being forced by the vendors.
- With benefits there are always challenges following behind such as lack of technology, the privacy of customers may be compromised etc. That you should focus on how to overcome them
- As the world of games and technology evolves one can invest more in gamifying their own versions.
- It tackles a customer’s competitive spirit and involves them so that they won’t mind some time at your site.
- This article will take you on an informative ride of gamification with all benefits and challenges you are looking for.
Chapters:
- What is gamification in marketing? (Introduction)
- Why should marketers engage themselves in gamifying their efforts?
- Benefits of gamification
- Challenges that have to face with all these benefits.
- Summation
Introduction:-
Traditional marketing is vanishing and gamification is stepping in with new levels. Everyone has already heard about customer engagement, customer involvement, and whatnot. With new times marketing is growing at the speed of light, and everyone has strategies to ultimately increase their customer base. Old-school techniques and technologies are bygone now. And to win in this rat race everyone has to build their out-of-the-box thinking. In this virtual world, people are more engaged with their smart devices than any other thing in the world. And this Era cannot be more quintessential than ever for a marketer. Thus, gamification marketing is thriving in its way to people. And in this digital age, people tend to engage in activities they find alluring. Games are one of them. But when we talk about the virtual world there are many challenges that marketers have to go through as we all know with the benefits of something there’s always a challenging road map ahead.
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Oxford Dictionary defines games as ” an activity that one engages in for amusement or for fun.” Well, this explains it all. Gamification in marketing is a new way to engage your customers, it is an enhanced marketing technique in which consumers are driven to perform these activities, and this way they spend their time on the site. Gamification is not just for fun for consumers but it also helps in collecting data for marketers. Gamification in marketing has emerged as an innovative approach that enables businesses to engage customers by incorporating game-like features in their campaigns. This technique of gamification in marketing not only enhances customer experience but also helps in collecting valuable data for marketers. By analyzing user behavior within a gamified experience, businesses can gain insights into their customers’ interests and preferences, which can be utilized by marketers for email marketing, WhatsApp marketing, or any other conventional marketing methods. However, gamification in marketing also presents certain challenges that can be overcome with the help of analytics. Gamification in marketing can assist marketers in reaching their segmented customer base and achieving their marketing goals.
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Why should marketers engage themselves in gamifying their efforts?
With the rise of online gaming and its massive global audience of 1 billion gamers, projected to reach 1.3 billion by 2025, the potential for leveraging gamification in marketing is immense. The statistics speak for themselves: 26% of Gen Z respondents consider video games their favorite entertainment activity, and video games currently capture 52.9% of the digital media market, with a growth rate of 11.9% per year, predominantly driven by mobile games (according to a Deloitte survey). It’s a well-known fact that people love games. As I write this, I can’t wait to dive into a round of 8-ball pool myself. The psychological appeal lies in the enjoyment people derive from these interactive and challenging experiences. Games provide a controlled form of freedom, where players must navigate and adhere to rules and regulations, presenting them with both challenges and rewards.
The fun and engaging nature of games entice consumers to spend their valuable time on them, creating opportunities for marketers. By incorporating gamification into their strategies, marketers can tap into this excitement and capture valuable data from their customers. Importantly, this data is collected with the consent of the customer, ensuring a respectful and proper approach.
By understanding the allure of gamification, marketers can create captivating experiences that not only entertain but also provide a platform to connect with customers on a deeper level. This data-driven approach allows businesses to tailor their marketing efforts to individual preferences, delivering personalized and relevant experiences that foster brand loyalty and long-term engagement. The fusion of gamification and marketing presents a win-win situation, where customers enjoy the challenges and rewards of games while marketers gain valuable insights to refine their strategies.
Let's get a nuanced look into gamification marketing:-
- Inserting Fun
Let’s start with the obvious: Everyone enjoys a good time, and games provide that. It is a great type of entertainment where our minds may feel the adrenaline rush or dopamine secretion with winning the challenge that a game presents, whether it is for time pass or the sake of escapism.
- Customer Engagement
How a marketer might involve his or her customers more with the brand is among the most crucial things. Marketers can access their backend data by using the gamification software platform. Depending on how many different players are actively participating in the games. This includes who is willing to redeem their game-earned points and how involved they are, as well as who is sharing their info like email addresses, phone numbers, etc. Instead of just appearing on the user’s device like in traditional marketing, the advertisement will provide them full control and an incentive to start playing. The customer’s approval is therefore crucial in this situation.
Games elicit a level of involvement that is unattainable by TV advertisements’ films and ad campaigns.
According to studies, 75% of consumers see TV advertisements on their mobile devices while watching a certain programme. HAH! Me too. Do you?
Most users don’t consider games to be part of marketing in this day and age where individuals look at their phone screens to pass the time when they’re bored and it doesn’t bother them in the least if they enjoy their break time.
- What you need more than Data:
It aids us in obtaining crucial customer information from clients. One of the most valuable resources for organizations today is data. Huge databases may give organizations the resources they need to target the best clients with the perfect offer at the best time and location feasible thanks to the complexity of AI, IoT, and machine learning technologies. Data collection is not always simple, which is where gamification comes in. Users are more likely to provide you with prospective data that you can use to better understand your target audience if you give them the opportunity to have fun or even the chance to win a prize or incentive.
- Catching the eyeballs of customers:
If you’ve heard of the well-known M&M Eye-Spy Pretzel app, it’s an excellent illustration of a straightforward game that has a substantial impact. The simple M&M puzzle was a windfall for the business, bringing in about 6000 shares and 25000 Facebook likes. Now that the game was straightforward but exciting, it attracted greater attention. The way that the clients liked it was satisfactory. We fulfill the needs of the customer in that way. Before building the game, it is essential to identify the target demographic and create a campaign. Gamification can increase brand exposure, brand engagement time, and even the frequency of brand contact.
