Gamification is not only pure entertainment but can be implemented into the marketing funnel to bring measurable results. It is a process of including game mechanics into nongame surroundings, like an online community, website, learning management system, or business’ intranet to raise involvement. The goal of gamification is to connect with customers, partners, and employees to motivate, collaborate, interact, and share the brand’s products or services.
How does it work? ❓❗️
Gamification works by providing spectators with practical feedback and directives through game dynamics and game mechanics added to online platforms that direct to the accomplishments of business objectives and goals.
All businesses require creative advertising strategies to promote their brand and engage maximum customer attention. Gamification helps people in reaching customers online and through connected mobile devices.
Some of the popular gaming techniques such as competition, scoring systems, incentives, and ranking lists are used to draw clients with the overarching aim of building brand reliability, making connections, and giving clients a reason to keep returning to the brand and acquire services and products. The main objective of gamifying as a marketing tool is to increase sales and boost profit. These customer-oriented games help people in achieving their objectives.
5 steps to start using a gamified marketing funnel
Gamification marketing can help brands in improving their digital presence. It helps in increasing customer engagement and interaction. It also helps in gathering data that would be otherwise difficult for a person to acquire.
Here in this section, you will get to know about the 5 important steps to start using gamified marketing funnel. Have a look at the content below:
1st step: What is your marketing goal with the game and your KPIs? 💥
Success comes to those who are focused towards their goals and make use of all the right strategies to achieve them. Everything around us changes from time to time. One must understand all the latest technologies and ways of making their brand stand out in the market. Staying ahead of others in the business world is not an easy job. It requires a lot of smart work and selection of the right marketing strategy.
At the end of the day, it’s all about coping with a different set of skills, ideas, and personalities, making sure that everything can be done on time. The CEOs must have a vision of the future. They must analyze paramount metrics to improve their business and generate expectations and lead with skilled intelligence.
Some of the most important performance metrics for a gamification marketing campaign:
- Number of leads
- Organic traffic
- Utilization rate
- Profit margins
Have a look at each of these points in detail:
📌 Number of leads
To find new customers, the company needs to comprise an explicit number of prospective leads. However, keep in mind that the advergame is not about all leads but only concerns qualified leads.
These qualified leads can help business leaders in predicting future customer relationships and the number of upcoming contracts. The team must be aware of how to systematize and classify the leads they get.
Once the business leaders manage to make sure their team is completely prepared to comprehend and scrutinize each specific lead, they can move on to the next phase, which is focusing on the platforms that are providing them the highest number of leads.
📌 Organic traffic
Generating traffic means getting maximum customer attention towards a business or brand. This will help in increasing sales. Make sure the advergame that you develop your business contains all the important measures to increase organic traffic.
This approach will help in increasing brand awareness. It allows companies or brands to get clients just by a website that manages to stay on top of the search engine. The business owners must understand the power of their organic traffic, the heading, and keywords they have used on their homepage and other pages. Similarly, make sure that the SEO strategy is finely attuned to get as many organic customers as possible.
One can easily monitor their website’s page organic traffic using Google Analytics. All you need to do is to sign up for Google Analytics, after that click on the main “Reporting” tab and select “Acquisition” and then “Overview”.
📌 Utilization rate
It refers to the amount of time your employees are spending on working. However, this is one of the most essential KPIs for companies to master as well as one of the Key Performance Indicators for employees.
Business owners need to go through this step. This will help them in making sure that their establishment is sharp and quick. It also provides them an opportunity to fine-tune and correct any breakdowns associated with time optimization.
📌 Profit Margins
It is one of the most relevant Key Performance Indicators for business owners to know about. At the end of the day, industry leaders either cope with building a super lucrative, industry-shaping agency, or they have failed. The companies or brands must use the right advertising strategy that provides them great profit margins.
2nd step: Figure out a game idea 💥
Advergames are a non-threatening method to increase morale and brand sales. It is a great way to tell people about your products and services and creatively engage them. Always consider developing a game that contains a clear message about your business or brand. Do not forget to highlight the key message for your business or brand and the particular campaign you are putting together.
Make sure that the advergame which you design for your business or brand conveys your brand’s message clearly and concisely. This will help your audience in knowing exactly what you are selling them at first glance. Similarly, try to match the color scheme with your company’s or brand’s logo. It is a great way of catching maximum user attention. This will also help people in remembering your brand through its advergame.
