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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Grow your customer base with games! Gamification is the practice of adding elements of gameplay into marketing materials to better engage customers. In Gamification Marketing For Dummies, you'll learn to use this proven strategy to capture the attention of your target markets and boost your results using valuable gamification data. Games are fun! That's why gamification is so successful--customers will jump at the chance to play and win your custom-developed marketing game. You'll connect with your customers and create lasting memories. Whether or not you are digitally savvy, this book will teach you the basics of gamification, from choosing the right game to capturing the user behavior data that the game generates. * Use games to increase customer engagement and marketing results * Learn how to choose or commission the right games for your market * Plan and execute a successful gamification strategy * Learn from data generated inside your game for valuable market insights From simple strategies like customer loyalty programs to complex, branded, social game apps, this book will point in the direction of gamification that works for you.
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Seitenzahl: 456
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Gamification Marketing For Dummies®
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Gamification Marketing For Dummies®
To view this book's Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “Gamification Marketing For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part 1: Introducing Gamification Marketing
Chapter 1: Gamifying Your Marketing Strategy
Seeing What Gamification Can Do in Marketing
Understanding How Gamification Differs from Other Online Marketing Tactics
Stepping Up Your Current Marketing
Chapter 2: Getting to Know Gamification Models
Exploring Your Options
Creating the Perfect Gamification Campaign Settings
Avoiding the Big Mistakes
Part 2: Beginning Your Gamification Marketing Quest
Chapter 3: Identifying Your Target Audience
Defining Your Audience
Taking a Closer Look at Your Current Customer Base
Mining Your Social Media Accounts
Chapter 4: Increasing Engagement in Your Campaign
Establishing User Rewards and Achievements
Encouraging Sharing among Your Audience
Chapter 5: Budgeting Your Development
Setting Your Budget
Gathering Your Team
Chapter 6: Getting to Know the Technology
Choosing a Foundation for Your Campaign
Keeping Up the Communications
Considering Testing Issues
Part 3: Executing Your Gamification Plan
Chapter 7: Making Your Game a Reality
Choosing the Perfect Gamification Model for You
Determining Your Target Market
Embedding Goals into the Game
Building in Loyalty Rewards
Chapter 8: Selecting the Right Components
Making Sense of the Game Development Process
Assembling Your Team
Preparing the Technical Strategy
Chapter 9: Launching and Promoting Your Game
Scheduling the Right Time to Launch
Perfecting Your Landing Page
Leading Up to T Minus Zero
Launch Day: Aiming the Spotlight on Your Game
Part 4: Monitoring Real-Time Events and Data after You Go Live
Chapter 10: Capturing All the Data
Establishing a Portal to Your Data
Knowing Which Data You Should Be Capturing
Following the User Journey
Gaining Valuable User Feedback
Chapter 11: Analyzing and Applying Data
Understanding the Why and How of Data Analysis
Extracting Your Campaign Data
Applying Intelligent Big Data
Getting Help from Predictive Analysis
Maintaining Control of Your Data
Chapter 12: Avoiding Data Overload
Watching Out for Maximum Capacity
Dealing with Data Failure
Applying the Best Development Practices
Part 5: Preparing for Your Next Gamification Quest
Chapter 13: Failing Up: Learning from Your First Quest
Taking a Hard Look at the Results
Researching for the Future
Shaping the Future
Chapter 14: Relaunching Your Gamification Marketing Campaign
Understanding Why You May Want to Relaunch Your Campaign
Tweaking Your Gamification Campaign
Knowing When to Shut It All Down
Part 6: The Part of Tens
Chapter 15: Ten Best Gamification Marketing Examples
Starbucks: Starbucks Rewards
Chipotle: A Love Story Game
Nike: Nike+ FuelBand
M&M’s: Eye-Spy Pretzel
Target: Wish List
Citroën: Game of Scroll
Coca-Cola: Shake It
Netflix: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
Nissan: CarWings
Magnum: Pleasure Hunt
Chapter 16: Ten Common Gamification Marketing Mistakes
Offering an Unengaging User Experience
Leaving Your Audience Screaming, “Help!”
