Marketing promotion: 5 steps to implement gamification marketing!

In the era of information explosion, if you want to get people's attention, your products must be interesting and special. This is when the importance of gamification marketing is highlighted. How can we do this? Let's see what the author says:

In today's age of information overload, we have to admit that it is difficult to impress users, but gamification allows you to attract users' attention immediately.

In the past three years, we have designed more than a dozen gamification marketing campaigns for our clients. Let’s break down the design steps we have always followed and see what conclusions we have drawn:

Step 1: Set your goals

It is important to decide on a goal. Goals must be realistic, for example:

Increase website registrations Increase email collection Increase website engagement (average browsing time) Increase sales

Gamification marketing helps achieve multiple goals. Here is a roadmap of goals and user behaviors:

Step 2: Decide on the Reward

In gamification operations, the most indispensable rule is to reward users. No one will participate in a game with unclear rewards.

Rewards don’t have to be physical items, certificates or discounts. It's also okay to make the rewards emotionally driven, such as: unique praise, points, levels, unexpected rewards, or competition wins.

It’s important for users to recognize these kinds of achievements — either self-recognition or recognition by others. Sometimes, such recognition can motivate people to take action better than physical rewards.

However, if physical and emotional rewards can be combined, more ideal user engagement can be achieved.

Why use rewards?

Enhance motivation - for example, there are two online activities with similar content: one with gifts and one without gifts. People are usually more willing to participate in the one with gifts because the reward motivates them to make a choice. Engagement – ​​Rewards attract engagement, which means users are less likely to drop out of your conversion funnel. Produce results - The game must point to a clear and interesting result for the audience, and rewards fulfill this purpose.

Step 3: Design a growth system

Now let’s look at a few tricks to keep users engaged:

Points: Allow participants to quantify their completion towards the final reward. Badges: Provide additional incentives, recognition, and update user status. Scoring: Allow users to quantify the difference between themselves and others, quantify the difference between their past and present, and visualize the process of winning the final prize. Ratings create a sense of competition, and a sense of competition needs to be fostered - meaning ratings should be updated frequently and higher ratings should come with better rewards. Communication: Chat with users, open comments, distribute user surveys, publish newsletters, etc. In short, use promotional interactions to establish emotional connections with users. Social media groups or targeted email lists can do this well.

The above three steps need to be further integrated with game thinking.

Let's look at it further. There are generally four types of players in the game:

Moneymaker: Participate in the game only for rewards, and exchange time for rewards. Killer: Most interested in competition, has a strong desire to survive and wants to be number one. Explorer: Just play games. Taking the online salon mentioned above as an example, they go only for the content and don’t care about the gifts. Party Boy: They care about being with others. Attend events for fun and enjoy the pop feel of the game.

In order to make your game work (which means increasing user engagement and sales), you should pay attention to what the expectations of different players are and make them all enjoyable.

If you can find a marketing trick that inspires all types of players to participate, the conversion rate will definitely be higher.

Step 4: Develop game mechanics

If the player's goal is to win, then when he wins, he feels great, and buys your product, then your goal is achieved.

But in reality, we usually also need to consider the conversion of other types of players, which requires referring to different game mechanisms.

There are hundreds of game mechanics in the world, and we can't possibly learn them all before deciding. I suggest starting with these very common game mechanics:

1. "Rewards when goals are achieved" type

It's simple, first there is a goal, and to achieve the goal you need to overcome some obstacles.

About rewards: It is better to do something useful and win money than simply win money. For example: winning a game could give you a new skill, or part of the game prize would go to charity. Give players a reward that means more than money.

It is also important to note that as a rule, the final reward must be the direct result of the player achieving a certain action. But you can also create some random prizes so that weaker players won't be discouraged too easily.

1. “Time is money” type

The key point of this mechanism is that players must take corresponding actions at a certain point in time.

For example: Users must register for an online salon held on a certain date and month in a certain year and express their thoughts in order to participate in the super draw. Deadlines are critical!

1. "Progressive Reveal"

Not all content is provided to users at once. For example: multiple videos on the same topic are provided in segments, and you will get a reward immediately after watching them. But be careful to control the degree.

1. "Punishment" type

If players don't follow the rules, they will be punished - such as having their points deducted. This can also motivate users if done well.

1. "Scoreboard" type

Players can see other people's scores, ratings or badges to increase game transparency and motivation for participation.

Step 5: Make the Game

To sum up, are you ready for these things?

Goals and rewards (need to be related to what the audience wants). Rules of the game or taboo boundaries. Hooks that lead different types of players to play the game. Game mechanics (can be your own or refer to commonly used ones).

Creating a complex, multi-layered game requires a lot of time and money. If you want to see if gamification marketing can work for your product, it is recommended that you try some ready-made gamification tools first. for example:

Easter Eggs: Users can get a coupon by finding several hidden Easter eggs on different pages of the site. It virtually increases the time users spend on the site and is suitable for online shopping malls, SaaS services, and multi-web portals.

Shopping Countdown Card:

Users can see a countdown board in the corner of the product page, but the countdown is not for time but for discounts. The longer the user stays on the page, the bigger the discount.

This game also increases the user's stay time. For search engines, the longer the user stays on a page, the higher the weighting, so this trick is also effective for SEO.

Conclusion

I hope that after reading this, you have acquired useful gamification marketing skills and are planning to apply them to your campaigns, or at least use them to sneak a peek at how your competitors operate.

Many times, gaming thinking is used unconsciously in marketing activities. Through this analysis, you may be able to see more clearly how they are borrowed.

When the time is right, let gamification marketing help you.

Source: Growth Hacker Training Notes