Try to be creative and imaginative while designing an advergame for your brand. People love to play games that are interesting and different from others. Identify the age group of your audience and design something that perfectly matches their interest and can help you in increasing your brand name.
3rd step: Build a game 💥
Now the third step is to build your game. One can use their company’s internal software developers but you need to keep in mind that they will need to start learning game creation from scratch. Also, you are required to make decisions regarding gamification techniques and rules – like game length and difficulty. Having proper knowledge in this area can help you in developing the game correctly.
In case you do not have an expert in your team who can help you in developing an advergame for your company then the best approach is to seek professional help. For this, you need to buy the service from a reputable software development agency.
All this will usually cost 15 000 USD and would usually take 3+ months of work. There is also a risk that the agency wants to create a fancier game that you need to sell at a higher price. Sometimes creative people from software agencies tend to get too ambitious and want to make cool video games while actually, it’s not good for gamification marketing. So keep this in your mind that the professional which you hire work according to your requirements and do not add anything other than your preferences. So you need to be very bold in what you want for them and communicate that you want the game to be:
- Mobile-first (90% of the players will be mobile)
- The game should work with different internet connections and various devices
- The game should be very simple to understand for people who are just browsing and not specifically interested in playing games. That means that the game should have one button to press and needs no manual
In Adact we have games that are proven to work – that are simple enough and need no manual. Also all games are mobile-friendly and they include all the useful features like leaderboards and automated prize raffling system. Something that also takes extra development when creating a game manually, is analytics.
Adact has real-time analytics that tracks all the necessary metrics, including where the traffic is coming in and how many players have pressed your directing link buttons.
4th step: Promotion 💥
After you develop a game for your brand now it’s time to tell people about it. Use all proper measures to constantly promote your advergame across your social media platforms. This will help you in maintaining a steady stream of promotions throughout the campaign.
One can also challenge their followers to beat their staff scores. This will help in creating a sense of competition among people. Also, try to be fully active on such platforms and respond to user’s comments and questions in less time and keep them engaged. Work on building up a strong relationship with the people coming to your social media page, organically or through tags from friends. Once you instigate your gamification crusade, you must be careful of where your target spectators will be and the kind of content they will counter to.
Creating an advergame is a good and fine idea of getting maximum customer attention and making a brand popular among people. But if you do not select the suitable promotion strategy to advertise or promote your game campaign to draw and confine your viewers, you could be short changing yourself.
5th step: Analysis 💥
There are some common metrics that one needs to observe while analyzing gamification campaign is as follows:
- Social media reach with the game and ad impressions
- Unique game players
- The bounce rate of the game page
- Completion rate of the game
- Percentage of people who clicked to the next links
Let’s discuss each of the above-mentioned metrics in detail:
📌 Social media reach with the game and ad impressions
Social media reach is a media analytics metric. It refers to the number of users who observe a particular content on a social media platform. There are different ways of analyzing, tracking, and reporting traffic on social media platforms. These platforms allow people an option to make their content public and tell people about it.
Tell people about your game and brand through social media. Use related hashtags, keywords, and creative tag lines to catch the attention of people. The use of social media platforms serves as the main source of communication between brands and their audiences. It also helps companies to exploit diagnostic information, such as the reach of their posts for understanding the interactions between the users and their content.
📌 Unique game players
People are always attracted to things that are unique and different from others. The same is the case with advergames. If you want to stay ahead of others and gain maximum user attention then you need to design your game in such a way that it includes interesting themes and unique game players so that it can engage the audience and people love to spend their free time playing your game.
📌 Bounce rate of the game page
Try to get a reasonable bounce rate for your game page. According to the latest study, the reasonable bounce rate is somewhere between 30% and 55%. It plays an important role in generating traffic on your page. Use all the measures to keep this up to mark for maximum output.
📌 Completion rate of the game
The advergame that you design for your business or brand must contain a higher completion rate. The higher completion rate refers to higher user engagement. It means the users are more likely to come back and consume more content. Design your game in such a way that it achieves a higher completion rate.
📌 Percentage of people who clicked to the next links
Keep account of people who clicked to the next links that are present on the first page. The higher percentage in this area will show that the user found the game interesting and thoroughly visits everything. It is a great way of making brand awareness. Keep account of this percentage and update the page from time to time for better results.
Conclusion 🗯
Using all five of these steps, you will be able to create an excellent gamified marketing funnel and increase numbers in your marketing reports.
Book a demo with us and we’ll show you how to incorporate gamification into your workplace. 😎
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