Having a Flawed Game Structure
Leaving the User Waiting
Scoring Pointless Goals
Not Establishing Clear Big Data Goals
Looking Great on the Desktop, But Not So Much on Mobile
Not Checking Up on Absentees
Missing Out on Social Interaction
Launching without Marketing
Chapter 17: Ten Benefits to Gamifying Your Marketing
Building Brand Awareness
Increasing Reach
Instantly Appealing to a Younger Audience
Driving Engagement
Injecting Fun into Your Brand
Influencing Customer Behavior
Accruing Big (Customer) Data
Personalizing Brand Experiences
Building Customer Loyalty
Gathering Great Customer Feedback and Research
Index
About the Author
Advertisement Page
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
TABLE 2-1 Determining the Best Frequency for Your Gamification Model
Chapter 4
TABLE 4-1 The Best Times to Post on Social Media
Chapter 5
TABLE 5-1 Typical Personnel Required for Action Games
TABLE 5-2 Typical Personnel Required for Simulation Games
TABLE 5-3 Typical Personnel Required for Interactive Storytelling Games
TABLE 5-4 Typical Personnel Required for Adventure Games
Chapter 6
TABLE 6-1 Advantages and Disadvantages of the Deliverability Tools
TABLE 6-2 GDPR Marketing Fails
Chapter 7
TABLE 7-1 Determining the Best Game Model for Your Audience
TABLE 7-2 Examples of the Best Game Options Based on Audience Research
TABLE 7-3 Matching Objectives with Game Models
Chapter 8
TABLE 8-1 Determining Which Model Is Right for You
TABLE 8-2 Determining Where Each Role Fits in the Project Life Cycle
TABLE 8-3 Comparing Freelancers, Agencies, and In-House
TABLE 8-4 HTML5 versus Unity for Game Development
TABLE 8-5 HTML5 versus Mobile Apps for Game Development
Chapter 9
TABLE 9-1 Determining the Best Day to Launch
TABLE 9-2 Current Audience Segmentation Goals
TABLE 9-3 Subject-Line Goals for Your Segmented Audience
Chapter 10
TABLE 10-1 Expected Data Metrics for Each Game Model
Chapter 11
TABLE 11-1 Types and Location of Your Campaign’s Raw Data
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
FIGURE 1-1: Google added a
T. rex
side-scrolling minigame to its Chrome web bro...
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2-1: The Bartle player types.
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3-1: DIY online sites such as SurveyMonkey allow you to obtain important...
FIGURE 3-2: Facebook Insights offers a wealth of audience metric data for you t...
FIGURE 3-3: Twitter Analytics helps you break down your key data to help you un...
Chapter 4
FIGURE 4-1: Waze, a popular driving app, has created innovative badges to keep ...
FIGURE 4-2: Customer Thermometer helps you implement emoji-themed surveys in yo...
FIGURE 4-3: The #Starbucks Rewards hashtag in use.
FIGURE 4-4: Charmin’s #TweetFromTheSeat hashtag was funny and encouraged its au...
FIGURE 4-5: To promote Susan Boyle’s album, the promoters failed to double-chec...
FIGURE 4-6: Online tools such as Piktochart help create professional infographi...
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5-1: Using an SRS template website such as SRSCreator can help clearly d...
Chapter 7
FIGURE 7-1: A skill-based game called Spot the Ball.
FIGURE 7-2: Using points can keep your audience motivated.
Chapter 8
FIGURE 8-1: The waterfall model.
FIGURE 8-2: The spiral model.
FIGURE 8-3: The iterative model.
FIGURE 8-4: The verification and validation model.
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9-1: Chipotle’s landing page for A Love Story Game.
FIGURE 9-2: This launch email has three CTA buttons, so users can clearly see t...
FIGURE 9-3: The iframe where your game appears on Facebook.
Chapter 10
FIGURE 10-1: Feedback widgets offered by companies such as Surveyapp can be eas...
Chapter 14
FIGURE 14-1: Holiday-themed campaigns can be easily integrated into existing ga...
FIGURE 14-2: Make your audience anticipate the holiday launch like Google does ...
FIGURE 14-3: Customizable seasonal experiences, like Office Depot/OfficeMax’s E...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Introduction
What is gamification marketing? After we had run a successful campaign, one of my clients put it simply: “I cannot believe we just gave our customers the experience of a game in a campaign that had nothing to do with games.”
Gamification is when you apply techniques and concepts from games to any marketing campaign. Today, gamification is everywhere — for instance, companies rewarding their employees, teachers encouraging their pupils to compete for higher marks, and even parents rewarding their kids for washing the dishes.
It’s no wonder gamification has worked well for marketing campaigns, too. When any company, large or small, implements gamification properly, the campaign will meet the company’s marketing objectives. Why? Because humans have an innate desire to play and compete.
Gamification marketing can have the following end goals:
To build brand awareness
To increase engagement
To drive conversions
To boost customer loyalty
To encourage brand advocacy
About This Book
This book is for marketers, not developers.
Most books, blogs, and articles on gamification are written for developers. So, I wanted to write this book for people like my clients — people like you! Reading this book should feel like I’m sitting with you in our conference room discussing how you can implement gamification marketing in your next campaign.
This book covers all aspects of developing, launching, and analyzing a gamification marketing campaign. You don’t have to read the book from beginning to end. You can use the table of contents and index to find the subject you want more information on. You don’t have to remember what you’re reading — there won’t be a test on Friday, and you can always return to the book to find what you need.
If you’re short on time, you can skip anything marked with the Technical Stuff icon, as well as text in gray boxes (called sidebars). This information is interesting (some might say fascinating!), but it’s not essential to your understanding of the subject at hand.
Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.
Finally, within this book, you’ll find many examples of gamification marketing campaigns from companies around the world. Some of these campaigns will have ended by the time you read this book; others will still be running. For the ones that are still running, I encourage you to sign up and start engaging with them. Experience what they have to offer and try to relate how each gamification element will work with your own campaign.
Foolish Assumptions
This book is for people who work in marketing or are responsible for their company’s marketing. Therefore, I do not assume that you are knowledgeable in game design or game development. However, I do assume the following:
You’ll be running a campaign for your company.
You know the basics of marketing.
You’re aware of and have experience in playing online games.
You have access to your company’s analytics program.
You have an in-house team or can hire a team of developers and designers.
Icons Used in This Book
Like other books in the For Dummies series, this book uses icons, or little pictures in the margin, to draw your attention to certain kinds of material. Here are the icons that I use:
Whenever you see the Tip icon, you can be sure to find something that’ll save you time or money or just make your life easier (at least when it comes to your campaign).
You don’t have to memorize this book, but when I tell you something so important that you really should remember it, I mark it with the Remember icon.
I’ve run loads of gamification marketing campaigns, and I’ve learned a thing or two along the way. If I can save you from the pitfalls I know are out there, I will! Whenever I warn you about something that could cause a real headache for you and your team, I use the Warning icon.
Occasionally, I dig into some information that’s a wee bit technical. If that sounds like your cup of tea, look for the Technical Stuff icon. If you’d rather stick to only the things you need to know, you can safely skip these tidbits.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this product also comes some free access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet for information on how games can change your marketing forever, tips on how gamification campaigns differ, and advice on data security for your gamification campaign. To access the Cheat Sheet, go to www.dummies.com and type Gamification Marketing For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the Search box.
Where to Go from Here
If you aren’t familiar with gamification at all, start with Chapter 1 — a very good place to start. If you already have a good understanding of gamification and you’re familiar with the basics, you can probably skip ahead to Chapter 3 and start learning how to kickstart your first gamification marketing campaign. If you’re all about the data, head to Part 4. And if you just want some inspiration, check out Chapter 15.
Wherever you start, you’ll find information you can use on your next gamification marketing campaign!
Part 1
Introducing Gamification Marketing
IN THIS PART …
Find out what gamification marketing can do for you and how campaigns can fit with your goals.
Explore the various types of gamification marketing models.
Chapter 1
Gamifying Your Marketing Strategy
IN THIS CHAPTER
Seeing how gamification works in marketing
Identifying what sets gamification apart
Determining which gamification elements will work for you
Thanks to the rise of gamification, marketing campaigns around the world have become increasingly more engaging. Gamification marketing campaigns offer your audience an experience, not just content.
Building gamification elements into your marketing will give your next campaign a serious advantage. Gamification enhances user experience and increases your audience’s engagement. Another advantage of gamification is that your audience will be more inclined to interact with and share your campaign.
The application of gamification elements in business is catching on fast. Gartner research projects that more than 70 percent of Forbes Global organizations will have at least one game-based application, and that half of all companies that manage innovation processes will have “gamified” them. This opens a wonderful opportunity for you and your team to drive specific behaviors and motivate audiences to perform tasks that would require a lot of effort and time in a non-gamified campaign.
In this chapter, I look at how gamification can help with your marketing and then explore how it gives your campaign an advantage over traditional forms of marketing.
Seeing What Gamification Can Do in Marketing
Using gaming elements in your marketing campaign may sound strange at first. But in my 15 years of gamification and marketing experience, I’ve found that gamification is a highly effective marketing strategy, no matter which industry a brand is in.
When you gamify your campaign, your audience will have fun interacting with your brand, which means your company will increase its overall engagement. It’s a win-win situation!
The ultimate goal for gamification is to drive your marketing objective to collect big data. I explore this subject in great depth in Chapter 11. But for now, just now that you can analyze big data to glean insights that can lead to better decisions and strategic business moves for your company. So, it’s not just about giving your audience a fun experience — it’s about gathering data about your audience while they’re having fun.
In the following sections, I explain what exactly gamification is, tell you how you can gamify your marketing, and share some examples of successful gamification marketing campaigns.
Understanding gamification
Gamification is simply the process of applying techniques and concepts usually found in games to something outside of games — in this case, your marketing campaign. Chances are, even if you’ve never heard of gamification marketing before, you’ve experienced a gamification marketing campaign, whether you realized it or not.
Gamification can be as simple as incorporating badges or achievement elements (you can find this in the Starbucks Rewards campaign; see Chapter 15). On the other end of the spectrum, you can develop a fully integrated gamification campaign, as when McDonald’s and Hasbro teamed up to create the McDonald’s Monopoly game.
