Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Gamification

Last week, I recapped the top 3 marketing trends of 2013. One of them, gamification, deserves a little more explanation. Over 70% of Forbes Global 2000 companies plan to use gamification for the purposes of marketing and customer retention. By harnessing people's natural desires to compete, achieve, gain status and money, express themselves and even to be altruistic, marketers can turn their product into a game, and actively engage their audience.

Popular Types of Gamifaction

Check-ins and Badges - Used often with fitness sites and apps such as Foursquare, virtual badges are awarded each time a customer reaches the next "level". These levels correspond, for example, to the amount of time someone has exercised, how many people they've recruited, how many restaurants they visited and logged with their apps, and so on. This is similar to the idea of frequent customer rewards, where if you collect a certain number of points, or spend a certain amount of money you get bonus gifts, but is even more engaging and cost effective. These apps encourage frequent use, and provide constant feedback and reward. It is just as rewarding to receive a graphic badge for an achievement as it is to receive a physical prize, and the idea of "leveling up" makes customers feel like they've earned the reward at the end.

It's important, when using this sort of gamification, to balance individual rewards with community rewards. Rewards only for community achievement can encourage coasting, and when sticking to just individual rewards it's easy for customers to get bored or plateau. The solution, as found by a recent MIT study,  is to reward participants not just for their own contributions, but by how much their contributions inspire others. He likens it to academia, where a publication is deemed more or less influential by the number of citations it receives in subsequent research. This encourages users to improve themselves, and keep leveling up individual ling, while also striving to better their standing and influence within the community.

Treasure Hunts/Narrative based marketing

This is a rarer form of gamification, as it requires more set up and investment on the part of the company, but is often more engaging and rewarding then simple badge and check in systems. This sort of gamification is generally attached to viral marketing, and works well when a new product, album or movie is being released. The idea is that users must follow a series of clues and puzzles, or accomplish a series of tasks to unlock additional content and prizes. Often, a loose narrative is created, such as the theft of the brand new product that must be recovered by the careful sleuthing of the customer base.

The idea of gamification, in all it's forms, is to encourage consumers to feel like the marketing they are doing, or the product they are using, is fun. That it is rewarding. That each time they buy a product, or refer a friend, they are accomplishing something. There's nothing more satisfying then physically crossing a task off a sheet of paper. By tapping into the human desire to compete, improve, and increase their status, companies can encourage their client base to do the marketing for them. 

First five comments get a free response! If you have any tips, comments or suggestions about games and marketing, let us know in the comments below  and on twitter and facebook

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Top 3 Marketing Trends in 2013 (So Far)

At the end of 2012, the top marketing trends and predictions focused on gamification, mobile marketing and content marketing. Now that we're halfway through 2013, did these predictions hold up? Has mobile marketing hit its saturation point? Is the focus still on content and a broad social media and mobile presence? Let's take a look at how these predictions held up, and how they changed.

Mobile Marketing - is still on the rise. If growth continues at the current rate, by 2015 more users will access the internet through mobile devices than their computers. It's just a fact - when your phone is a portable computer you will use it whenever you don't have your laptop or desktop. Thanks to smartphones, every minute of someone's waking day could potentially be spent online. It's not a coincidence that 42.8% of marketers planned to increase their marketing spending in 2013, it's just good business sense.

Content Marketing - Recently, there's been an emphasis on content. Not just amount of content, but quality of content. With the advent of the blog, the initial theory (and instinctual impulse) was to just put as much information out there as possible. Update as often as possible and let the rest sort itself out. Now is the time to sort all that content out. Companies are re-evaluating their approach to content. How they organize, how they curate it, whether quality of content is more important then quantity of content, and the hammer is coming down on the side of quality. Producing less content, but of a higher quality is proving itself to be a better strategy then providing a lot of content without much consideration to content. While having a blog filled with posts back to 2007 is impressive, readers would rather not have to slog through a lot of mediocre content to get to the gems. Instead, they would rather read only the best of your posts, even if there are fewer. 

Gamification - is a relatively recent marketing innovation, that's seen a lot of use in the beverage and food industry. Essentially, it turns marketing strategies into a game. The most classic example is when companies hold contests or surveys and let the consumers decide what the new candy flavor will be, or the logo, or the mascot. An adaptation of this strategy to the internet, particularly to social media, is to offer prizes or rewards based on likes, shares and re-tweets. For instance, if you share a certain link x amount of times, you get a special reward, rank or badge. Companies have also arranged internet "scavenger hunts" where consumers unlock certain rewards at each level, where each level involves some form of promotion, purchase or use of the product. 

Whether these trends continue, or some new marketing strategies arise to take their place remain to be seen. What trends have you noticed so far? Is there any marketing strategy that you're glad to see go? Let us know in the comments below twitter and facebook