Have you ever used Foursquare to check-in a place so that you can write a review about your experience, collected frequent flyer miles or purchased a coffee from Starbucks multiple times over a certain time frame? If you are nodding your head down, it is alright; you have been gamified!

Marketers are constantly trying to find new and inventive ways to stand out and attract an audience. The use of gamification can help marketers create memorable experiences for the users and that could result to increasing the amount of time a consumer spends in a website (or app) while raising consumers' engagement level with a specific brand. This could go a long way towards influencing consumers' purchase decision in the near future.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts. It is about 'listening' to games and what we can learn from them. Hence, gamification takes the data-driven techniques that game designers use to engage players and applies them to non-game experiences to motivate actions that add value to your business.

When people hear the term 'Gamification', they envision games created for a business purpose. However, gamification is about amplifying an existing experience by applying motivational techniques that make games engaging. For instance, you can gamify the process of inserting data into a CRM (which is a huge pain for your sales organization) so that you have a complete and high-quality dataset of your potential and existing clients.

How to get started

Gamification can work for almost any product or service and it is adaptable to every budget. You can gamify almost any stage of the customer interaction including websites, loyalty programs, marketing campaigns and online brand communities.

Before implementing gamification though, you should identify the need that you want gamification to address. Setting SMART objectives is highly recommended, as well as integrating your analytics tools so that you get the statistics on user behavior and monitor if your goal has been achieved. In addition, you should spend some time on understanding your audience; a millennial audience probably doesn’t like the same type of gameplay as a 50-year-old. So, do some research into what topics and keywords your audience is most interested in.

Last but not least, determine your incentives; it could be a promotional coupon or guides to help your audience to achieve a specific a task. You can even ask your audience directly on what they would like to receive from you.

All gamified systems use the following primary elements, thus it is prudent to think of these when setting up your plan:

• Points: Way of tracking behavior, keeping score and providing feedback.

• Levels: Structured representation of progress; stage of difficulty.

• Leader-boards: Show which players have achieved the highest goals (measurement and behavior). They give a player status (reward).

• Badges: Given when a player achieves a certain goal (measurement and behavior).

• Challenges/quests: Give players a sense of purpose within the world of the gamified experience.

• On-boarding: The first minute of a new player entering a funnel, where the game will train and engage but should not overwhelm.

• Engagement loops: Motivating emotional leads to promote player re-engagement, which flows to visible progress and/or rewards, which loops back around to a motivating emotion.

A great example of a gamification campaign is the Easter Egg Hunt, created by SEMrush . To give you a basic idea on what they did, during the Easter season last year, they released a game directly build into their software interface - an Easter Egg Hunt. They challenged their users to find 15 Easter eggs, hidden anywhere within their platform. To collect the egg, a user had to set up a project, create a report, or basically perform any action that showed off the functionality of their software tool.

Why Gamification works?

The concept of gamification operates under the same science as video games, which are specifically designed to activate human reward centers. Playing a game can lead to high (or low) levels of dopamine. When players win a game or achieve something, their brain chemistry alters to release an excess amount of dopamine. Dopamine makes people feel good since it controls the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. It can be addictive, because people want to feel that way as often as they can. On the other hand, If the reward is small, repetitive, or boring the amount of dopamine is going to be small.

The positive effect of games can also be explained by the prospect theory and the flow theory. The Prospect Theory suggests that small incentives enable people to make an extra effort to do things that they otherwise would not. For instance, providing rewards that can be lost if gamers do not return to the game can trigger the well-known human tendency to avoid losses.

In Flow Theory, flow is the mental state of a person who is performing an activity and is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment. Games that satisfy all the necessary conditions to achieve the flow state, can create a sense of intrinsic motivation which grows over time.

Gamification is NOT a panacea for all business problems

Gamification can drive results, but a clear approach to strategy is essential before diving in. Gamification deployments often fall short due to poor design, a failure to understand how rewards systems work or because the product or service isn’t a good match for the consumer.

Although you may believe that engaging with younger audiences really means tackling an issue of attention span, consumers within all generations still just want a good product, suggesting that gamification alone won’t drive results; it’s not like gamification is going to help you sell a product/service that does not meet the customer's expectations.

Sometime marketers fall into a trap of their own bias. They set a goal (like bringing in 100k unique visitors to their website) and they feel good when they achieve it, without considering if there was a real impact for their business out of this.  Bringing 100k unique visitors means that you generated website traffic but unless you are Google/Facebook, you cannot monetize this traffic. You should focus more on building a dedicated audience. 

Bringing it all together, in a world where those in the online marketing field are constantly trying to find new and inventive ways to attract an audience, gamification in marketing can help. Doing gamification well is all about understanding how consumers respond to rewards and then leveraging this in relation to a product or service, something that marketers often struggle with. Gamification serves as a form of entertainment, education or progress-monitoring, all of which are great at increasing user engagement, brand awareness and customer loyalty. It is not just a marketing buzzword; it is a way to trigger real, powerful human emotions that can trigger better customer experiences. If gamification sounds like a great marketing strategy to you, then it’s time to start thinking about how to put gamification in motion. Game on!