Adding gamification elements even to a negative situation can make things a little better. For instance, when Google’s Chrome web browser can’t load a page for some reason, it presents the user with a simple yet highly engaging minigame, as shown in Figure 1-1.
FIGURE 1-1: Google added a T. rex side-scrolling minigame to its Chrome web browser.
Gamifying your marketing
Gamification elements can be based off a number of game types that have their own gamification elements, such as trophies, badges, or rewards (see Chapter 2).
In my experience, when marketing content incorporates gamification elements, audience engagement increases. This increase in engagement means that your audience will not only remember your campaign, but also share it with their friends and family on social media. This means you have a bigger potential to increase your brand’s awareness to a far larger audience.
When you expose a gamification marketing campaign to your audience, they’ll start to think more about your brand, which can lead to a huge increase in newsletter subscriptions and can even lead to purchases of one or more products or services related to the campaign.
The most effective result of gamification marketing is that your conversion rates will spike as audiences become motivated to complete tasks for rewards.
Looking at some examples of gamification
Chapter 15 is all about real-life case studies of gamification marketing campaigns. Let me whet your appetite with just a couple additional examples from brands you’ve probably heard of:
Verizon Wireless: Verizon enjoyed a 30 percent increase in login rates due to its gamification campaign. The company did this by adding leaderboards, badges, and social media integration, among other gamification elements, to its website. With this campaign, Verizon managed to engage with its customers on a much closer level.
More than 50 percent of the site’s users participated in the new gamification features. And users who took advantage of the social integration spent 30 percent more time on the site and generated 15 percent more page views than users who used the traditional login method.
Volkswagen Group: Volkswagen invited its consumers in China, one of its largest and most important markets, to help the company develop new versions of the “people’s car.” Participants were given gamification tools to help them easily design their new vehicle, and they were able to post their designs online. The designs were then open for others to view and rate.
The results were tracked on leaderboards so that contestants and the general public could see how the competing designs were faring. Within ten weeks, the online crowd-sourcing campaign had received more than 50,000 ideas! By the end of the campaign’s first year, at least 33 million people had visited the site, and the general public had chosen three winning concepts.
This campaign owes its success to the fact that Volkswagen recognized that participation in a popular business initiative needs to be not only enticing and rewarding but also engaging and fun. Because Volkswagen’s marketing team using gamification, the campaign went viral in China.
Understanding How Gamification Differs from Other Online Marketing Tactics
When I first started consulting on gamification marketing, traditional marketers viewed gamification as just a temporary fad that wouldn’t last. Today, gamification is one of the most profitable forms of marketing worldwide, with engagement from millions of audience members.
Gamification marketing can be very profitable and lucrative for your company. Over the years, I’ve helped and witnessed companies from all industries successfully implement gamification elements into their campaigns.
In the following sections, I walk you through the advantages of gamification and show you how you can take your user experience to the next level.
Looking at the advantages of gamification
Gamification provides the answer to problems inherent in traditional marketing. Gamification taps into the basic instinct humans have of wanting to play and compete. It also provides a way for all marketing campaigns to provide real value to their audience and a positive digital experience.
When you use gamification techniques, you’ll build brand awareness, drive engagement to your brand, and develop a long-lasting loyalty program.
Here are some of the advantages gamification has over traditional marketing:
It enables you to put some fun into your brand or message.
Gamification incorporates elements of fun and competition in any marketing strategy. This is good news for your brand, because your gamification marketing campaign will actively draw people who want to participate, follow, and share your brand’s message.
It enables you to get better and more meaningful feedback. Sadly, we’re all inundated with requests for feedback from websites these days. Because of this, generating meaningful customer feedback for a traditional marketing campaign is rare. If you rely on traditional marketing techniques, you’ll likely have no clear picture of how your audience feels about your company, brand, and campaign.
Gamification helps make the process simple by offering a more engaging and fun campaign that increases response rates. It generates an emotional and immediate response from your audience because they respond without thinking about their answer. So, as your audience is being bombarded with requests for feedback, gamification helps your campaign stand out by making the process simple, seamless, and fun.
It generates loyalty. Your audience is inundated with all forms of noise — special deals, offers, and advertising messages everywhere they look. In order for your marketing campaign to be successful, it needs to engage customers, retain their interest, and develop loyalty. With so many options aggressively competing for your audience’s attention, this task is becoming more and more difficult.
Gamification can power effective customer loyalty programs, creating a more valuable and sustaining customer relationship. When done well, gamification loyalty programs have an impressive impact.
It personalizes your audience’s experience of your brand. Gamification marketing can create a more personal experience for your audiences during the campaign. Segmentation and personalization are critical to driving conversion, developing trust, and building customer loyalty (see Chapter 9). The more you tailor your marketing to your target group, the more effective your campaigns will be.
You can create custom game experiences targeted to specific audience segments and then develop these game experiences to your brand values. By doing this, your marketing campaign will connect with your audience on a deeper level.
