1. Gamification and gamified promotions

What is gamification?

Gamification is adding game mechanics into nongame environments, like a website, eCommerce store, online learning portal, corporate intranet, online community, and more, to increase participation. Gamification aims to reward leads, customers, employees, and channel partners for their data, time, performance, and other positive actions that impact your business.

Why does it work?

Games and promotions can create a sense of intrinsic motivation that grows over time. A successful experience taps into our need for competition, rewards, and status; this creates opportunities for you to increase audience engagement, participation, loyalty, and influence and drive specific behaviors.

It can create a state of flow. Flow is the mental state of a person performing an action and fully immersed in a feeling of focus, involvement, and enjoyment. It’s the ideal moment for you to convey key messages you want them to remember and incentivize actions you would like them to perform.

Rather than feeling marketed or sold to, the right game or promotion will engage your audience in a task or behavior. While your entrant goes through your game or promotion, you can share messages or updates in an authentic and timely way.

Merging games or promotions that require skill or knowledge with your key marketing messages gives you the opportunity to generate awareness and be remembered. No other marketing technique can do that.

What makes a successful gamified promotion?

Match your goals with the right gamification mechanic. Some promotions are more effective than others. For example, when trying to engage existing audiences vs. generating lots of new leads and conversions, you need to choose a suitable method that relates to your targeted outcome.

Know your target audience. Only some games will be effective for all audiences. Consider the game or experience most appropriate for your target audience and your marketing goals.

Use the right incentive. If your game or promotion offers an incentive such as a social reward, vouchers or coupons, or unique content, ensure you match the appropriate incentive with your target audience. What does your audience want, and what will motivate them?

Keep it simple. Make sure you design your game or promotion so it’s clear and straightforward for your audience to understand how it works, what you’re asking them to do, and what they get out of it.

We’re a serious company. Will gamification work for us?

Absolutely! Just read what our clients have to say.

As a luxury retailer that operates in the online and offline space, creating customer promotions that resonate with our audience and succeed in driving footfall to our stores, requires a technology partner with creativity and professionalism. Not only does the BeeLiked platform offer a great range of gamified promotions with entry security and scannable in-store coupons, but the team’s hard work and determination to deliver a successful campaign are impressive.

Jessica Anelli | Product Experience Manager | Holt Renfrew

Isn’t gamification just about fun games?

That’s just a myth. Gamification is not just for fun; by using the human need for play and competition, many business problems can be tackled, including motivating and driving employee performance.

By using a gamified incentive program on the BeeLiked platform, we increased our staff motivation and performance scores by up to 10% across our various properties. We look forward to running more programs in the future and see gamification as a cost-effective way to motivate and reward our team members without increasing our fixed costs.

Devina Morjaria | Brand Operations Manager | IHG voco hotels & Vignette Collection 

Will gamification work for my industry?

Yes. Gamification works for companies in any sector, whether in B2C or B2B. We have helped customers in every industry apart from agriculture. Although we’re up for the challenge! They are all using gamified promotions to:

• Reduce the cost of loyalty and reward programs
• Attract new customers and audiences
• Reduce the acquisition cost of a new customer
• Drive new and returning customers 
• Get better feedback from customers
• Re-engage and convert idle leads
• Create an immersive brand experience
• Reinforce important lessons and behaviors
• Improve knowledge absorption and retention
• Track and automatically reward customers, employees, and channel partners

How can we use gamification in our business strategy?

Gamification and gamified rewards can be applied to solving most business challenges, and here are just a few of the use cases you can apply this to:

• Lead Generation
• Data Enrichment
• Audience Engagement
• Customer Loyalty
• Product Marketing
• Employee Engagement
• Channel & Partner Motivation