Gamification is one of the top trends in the marketing world that operates on the principle of actively encouraging your prospects or followers to engage more with your brand and services.
According to statistics, gamification increases content discovery and activity feed engagement by 68%. That’s a large percentage enough to boost your ROI and retention rate wherever applicable.
And that's why in this article, we'll be digging deep into why you should add gamification to your social media strategy if you haven't already and how you can use gamification for more engagement, return on investment (ROI), and brand loyalty.
Table of Contents:
- What Is Gamification?
- Benefits Of Adding Gamification To Your Social Media Marketing Strategies
- 4 Exciting Ways To Gamify Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns
- 6 Best Practices To Gamify Your Social Media Marketing strategy
- Conclusion
What Is Gamification?
Gamification simply means introducing game-related activities to your marketing strategy in order to boost engagement, grow the customer base, increase sales, and improve the overall customer retention rate. Usually, you might need to set up a reward system to encourage participation in these games.
Source: Hurix
For instance, you can give your prospects the chance to redeem a discount code so long as they submit their emails or opt-in for a weekly newsletter. Or you can reward your prospects with a free-trial pass after successfully completing a puzzle about themselves.
Note that you can include gamification on your website, social media platforms, and offline booths integrated with different conference booth games.
Benefits Of Adding Gamification To Your Social Media Marketing Strategies
Video games are incredibly popular and loved, and that's why gamified content succeeds because it is entertaining, engaging, interesting, and even soothing.
Source: Byjus
For example, Domino's pizza experienced a 30% increase in sales after launching a mobile game app. At a time when most consumers are worn out by a constant barrage of virtual engagement efforts, games offer a means to keep their attention.
Average customers, particularly younger consumers, come across 4,000 to 10,000 marketing ads daily, making it challenging to connect with them through conventional channels.
Now think about the current explosion in internet gaming. Online gamers are estimated to surpass 1.3 billion by 2025, higher than the current 1 billion. In a Deloitte study, 26% of Generation Z participants said that playing video games was their favorite form of entertainment.
Video games account for 52.9% of the global market for digital media, and this sector is expanding 11.9% annually on average, mostly due to mobile games.
Therefore, gamification marketing is effective, particularly in the e-commerce industry. And it’ll help you achieve the following:
Engage your customers: An entertaining way to educate others about your business or areas of expertise on social media is through an engaging quiz or trivia challenge.
Employ user-generated content: Use User-Generated Content to increase brand recognition. You can encourage your customers to post their winning results or pictures on social media.
Drive conversion and sales: People are more likely to return to your brand to buy more if you give them discounts, rewards, coupons, or points as an incentive.
Gather customer data: You can get more data about your customers in ways that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPA), customer privacy, and the rules guiding third-party cookies. Customers might choose to provide you with their data in return for enjoying your game.
Boost interaction while lowering bounce rates: Attract customers by promising them coupons, free merchandise, bragging rights, or even fun.
4 Exciting Ways To Gamify Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns
Here are 4 best ways you can add gamification to your social media marketing campaign:
1. The Scratch-and-Win Game
Scratch-and-win games are one of the ways to create a buzz around your brand on social media. Imagine if you could reward your social media followers or new subscribers with a random reward ticket that they need to digitally scratch. That will keep them engaged and active when participating in your online activities.
Another benefit of games like this is that you can generate a list of quality email contacts. Once your followers complete a scratch puzzle, you can request their emails through which you will email them the coupon code or any other reward that you have prepared beforehand.
Before integrating this strategy into your social media campaign, first draft out your goal, whether to boost engagement or generate new leads. Afterward, figure out an affordable prize as a reward and develop the necessary elements of your game. Lastly, promote it through different campaign formats and track performance.
2. Create A Loyalty Program
Is there that one person that keeps engaging with your social media posts every time? You need to segment them and create a reward system that recognizes their effort. That’s where loyalty programs come in.
