Gamification: 3 tips for gamification apps as part of your content marketing
Game on! There are 120 million people enrolled in travel rewards programs and more than 200 million play reward-based online games, according to Bunchball.
To help you get started with your own gamification app, here are three tips. Since gamification apps are such a new and emerging tactic, we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section of this MarketingSherpa blog post, as well.
Tip #1: Provide value in game form
For a gamification app to help your content marketing, it should tie into the value your paid products or services offer. All paid products or services do one of two things:
- Help a customer alleviate a pain point
- Help a customer achieve a goal
In content marketing, you translate the value your products have in these two areas into some form of content, like a video or blog post.
With a gamification app, you take that value one step further by making pain point removal or customer goal achievement fun, and add a reward.
There may be many obvious ways to do this if you have a consumer brand. However, B2B marketers often tell me they find it challenging to produce engaging, or dare I say, fun, content.
Let’s take an example. Imagine if you sold manufacturing solutions. To engineers and plant managers. Sounds boring, right?
Well, Siemens turned that combination into an engaging game called Plantville. To learn more about it, and get ideas for your own games, read “Gamification: How Siemens got 23,000 engineers to learn about its brand.”
Tip #2: Find a reward your audience values
What do your users find valuable?
Virtual rewards, like moving to the next level? Getting points? To gamify its community, SAP rewarded users by making them an “expert” in different areas, giving them status within the community.
How about physical rewards like discounts, free products and cash money? In this way, gamification can be similar to a more traditional marketing practice – the contest.
To get your creative juices flowing, here is a short list of possible rewards, from the article “Gamification: 6 tactics for B2B marketers” …
- Cash
- Products
- Community status in the form of a badge, such as identifying the winner as an “expert”
- Early access to content
- VIP status at events
- One-on-one time with executives
Tip #3: Get rated to get downloaded
Before anyone can play your app, they have to download it. However, as of September 2012, there were more than 700,000 apps in the iTunes store. So, you have a lot of competition for your app.
To get downloaded, you need to work your gamification app into your overall marketing mix. You can use some tactics that you would use to promote any other app, or product really.
However, one element should be unique for your gamification app … where you ask your users to rate it. According to Andrew Martin, Vice President, Metia, this point in a gamification app is usually right after completing a challenge.
It makes sense – people usually like a game when they are winning.
But, don’t require a rating every time they use the app. That could just get annoying.
For more information on getting your gamification app downloaded, read “Mobile Marketing How-To: 9 tactics for improving ranking in Apple’s App Store and the Google Android Market.”
Related Resources:
B2B Social Media: Gamification effort increases Web traffic 100%, employee collaboration 57%
B2B Gamification: Bold strategy in conservative industry increased website visits 108.5%
Event Marketing: Virtual event campaign drives 10,155 registrations and 1,800 new database names
Categories: Marketing content marketing, contests, games, gamification, rating
