Gamifying Your Content

What would you think if we told you that gaming is an inherent part of human nature? It might sound far-fetched, but humans have been gaming since the dawn of time in order to learn, to communicate, and to build bonds. Do these concepts sound familiar? That’s because they’re all objectives shared by modern-day marketing.

Nobody would blame you for thinking ‘gamification’ is a fancy word for turning something into a video game but it’s actually a much broader principle that has a lot to do with engagement. When applied to your content strategy you’ll find a whole new angle to help your business score!

What Do You Mean by Gamification?

Gamification is the practice of applying game mechanics and design techniques to your content. It doesn’t mean turning your content into a game – although you could do that if you wanted to – it just means taking all the best concepts from gaming and using them in your content.

What do people love about gaming? For some it’s about getting a reward for their efforts, for others it’s about their actions having influence over an outcome. It can be about being the best at something or it can be about working with other people towards a common goal. Above all else it’s about interaction and delight.

What Are the Benefits of Gamifying Content?

Gamifying your content works to increase engagement and boost brand awareness but there’s so much more to it than that. It’s about turning your content into an experience and building a bond between user brand. Gamification can be used to inform, educate, and entertain in a way where traditional content might struggle to maintain interest. Gamification also helps to simplify marketing campaigns that could otherwise be too long or become boring for the user.

An example of this is Burger King Spain’s 2018 InstaWhopper campaign which used the Instagram Stories poll function to enable users to vote on combination of ingredients which resulted in the creation of a new burger. Users were able to generate a coupon for this burger and redeem it for free in-store. Let’s break this gamification process down…

The campaign objective was to increase engagement on Instagram and incentivise users to visit stores. This was achieved by allowing users to create something on social media that they could then experience in real life. In order to work, the campaign required one of marketing’s most boring user exercises: data collection. The gamification process turned the data collection process into a selection of vibrant, short-form pieces of content that users could engage with on a platform they were familiar with.

Instagram’s poll function is a great way to encourage engagement anyway, but Burger King added an element of competition by allowing voters to impact something tangible in the real world that they would then be able to interact with as a reward. This made the users’ choices matter. By the end of the campaign the brand achieved 270K brand interactions, with 45K unique users engaging, and a 10% increase in followers without spending a penny on paid media. They also served over 30K InstaWhoppers in-store.

I’m Convinced, Tell Me How!

There are plenty of ways you can gamify your content. The simplest way is to break down the core elements of gaming and consider how you can incorporate these into your marketing strategy. In its simplest form gaming encompasses elements of scoring and tracking processes; achieving goals/objectives; levelling up; winning something or receiving a reward; and fun! You don’t have to incorporate all of these elements in your content but you do have the option to mix and match. We’ve created a variety of gamified content for our clients from personality quizzes all the way to ribbons/badges that users can add to their profile pictures to show their affinity for a brand/cause.

Tell us about your next project and find out how your marketing content could benefit from gamification. Contact us today.