It gives you big data.Big data offers insights from all kinds of structured and unstructured data sources to help improve how companies operate and interact with consumers. Gamification, which allows you to connect with your audience in a more interactive and intimate way, gathers valuable data that can be turned into new insights to create detailed market segments for future campaigns.
Gamification creates a lot of data that your company can analyze, especially when users are asked to sign in via social networks where a lot of your audience’s public data can be captured. More interestingly, this data can be integrated to provide context with all the other gamification data you’re storing.
I look into big data techniques in greater detail in Chapter 11.
It enables you to influence customer behavior. Gamification has a major advantage over traditional marketing campaigns when it comes to influencing customer behavior. A gamification marketing campaign engages universal experiences, such as stimulation and motivation.
Influencing audiences to make the decisions you want them to make is the holy grail of marketing. In Chapter 15, I explain how Nissan’s use of gamification influenced drivers to use better driving habits, which is exactly the message Nissan wanted to align itself with.
It drives engagement. If your marketing campaign is engaging, it’ll be worth sharing. Gamification can help drive engagement by getting your audience to share your campaign with their family and friends.
Gamification plays on the psychology that drives human engagement — the human desire to compete and improve, as well as wanting to get instantly rewarded. The technology is merely the means to put that psychology to work in the business sphere.
It appeals to a younger audience.
By promising a fun and engaging experience, your campaign will grab a younger audience’s attention instantly. Younger audiences have been quick to adopt the newer digital and social technology revolutions. This makes gamification an even more important method of marketing if your campaign wants to appeal to young people. Gamification forces your marketing to practice creativity, which is bound to draw younger audiences.
It increases reach. No matter what kind of campaign you run, one of the main objectives will always be to gain new customers. It doesn’t matter what market segments you’re targeting or which sector your company works in, increasing your consumer reach will always be a fundamental part of your marketing.
The brilliance of gamification marketing campaigns, in which everyday situations are turned into games, is that they’re layered and multifunctional, naturally improving both audience engagement and brand reach.
It builds better brand awareness. By using gamification, you can attract new customers when they notice your branding as part of an innovative and fun campaign. Your audience, old and new, will experience your marketing campaign in a fun and interactive way — an experience that will leave your audience more aware of your company and branding.
By exploiting rewards, points, ranks, leaderboards, and competition, all of which I cover in depth in Chapter 4, you can encourage your audience to follow, share, and like your brand on social media. This way, you can increase your reach and, ultimately, your brand awareness.
Taking your current user experience to the next level
A gamification marketing campaign will trigger emotions that are linked to positive user experience. These emotions can play a very important role in the way you engage with your audience overall.
Here are some ways using gamification elements can affect your audience:
Giving the user control:
Leading your audience toward your desired marketing goals becomes part of the user journey. Nobody likes to be forced to a destination. Most people like to feel in control. This is the core of what gamification is all about. Your campaign will become more like a “choose your own adventure” campaign, which is what’ll make people engage with it (see
Chapter 2
).
Going on a journey:
Gamification elements can help your audience navigate where they’re going in your campaign. People like to know where your campaign is heading and where they are in the process. Consider a simple gamification element like badges: You can see how badges can act as progress maps for your audience. They know where they are in the process and what the next steps are. In a way, these elements help break up the journey your audience is taking, which makes it more manageable and engaging — and more likely that they’ll keep going.
Giving a real sense of achievement:
Achievement is one of the most powerful driving factors for your audience to remain in your campaign. Whatever they do in your campaign, they’ll want to feel like they’ve achieved something. If you can make them feel a sense of achievement, they’ll keep coming back to your campaign. By using gamification elements such as points or rewards, you can create this sense of achievement at regular intervals.
Setting competitive goals:
Your audience will be competitive by nature. Most of them will want to push themselves further and harder. By applying elements such as leaderboards, you can convince your audience to come back and try again. Competition is the driving factor behind the popularity of the Nike+ app (see
Chapter 15
).
Exploring:
When you give your audience the freedom to explore, it creates intrigue and excitement, which are two very powerful and positive emotions. Of course, the gamification element should be carefully structured so your audience is neither overwhelmed nor bored. With a combination of levels, strategy, and storyline elements (see
Chapter 2
), you can transform any campaign into one that allows your audience to feel like they have room to explore inside your campaign.
Giving rewards:
People love rewards. Earlier, I explain the importance of creating a sense of achievement. But this sense of achievement should be supplemented with a tangible reward. Consider the Starbucks Rewards program, in which Starbucks offer rewards after a certain number of purchases (see
Chapter 15
). Create your rewards in a way that your audience will go out of their way to get their hands on them.
Offering exclusivity:
Your audience will do just about anything for exclusive gamification elements, such as status levels. Exclusivity creates intrigue and curiosity. Your audience will work hard to achieve that status. This is akin to unlocking the secret level on a video game.
