To reach your target audience, you always need something unique and exciting. Nowadays, you can reap the benefits of gamification. Remember, gamified content will help you to increase customer loyalty and brand engagement. Moreover, it is beneficial for the target audience to experience exclusive features of your brand.
Introduction to Gamification
There are a growing number of companies implementing gamification into their websites and apps. A recent study found that 74% of users will abandon a website that has mediocre game mechanics. Gamification can drive retention on your site, in your app, or in certain cases even increase profits. Let’s get started with answering the important business question: What is Gamification? For several people, gamification is a new concept, and they only think about games. Undoubtedly, gamification is more than gaming because it promotes a game-like mechanism for content marketing (non-gaming activities). Brands can set up different game-like activities to allow people to participate and win rewards.
Indeed, it is appealing for people’s competitive side and increases positive sentiments for brands along with high brand engagement. Feel free to create the best gamified content with Komo Digital if you are new to this concept. Here are some tips to get started with gamification.
“Gamification is a strategy to engage people to solve problems, improve the level of satisfaction in tasks and self-motivation in achieving goals.” Wikipedia. The basis of gamification has always been to “make learning fun”, which is why it has been widely used in education. Over the past year, gamification made its way into the marketing world. Forbes reported that 62% of marketers thought online games were an important part of their marketing plan in 2011, up from 40% in 2010.
Begin Small
Are you trying this strategy for the first time? It is essential to get started with baby steps. You can start with a contest, reward, or game to learn how this theory works. Moreover, check the response of your audience to understand if your strategy needs some changes.
You can ask your users to follow on Instagram, sign up for a newsletter or visit a Facebook page. Offer them a reward for all these activities. To understand gamification, you can review the strategies of other brands. Fortunately, case studies of successful gamification are available, such as Heineken.
Before starting your strategy, you should understand how companies use it, such as their scale and rewards for participants. It is not necessary to use similar techniques but use them as inspiration.
Keep Structure of Content Simple
With confusing content, you will face different problems. Keep your games simple and easy to understand. Remember, participants will not like to read a long manual to understand the mechanism of rewards and games. Before going into the testing phase, you have to know how this game works.
Make sure to create some simple rules for the audience. Keep everything simple, clear, and convenient. Remember, confusion in participants can increase your dropout rate.
Recognize Your Target Audience
Nothing is worse than targeting a wide scope of people. You should target the people that are most likely to want your product, service, or information. These people are known as your target audience. If you don’t know who they are, think about how they could find out about your site. Would they be searching on keywords? Trying to figure out if your company is trustworthy? If you can’t figure out who would be a person in your niche, then you haven’t found your target audience yet.
It is not good to gamify your content without understanding your audience. Remember, it can increase the chances of vital mistakes. You cannot engage your audience without considering their interest. They should feel inclined to enjoy a game.
If you have an understanding of your audience, you can create exciting content to impress them. In short, you have to create something special to increase the engagement of your audience.
Introduce Clear Incentives
You are free to offer promotional coupons, a free trial, or a product sample, but keep everything clear. If you are running a contest for the first time, benchmark what is interesting for your audience.
Certainly, if people need your product samples, you will not benefit by offering them coupons. You should understand the interest of the audience to find out the best incentives for them. Before launching your content, you should define your goals and success. Remember, you are free to use technology in gamification strategy.
Suppose, you have just launched a product and want to get some initial feedback. You can send free samples to influencers and bloggers to get some genuine reactions from the audience. Now, this is a great method to encourage reach-out and get users as well as potential. However, there are many social media managers that block non-followers and will not reply to such requests. In this scenario, you should try out some other methods to collect samples of your products. For example, you can ask people to create their accounts on your platform and request them to run giveaways in their community or social media groups.