Zarrar Chishti - Gamification Marketing For Dummies

Consider the longevity of your gamification marketing campaign. How long will your campaign last? This is especially important for gamification campaigns, where you’ve invested huge resources creating a unique marketing vehicle. Ideally, you want your campaign to last long enough for your target audience to engage fully.

If your campaign is shorter than one month, you’ll be seriously reducing the likelihood of your audience seeing, understanding, and engaging with the gamification elements you’re marketing. Similarly, you don’t want your campaign to go on more than six months because you run the risk of your gamification elements becoming stale. If a gamification campaign becomes too familiar to your audience, it eventually loses its appeal. Even legacy brands like Coca-Cola and Nike change up their gamification campaigns frequently in order to keep their audiences interested in their marketing messages.

When considering the duration of your campaign, keep in mind the following:

What’s popular today may not be popular tomorrow. Gamification works best when it’s based on trends, but you need to identify a sensible longevity for those trends.

Try to provide a means for getting customer feedback (see Chapter 10 ). This can be through forms, chat bots, and social media platforms. Then keep track of public interest in your campaign and make adjustments accordingly. Being able to show your audience you’re listening will produce a positive reaction on social media.

Be flexible. Don’t be afraid to end the campaign sooner than you thought, if you identify interest going stale or, worse, you’re getting negative feedback. Figure out what’s working in your current marketing efforts. You may not need to change everything — just adjust anything that’s causing negative reactions.

Be innovative. Innovation is what gamification is all about. Be creative with your gamification elements. Pay attention to what’s current. Don’t be afraid to be a trendsetter!

After you’ve worked out the ideal duration for your campaign, consider the frequency of it. How often will you bring out a new campaign? Gamification elements are expensive to design and develop, and gamification campaigns can take a lot of effort.

All the elements you create — from the animation to the designs to the coding — can be reused over and over again. These elements are assets for your company. The first development will involve the biggest cost. After your first campaign, it will cost considerably less to revamp and recode new campaigns. Think about how you’ll be reusing the gamification elements when developing your first gamification campaign.

There are three frequencies I recommend considering:

One-off: When the campaign ends, so does the narrative for the gamification elements. When reusing the gamification elements for the next campaign, you’ll produce a brand-new narrative. This approach works well when your audience is exposed to your campaign over longer periods. In this case, a new narrative will reignite their interest in your marketing efforts each time you launch.

Series: Just like a TV series, your campaign’s narrative continues from where it left off with the last campaign. This approach can be extremely profitable in marketing terms. Your message is repeatedly pushed to your audience with minimum effort (after the first launch). This approach works for campaigns that are short, leaving your audience wanting more.

Seasonal: Here, you deck your campaign with the seasonal themes. The most popular version is Christmas, which has historically been the most engaging time for gamification campaigns. This approach can work for medium to short-term campaigns. It can even work for long-term ones as long as the seasonal theme is incorporated within the campaign rather than treated as a relaunch.

In Table 2-1, I compare the various frequencies against the gamification models I look at earlier in the chapter.

TABLE 2-1Determining the Best Frequency for Your Gamification Model

In this section, I share some of the mistakes I’ve made so you can avoid making them yourself. Believe it or not, the list was originally much longer — I’ve shortened it to the most important mistakes I believe can be easily avoided with a little care from the start.

Mobile phones and tablets are everywhere, so as a marketer you need to make sure your gamification elements are developed using mobile-friendly interfaces.

As I explain in Chapter 6, having a responsive game design means that it can be played on different types of devices. You can achieve this goal using HTML5, which is a web-based framework that, in my opinion, is the best way to ensure games will run correctly within any device.

This is when you try to add more elements after the final functional spec has been agreed upon. You see something new and creative and you just have to incorporate it into the development. Most of the time, this only delays your final product and inevitably creates a muddled and confused gaming experience.

Stick to your functional spec and create a “wish list” when you come across a new idea. The wish list will come in handy for the next phase or launch.

Making the gameplay more unique or more complicated doesn’t mean your campaign will be better. The ultimate goal for your team is to get your audience to engage with your campaign. Overly complicated gameplay causes confusion, and confusion means minimal overall engagement. Another downfall to adding too many elements is the adverse effect on loading times. If your campaign doesn’t load quickly, your audience will quickly lose patience and give up.