Creating collaboration:
Another key driver is community and collaboration. Community elements allow audiences to collaborate in order to achieve bigger and better things than they could on their own. If you can make your audience feel like part of a team within the campaign, you’ll create loyalty and a positive user experience.
Stepping Up Your Current Marketing
Using gamification elements in your campaign can be a great way to increase the amount of engagement with your brand. And brand engagement will go a long way toward influencing an audience’s purchasing decisions.
Here are some ways you can step up your current marketing strategy by incorporating gamification:
Figure out what type of gamification elements might appeal to your target audience (see Chapter3). If you don’t look at this aspect first, you may not engage them to get the return you’re seeking.
Not every gamification model and element will be suitable to your target audience. In fact, you may find that only one or two really resonate with them. Before deciding which ones to use, you need to understand how gamification models perform with various audiences.
If your audience spans a larger demographic, you could combine several popular gamification elements to appeal to a more general audience.
Do your research. Check out the examples in Chapter 15 to get a sense of how gamification works, what type of rewards companies give, and how the campaigns incorporate companies’ marketing objectives.
Nothing helps shape your own gamification strategy like trying out what others have done before you. See if you can identify best practices that would fit your marketing objectives.
The gamification elements that often do the best are social sharing, scoring, and rewards. I’ve investigated numerous quiz, trivia, puzzle, and skills gamification models before knowing what would work for my client’s brand and audience. This more hands-on strategy also provided me with a way to better understand what was engaging based on my own reactions.
Think about establishing incentives. Consider what you want to give away as an incentive. It could be a new product, digital content, or promotional coupons, for example. Whatever it is, you need to offer a clear incentive in order to make the gamification work with your audience. Your audience needs a reason to aim toward earning the coveted gold badge.
Research what works with others in your industry or ask your audience what they would like to receive from your next campaign.
Keep it as simple as possible.
A complex gamification marketing campaign may get lost on your audience. Look at the campaign from your audience’s point of view. If they can’t figure out your gamification elements quickly, they’ll move on. These days, people have relatively short attention spans and many distractions, so consider making each achievement or gamification milestone relatively short.
Start thinking about who you’ll want to work with for your creative and technical tasks.
Define your ideal time frame for developing and launching your gamification marketing campaign, and set your budget. Gamification may be new to your marketing strategy, so look to outsource talent that specializes in gamification (see
Chapter 5
).
Plan your launch.
Your audience cannot play your awesome gamification campaign if they don’t know it exists. By using a combination of a planned successful launch, a targeted email campaign, social media promotions, and a researched media outreach, you can ensure your game reaches everyone who would love to play it (see
Chapter 9
).
Don’t be afraid to experiment with your gamification elements.
There is no bible or “best way” to creating gamification marketing campaigns. Gamification elements are designed to personalize the experience and continually increase the challenge involved for your audience. The only way you’ll know which element is right for
your
audience is to take the plunge and make educated choices.
Stay up to date on new gamification elements to keep your marketing strategy fresh for your audience. Subscribe to gamification blogs written by industry experts. Here are a few I recommend:
Gamelearn (
www.game-learn.com/serious-games-gamification-blog
):
Gamelearn’s blog explains how games can apply to business environments.
Gamification Nation (
www.gamificationnation.com
):
This blog offers fresh gamification content presented in a fun way.
Gamified UK (
www.gamified.uk
):
Gamified UK is a great place to start learning about gamification and game theory more broadly.
Yu-kai Chou (
https://yukaichou.com
):
Yu-kai Chou is an author and international keynote speaker on gamification and behavioral design, and his blog is a great resource.
Chapter 2
Getting to Know Gamification Models
IN THIS CHAPTER
Looking at the game options at your disposal
Choosing the right settings for your audience
Avoiding common mistakes
You and your team have lots of gamification options and elements. The key is understanding all these options and how they can benefit your campaign.
Be sure to keep your intended audience in mind when you’re building your campaign. Understanding your audience will help you make the right choices and, ultimately, the most engaging campaign.
In this chapter, I walk you through the various settings you can make for your gamification campaign and fill you in on some of the mistakes I’ve come across in gamification marketing.
Exploring Your Options
When you’re just starting to think about developing a gamification marketing campaign, you’ll be glad to know that you have lots of options! But the options may be overwhelming. There is no definitive list of all the options at your disposal, but over many years working with many clients, I’ve come up with ways to make sense of all this information. And that’s what this section is about.
Here, I introduce you to the six game types you have to decide on:
Classic
Enterprising
Disrupting
User experience
Contributing
Community
In the following sections, I walk you through each of these game types in greater detail.
Discovering game types
In this section, I walk you through the six game types that have individual elements that you can choose from. As you read the sections that follow, think about your target audience. First, rank the game types that your campaign associates with best. Then choose the elements that will work best for your audience from each of the game types. For instance, if your target audience is made up of other businesses, you’ll probably want to base 70 percent of your campaign on the enterprising game type and the rest on user experience and classic. Alternatively, if your clients are in the 18- to 25-year-old market, you’ll want to focus more on the community and user experience game types, because that’s what 18- to 25-year-olds are into.