The goal is to actively reward members who repeatedly engage in your social platform, purchase more products, or attend your social events. You can measure loyalty in points and assign them to individual members that fit in your program.
When all is set and ready, announce your loyalty program to your followers and let them know the qualifications for earning a spot. Once any user or customer meets the minimum required points, they can use it to redeem a coupon code, discount offers, or product.
3. Devise Healthy Competitions
Competitions are another intuitive strategy to boost your follower count or generate tons of leads. You can have your existing customers create social media content featuring your product, brand, or a unique hashtag linking back to you. Thereafter, place a reward system in place that favors the post that generates more likes and retweets on Twitter, comments, and other forms of engagement.
This strategy is very effective for drawing in new social media followers, increasing brand visibility, and improving your retention rate.
4. A Knowledge Test
Thinking of a way to boost your engagement rate and see if your followers are not just dummy lists? Then you need to create a knowledge test. Similar to how other gamification strategies work, it ensures people take active participation and feel carried along.
Platforms like Facebook allow you to create a knowledge test through polls. Instagram has a feature called Quiz Stickers which functions like Facebook and Twitter Polls. You can try out other third-party platforms like Quizlet to create intriguing flashcards and quizzes which you can then share on your social media platform.
6 Best Practices To Gamify Your Social Media Marketing strategy
These best practices will ensure you're practicing gamification the right way in your social media strategies:
1. Set Objectives And Targets
You must perform in-depth research and identify your goals or expectations after implementation for vital projects like gamification.
Your goals could be generating more traffic, increasing social media engagement, nurturing prospects, or initiating sales.
Identifying these objectives also helps you to figure out your target market. And this not only boosts your return on investment but also facilitates relationship-building and improved personalized content.
2. Reward Your Consumers
Without a definite reward to build anticipation, a game has almost little or nothing to offer. Your users must be inspired to engage, and you can only do that by giving them something to look forward to.
Note that the reward doesn't have to be something physical. Virtual gifts such as a gold star, a badge, a digital sticker, or unique perks for using the product, like early or free access to the program, also work great.
Roll out intriguing components like a rewards system for active accounts and participants or “double discounts”.
3. Provide Communication Access
One important component that's often overlooked is call support. While gamification can step up your social media marketing game, you need to provide means for your potential prospects to reach you.
You should equip your campaign team with a call center phone. Such options will help your staff communicate with consumers more effectively and foster customer loyalty and interaction.
4. Keep The Design Simple
The amount of effort invested in learning a game's basic mechanics determines its success. To prevent players from spending too long in the learning curve or becoming bored, the game should be as easy as possible for them to navigate.
However, mechanical simplicity does not mean your game's UI design should be uninteresting. Ultimately, you will need the services of a professional. Hire developers to create an interactive UI that runs smoothly and without hassle to give your audience a straightforward, enjoyable experience.
5. Offer Users The Chance To Share The Wins On Social Media
We all enjoy talking about our accomplishments, and it's now much easier to do this, thanks to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook's growing popularity.
However, the opportunity to attract an audience is the most valuable factor for marketers. Gamification is the secret to maximizing participation and, as a result, producing better outcomes.
You can also integrate your social media gamification campaign with your email marketing campaign by adding a small banner or button in your email signature redirecting users to the campaign post or page.
6. Evaluating Performance
Test out the campaign and make adjustments as necessary. Run A/B tests. Often, social media campaigns integrated with gamification perform better than those without. But you can still evaluate the impact of both campaigns on achieving your goals.
Since you might be using different kinds of gamification strategies, you should track each campaign and see which one works best or needs some tweaking.
Conclusion
The effectiveness of social media gamification and game-based learning cannot be over-emphasized.
Aside from being an effective technique that can be applied in training sessions, it can also be applied in various ways to boost your social media campaign, whether you use the scratch-and-win game, loyalty program, competitions, wheel spinning, or knowledge test.
Don't also forget to reward your customers, keep the design simple and evaluate the performance of your campaign.
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