Gamified Marketing Strategy & Planning

Gamification can be employed in individual or group dynamics to achieve amazing results from becoming more engaged members of a community to increasing sales to affecting positive cultural change at a local, regional, or even national level.

So, what's typically included?

• Gamified marketing strategy and plan born from your business objectives: defining the game;

• Player definitions and a content plan;

• A progressive engagement model that begins with "player onboarding," when we teach participants how to play the game to mid-game strategies where we build advanced players to endgame evergreen missions to convert players who have mastered the game to evangelists;

• Content development and storytelling: group/game narrative development, writing missions, designing challenges, developing marketing and campaign materials, educational content, and more;

• Tiered rewards structure for motivating participating from beginning to end;

• Communications plan that includes online and offline campaigning for building awareness, growing participants, and announcing achievements and celebrating participant successes;

• Physical and digital infrastructure for maintaining the game or gamified program — the campaign may not literally be a game, but may simply draw on game theory but it may also require a digital gameboard in the form a portal to track participant and game progress — and engaging participants at all levels and roles.

What are the outcomes?

• Improved engagment from participants; most campaigns require a high-degree of asynchronous communications from a brand whereas gamification provides a defined framework for participants to be players and evangelists;

• Perspective and behavioral change, whether that's more engaged community members, more customers and customers converting at higher tiers, or affecting social norms;

• A built-in feedback loop from participants in the form of reporting progress on challenges and missions, privately and/or publicly;

• Brand lift through the incorporation of "fun;"

• A measurement and reporting framework for consistently improving participant behaviors and program outcomes.

How will we build this type of campaign?

If you've never built a gamified campaign before, that's OK! If you're a consumer, you've likely already been a player in someone else's campaign, even if you didn't know it at the time. And, we have a helpful guide you can use to begin thinking about some of the aspects of your campaign right now. Here is the process with some of the essential questions that will help us build an optimal plan...

1. Identify Business Objectives

• What is the role of this initiative?

• Why gamify? How will a gamified system benefits business’s goals?

• What is the problem or challenge?

• What will success look like to the business? Don’t focus yet on the method or mechanism to achieve it.

2. Describe Your Players

• Platforms without players have no value. Who do you want to play your game? Is there only one audience and one type of player-participant?

• What are each audience’s current beliefs and behaviors? What motivates them? What’s the most important thing to know about them?

• What is their relationship to your business?

• How do they think? What is the insight that reveals how we can motivate them?

3. Define Behaviors

• What do we want them to believe?

• What do we want the players to do? What are their target objectives? Calls-to-action (CTAs)?

• Player actions should promote the business objectives. How will we provide private and public acknowledgment of overall performance?

• How should your players’ behavior change?

4. Design Activities/Missions

• Describe gameplay and player processes.

• Utilize game elements to teach objectives and rules.

• Describe how each activity will encourage the next mission and the feedback within specific tasks.

• How will you measure player performance and report progress towards goals — player and business?

5. Build Engagement With Fun

• The best games have more emotional hooks than rewards (like coupons, badges or points) — intrinsic rather than purely extrinsic value.

• Fun is essential to the design process. Identify the fun. Remove rewards, and the game should be fun. What is fun about what we're designing?

6. Deploy The Campaign

• What will we need to run the game or campaign? Design tools and a platform, if needed, and develop a plan for implementation and management.

• Architect the details of the game system and how it supports activities/missions. How will content drive engagement and participation?

• Define technical model(s) of player experience, feedback, and rewards.

• Validate our plan toward business goals; ensure the measurement plan will document success and provide inputs for optimization

• Deploy,  learn, refine, and grow.