- Everyone likes Rewards:
Using the Starbucks Reward app as an illustration. Who doesn’t enjoy receiving incentives and prizes? One of the best-performing rewards programmes in history was the Starbucks rewards programme. Customers gain points towards increasingly larger prizes in this programme on a completion-based system as they make purchases. When compared to modern loyalty programmes, old-fashioned ink-on-paper cards weren’t as useful and efficient since customers would bend and lose them in their pockets. A clean and user-friendly app version is more likely to promote brand loyalty.
Then, Starbucks claimed a rise in revenue of $2.65 billion, with the majority of the growth being attributed to their loyalty programme. Membership has increased by more than 25% during the past two years.
- Getting ideas from customers:
Gamification can occasionally be used to determine a customer’s preferences and tastes. Customers may also be a source of fresh flavor inspiration! People from every region of India submitted suggestions for the next flavors of dairy milk as part of a great campaign from Cadbury, and they were given credit for it by having their names and city printed on the package. Customers participate and provide their creative ideas for the new flavors in the hope of appearing on dairy milk packaging in this way. Dairy milk, on the other hand, is benefiting from two things at once: customer interaction and fresh flavor concepts! The idea has been given back to the customer’s thanks to the introduction of numerous new flavors. This way customers feel “connected” and part of the product and not just an outsider purchasing the product.
- Increases the competitive spirit of your audience along with your business!
A gamification technique draws individuals together to encourage a community to spread a common cause! Because of their increasingly active lifestyles, most individuals are interested in fitness and health. Your technology basically makes you want to get up and run! Smartwatch and shoe firms have run numerous campaigns that involved defining their target market, engaging them, and advocating for a cause. The collaboration between the applications Nike + Run Club, for instance, is the best illustration of customer engagement through interpersonal impact. The Nike Run Club app quickly rose to the top of the charts worldwide.
- First in the herd: (Ham first!)
A core human nature is to challenge others, accept challenges from others, and continually seek more than others. Doritos hit the mark with all their cleverness. They cleverly advanced their gamification. They have a product and gamified marketing campaign called Doritos Roulette. The Doritos Roulette product, which consists of a bag of primarily nacho cheese-flavored chips and one spicy chip, was first introduced in 2015 and then re-introduced in 2021. Customers’ reactions to it have been thrilling since they never know whether their next bite will include a regular chip or one that is extremely spicy. When Doritos and Walmart promoted the product on social media with the hashtags #doritosduetroulette and #doritosroulettechallenge, people went berserk. People posted on social media using the hashtag and it spread like wildfire. Everyone wanted to get the hot chip first. This silly, funny yet interesting gamification brought colors to Doritos.
- How can we forget to spin the wheel?
“Spin the wheel and win exciting prizes” is the most well-known example of gamified marketing. The most clichéd yet successful form of gamification. No matter how busy they are, people always try their hand at earning spectacular prizes via a latent surprise. No matter their age, a person will spin the wheel to at least get an idea of the spectrum of prizes. Here’s how gamification functions.
Challenges of gamified marketing:-
- The design:
Online games are multifaceted and game engineering is a complex process that requires knowledge of design, psychology, and programming. Designing a game for marketing purposes is way hard and sometimes, expensive. Web designers and game developers may find it difficult to understand the objective of gratifying. The poorly developed game may wipe down potential customers instead of bringing them on board. That’s why it is very crucial whom you select as your game developer and how competent they are.
- Money and time:
Developing a game to entertain the audience requires a lot of conceptualization and deep study of their psyche. Who is the audience? What is the goal of the business which needs to be disseminated through games and what are the parameters specific to be covered while making the game so that the maximum audience enjoys it? This is a time-consuming process that requires handsome funds to get a nourishing set of customized games.
- Trial and error culture:
Despite investing in developing a marketing game, there is a high chance that it doesn’t tickle the interest of the audience. In that case, one has to adopt a trial and error method to check the preference of the audience. Once you’re getting traffic in your gamified marketing, you need to test whether the software is working or liked by the audience. After getting results from your initial testing, we are supposed to identify whether it can be improved — either at the input level (targeting, audience, eligibility) or output level (level of reward, type of reward, frequency).
- Updates never end:
After managing to create a well-developed game for marketing, there will be other stuff waiting for you to be addressed. Updates in software never end. So, startups and businesses should implement foresight software solutions to drive gamification so that it can be iteratively updated; otherwise, you know that – GAME OVER!
- Data privacy discrepancy:
Including a gamified element in your marketing strategy is a big challenge regarding gamers’ data privacy. The protection of personal data is even more imperative in the context of marketing because the gamers are either your prospects or your existing customers. Any personal information breach would lead to endangering the trust that your customers have put in your company.
So to finally sum up…
Gamification isn’t merely a source of designing games and strategies for customers, it is an umbrella under which rests- brand attitude, customer engagement, brand awareness, brand positioning, and attracting the target audience. Gamified marketing is a contemporary idea with the same old aspirations and objectives. It is more like understanding the Psychology of the target audience and designing the strategy accordingly. The thumb rule of gamified marketing is, the games should be easy, rewarding, and have an interpersonal connection, customers should feel that the game is made for them only. Then it will increase the competitive mindset of the customer and will engage himself on an app/site without forcing him/her to do so.
Khyati Madhak
Content writer
Harshit Khatri
Graphic designer
Sanskruti Wani
Editor
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