Classic
The classic game type includes gamification elements that are intuitive. You can add these gamification elements to your campaign and know that your audience will be able to easily engage with it.
If this campaign is your first gamification marketing endeavor, I recommend using the classic game type.
Here are some elements commonly found in the classic game type (not every classic game will have every one of these elements, so you can pick and choose what works for you):
Strategy:
Strategy involves skillful thinking and planning, in which your audience must plan a series of actions against one or more opponents. Players win through superior planning, but the element of chance is involved, too (in a much smaller role). If you’d like strategy to be a part of your game, be sure to incorporate a challenge for your audience so they can explore or manage their environment.
Investment:
The goal here is to get your audience to invest their time and emotions into your game. If you achieve this goal, they’ll value your campaign. This game type typically involves more development at the design stage to ensure there is enough to engage your audience for the long term. Ultimately, you want your game to get them racing back to your campaign to ensure their progress is maintained.
Consequences:
If you include this element in your classic game type, there will be a consequence for every one of your audience’s actions. Each significant action (or nonaction) should result in a visual consequence, such as rewards, badges, or points.
Progress and feedback:
I cover this element in the coming chapters, where I discuss the importance of giving your audience some sort of measure of progress and feedback as they progress in your game.
Tutorials:
The last thing you want is for your gamification campaign to leave your audience feeling helpless. To alleviate this problem, you can include a visual tutorial, as well as help sections at each major part of your campaign. This way, your audience will know how everything works right at the start and throughout the campaign.
Achievements:
As opposed to progress and feedback, where the audience can see a positive progression, here the fear of losing points and achievements can be a powerful motivator. With gamification marketing, getting your audience to your campaign is the easy part. Getting them to return and value their status in your campaign can only be done through regular, meaningful achievements.
Storyline: In a classic game type, you may want to consider adding a storyline in the form of a narrative or a theme. This strategy can help your audience be more engaged.
The storyline may be linked with some existing narrative associated with your company or industry. It could be anything from your company values to topical industry themes. Whatever you decide on, make sure your audience will be able to understand and make sense of it. Otherwise, they’ll feel an immediate disconnect with your campaign.
Time: Including time pressure in your classic game type can help create a sense of urgency with your campaign. Reducing the amount of time your audience has to complete tasks can focus them on your campaign. You can increase engagement through increased time pressure, too.
For instance, by default, you can give them 15 minutes to solve a particular task, which is plenty of time. However, whenever the audience makes a mistake, not only are they penalized with lack of achievements, but their time remaining is also reduced. This increase in time pressure adds an interesting tension to the classic game type. The idea is that your audience will remain engaged because they’ll want to solve the task faster.
Rarity:
There should always be levels of rarity to the achievements you offer in a classic game type. Making something rare can make it all the more desirable. For instance, if you’re offering colored badges, there should be a badge that is very much coveted but extremely rare to achieve.
Enterprising
You should incorporate at least one enterprising game type element in your campaign. The enterprising game type is all about points and status. It creates the type of engagement where your audience will want to show their friends how they’re progressing (for example, through badges).
An example of an enterprising game type is British Airways Avios air-mile program, where every additional mile collected is an achievement in its own right. Flyers can gain points by purchasing tickets, shopping at one of British Airways’ partner sites, and using an American Express credit card. However, British Airways also awards badges for purchasing a certain number of flights every year. These badges give flyers privileged access to lounges across the world, among other benefits. Flyers then have to ensure they complete the journeys every year to maintain their badge status.
There is a good chance that your audience will respond favorably to the enterprising game type: someone who boasts they have a higher status or achievement than their friend did.
Here are some elements of the enterprising game type (not every enterprising game will have every one of these elements, so you can pick and choose what works for you):
Levels or progression:
In an enterprising type game, giving your audience a chance to work their way up levels (such as status levels) and goals can help them to visually map their progression through your campaign. Employing levels will ensure that your audience remains loyal to your campaign and company.
Learning new skills:
The idea here is to give your audience an opportunity to learn something new about your company, products, services, or industry. Gamification can be a very effective way to achieve this goal in a marketing campaign. For instance, if you want to highlight the fact that your company uses a unique method or ingredient, make sure this lesson is learned during people’s engagement with your campaign.
Symbolic rewards:
Symbolic rewards are different from general rewards like badges. Symbolic rewards are a physical symbol of achievement, such as a free coffee or a free companion ticket on someone’s next purchase. Make sure they carry meaning and status and are useful to the campaign.
