Games are the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessray obstacles
Bernard Suits
I’ve heard about the trend in gamification in the past. Yet, I wasn’t taking it seriously. Russell Sparkman, CEO at Fusionspark Media, in his presentation at CMW 2012 really brought up some interesting facts and ideas that made me change my mind.
If you are serious about content marketing in your company, you should dig into the issue. It’s getting trendy and you want to catch the trend.
Let me put it straight – why would you care about gamification in content marketing?
1. You have two ways to get to the hearts of your audience:
- be relevant and educational
- be engaging and fun
You need gamification in content marketing to be fun!
2. You want to keep an eye on the trends.
Search for the term “Gamification” in Google trends. Just check how often people search the term «gamification» from summer 2010 and until the present day. It went from 0 and is definitely on the rise .
O’k, now why do people play games?
- feel alive, stay focused, and engaged
- experience power and feel heroic
- experience the thrill of victory
- have satisfaction of overcoming difficulties as teams
They want the emotional state called FLOW – sweet spot between boredom and anxiety.
Flow just doesn’t happen as frequently in real life as in games. So, that’s what people are going after on their IPads, IPhones and in social networks.
The potential gamification has for content marketing:
- increases brand retention
- encourages sharing
- increases engagement
- increases time on site
- generates user created content
Here are the 5 Key Game Strategy Qualities:
- Intrigue
- Reward
- Status
- Community
- Challenge
Here are the 4 game personalities:
- Ahievers
- Socializers
- Explorers
- Killers
How can you apply it in your business?
- think what you can do to make your business more social with gamification
- create gamification around your brand story
Example:
The most simple and descriptive case of applying gamification is profile completeness bar on LinkedIn. Many people are driven to provide more information to get to 100% completion. As a reward they will get access to more advanced features on LinkedIn.
Your company is not LinkedIn but you ceratinly can come up with some kind of Facebook contest for your potential customers with a promised reward in the end. If organized well, this can give a strong push to raising your brand awareness and building a stronger community.
Authoritative sites you may want to check out for further reading:
gamification.co
gamification.org
Have thoughts? Share 