Use gamification to make your whole marketing strategy more efficient!
Gamification is a marketing tactic that borrows design elements from games to create a fun experience for customers. Gamified marketing is used to attract and retain consumers who are driven to perform an action offering elements of competition or reward. Many brands, like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Under Armour, have already integrated gamification into their marketing strategy. Let’s find out how you can leverage it:
Gamify Customer Data Collection
Gamification has proven to be a great way to collect user data. Customers are much more willing to share their details if they have the opportunity to earn a reward—like an in-app badge or even a discount on a particular product or service.
Polls, quizzes, and surveys are all effective ways to inject fun and gamify customer data collection. Customers provide the brand with their information when they feel that it is valuable and beneficial to them – the brand has ‘earned’ their trust through valuable engagement.
Boost Online Engagement
Businesses use gamification for boosting user engagement in digital spaces as gamified content requires active user participation. Game mechanics encourage users to stay engaged and motivated.
It is a fact that customer engagement may increase by 30% when brands use interactive elements in their web portals. For example, Duolingo motivates its users by giving some points for learning new languages, Fitbit uses badges to get you to exercise more, and the YouVersion Bible App uses streaks to get you to read your bible every day.
Conduct Market Research
Yes, gamification can really help you successfully conduct market research making it more engaging, meaningful, and fun. This tactic encourages respondents to share accurate and detailed feedback on your products or services. Interactive surveys give respondents more freedom to truly describe their opinions and provide honest feedback.
Let’s take IHOP’s example to promote burgers on their breakfast-heavy menu. The restaurant chain surveyed customers about what made a burger great. IHOP became popular after jokingly changing its name to “International House of Burgers”. Can you believe IHOP quadrupled its burger sales that quarter?
Advertise a New Product
Gamification is a great option for brands trying to generate hype around a product. Let’s take the excellent example of the KFC Shrimp Attack mobile game. KFC franchises in Japan released a re-skin of Fruit Ninja that allowed users to earn points by slicing shrimp while evading drumsticks.
The users could get real-life discounts for the Ebi Puri (fried shrimp) meal due to the points they had scored. By marketing this new product through a playful, engaging game, participating locations sold out of Ebi Puri products just halfway through the campaign. Great!
Build Brand Awareness
Gamification marketing can help businesses push better brand awareness by creating fun content that their followers can engage in. For example, world-renowned company M&M’s created an “eye spy” game to remind people about their not-so-new pretzel line.
M&M’s Facebook Page gained 25,000 new likes due to this. While the brand is a household name, M&M’s using this gamification marketing tactic proved to old and new customers alike that they’re still active candied snack producer.