Challenges:
In an enterprising game type, you want to challenge the audience. Don’t be afraid to create challenges. In fact, look to incorporate them in increasing levels. Challenges help keep your audience interested and engaged, especially after the initial phase. Look to test your audience’s knowledge and give them an opportunity to apply it. Overcoming challenges will make your audience feel like they’ve earned their achievements.
Disrupting
Elements of the disrupting game type help create a gamification marketing campaign that displaces the existing marketing trends and eventually replaces them. Disruptive campaigns are generally more entrepreneurial in design and outside the norm in functionality.
Try to identify gaps in your industry’s current campaigns that fail to see how the marketing trends are evolving. With a game-changing element, you can create a disruptive campaign that will allow your company to stay ahead of the rest. Plus, your audience will welcome a disruption to the current marketing campaigns being thrown at them.
Here are some elements of the disrupting game type (not every disrupting game will have every one of these elements, so you can pick and choose what works for you):
Creativity tools: Give back control to your audience. For instance, allow them to create their own content and express themselves. There could be a number of reasons to do this, outside of your campaign, including for personal gain, for pleasure, or to help other people.
An example of this element of a disrupting type of game is the popular ElfYourself gamification campaign from Office Depot/OfficeMax. ElfYourself is a native app (available for download from the mobile app stores) that allows users to upload photos of their friends and family from Facebook or their mobile phones. Then users select a dance, and the app creates a custom video that users can share to social media.
Innovation:
Giving your audience a way to think outside the box and outside the boundaries of your campaign is a great element of a disrupting type of game. This approach allows them to channel innovation and helps you understand what your audience wants and expects from your company and industry. For instance, you could allow your audience to develop a system that creates the results
they
would like to see. You can then use this data to see if your company is currently producing these results for your customers.
Chaos:
I get funny looks from clients when I suggest chaos as a gamification element. But in games, chaos is symbolic. It’s a core element that keeps the player immersed and engaged. For your disrupting type of game, it’s not about burning your company’s image to the ground. Instead, think of this chaos element as throwing out the rulebook for your campaign. For instance, in your gamification model, consider running “no rules” events.
Random rewards:
The key here is to surprise your audience — pleasantly, of course. You can do this with unexpected rewards. If done correctly, you’ll see an increase in engagement in the long run. Everyone likes to be given a nice surprise, especially if it’s unexpected and random. This element of a disrupting campaign will keep your audience engaged in a more positive way.
Voice:
I find giving your audience a voice an extremely effective element of a disrupting type of game, especially in industries where the customers are seldom heard from. However, it isn’t enough to simply give your audience a voice. They need to feel that their voice is being heard. You can do this by incorporating feedback tools into your game, which allow you to gather data as you hear back from your audience. This data can be extremely powerful for your company and industry as a whole because it gives you a greater insight into your audience’s voice and generates opportunities to create better relationships with them.
Invisibility:
If used properly, the invisibility element of a disrupting type of game can work in your gamification campaign. Essentially, it’s about encouraging total freedom and lack of inhibitions. Why? It allows your audience to be far more open and honest in their opinions. Be careful, though — invisibility can bring out the worst in your audience.
User experience
The user experience game type involves designing your campaign around the psychology of your intended audience. You can go further and consider their behaviors, thought processes, and capabilities as well.
I like to think of user experience as creative design elements that create a unique and long-lasting impression on your player. The ultimate goal here is data collection (see Chapter 10). You gather data is by tapping into the behaviors and thought processes your intended audience will respond positively to.
Before I look into the various specifics of user experience elements, let me offer some tips on user experience in general:
Learn as much as you can about your intended audience (see
Chapter
9
).
This is the best advice I can offer to my clients. For instance, if you’re thinking your audience is men from 18 to 30 years old, go back to your research because that’s too vague. There are so many types of players with different tastes and expectations when it comes to the complexity of the game. You can’t appeal to them all. So, it’s best to be more specific and design the campaign for those who will most likely engage positively.
Less is more.
When you’re looking to add elements to your game, you may be tempted to add as many elements as you can. This impulse is natural. As a marketer, you want to add extra mechanics to ensure maximum engagement. But using fewer elements is the core of the user experience discipline.
Your campaign’s gamification user experience should feel seamless.
This is harder to achieve than it may sound. When designing your game, make sure to prevent any discontinuity in the user experience. You want the gameplay to be compelling and the feedback to be instantaneous in order to keep the campaign flowing. An example of this is to employ the same level of responsiveness in every element you design. Anything that the player interacts with should respond with visual and audio cues.
As with any marketing campaign, try to keep your user experience consistent.
Create a user experience bible that contains the core principles of your user experience. Then make sure all designers and developers adhere to this bible. Consistency helps your audience find their way around the gamification campaign more easily because they’ll have fewer rules to figure out and remember.
To gather as much behavioral and personal information as possible on your campaign’s audience, along with the relative objective data, you have to use an analytics program (see Chapter 11). The data you collect will allow you to spot issues with your campaign’s user experience design very clearly.
