with them. Before deciding which ones to use, you need to understand how gamification models perform with various audiences.If your audience spans a larger demographic, you could combine several popular gamification elements to appeal to a more general audience.
Do your research. Check out the examples in Chapter 15 to get a sense of how gamification works, what type of rewards companies give, and how the campaigns incorporate companies’ marketing objectives. Nothing helps shape your own gamification strategy like trying out what others have done before you. See if you can identify best practices that would fit your marketing objectives.The gamification elements that often do the best are social sharing, scoring, and rewards. I’ve investigated numerous quiz, trivia, puzzle, and skills gamification models before knowing what would work for my client’s brand and audience. This more hands-on strategy also provided me with a way to better understand what was engaging based on my own reactions.
Think about establishing incentives. Consider what you want to give away as an incentive. It could be a new product, digital content, or promotional coupons, for example. Whatever it is, you need to offer a clear incentive in order to make the gamification work with your audience. Your audience needs a reason to aim toward earning the coveted gold badge.Research what works with others in your industry or ask your audience what they would like to receive from your next campaign.
Keep it as simple as possible. A complex gamification marketing campaign may get lost on your audience. Look at the campaign from your audience’s point of view. If they can’t figure out your gamification elements quickly, they’ll move on. These days, people have relatively short attention spans and many distractions, so consider making each achievement or gamification milestone relatively short.
Start thinking about who you’ll want to work with for your creative and technical tasks. Define your ideal time frame for developing and launching your gamification marketing campaign, and set your budget. Gamification may be new to your marketing strategy, so look to outsource talent that specializes in gamification (see Chapter 5).
Plan your launch. Your audience cannot play your awesome gamification campaign if they don’t know it exists. By using a combination of a planned successful launch, a targeted email campaign, social media promotions, and a researched media outreach, you can ensure your game reaches everyone who would love to play it (see Chapter 9).
Don’t be afraid to experiment with your gamification elements. There is no bible or “best way” to creating gamification marketing campaigns. Gamification elements are designed to personalize the experience and continually increase the challenge involved for your audience. The only way you’ll know which element is right for your audience is to take the plunge and make educated choices.
Gamelearn (www.game-learn.com/serious-games-gamification-blog): Gamelearn’s blog explains how games can apply to business environments.
Gamification Nation (www.gamificationnation.com): This blog offers fresh gamification content presented in a fun way.
Gamified UK (www.gamified.uk): Gamified UK is a great place to start learning about gamification and game theory more broadly.
Yu-kai Chou (https://yukaichou.com): Yu-kai Chou is an author and international keynote speaker on gamification and behavioral design, and his blog is a great resource.
Chapter 2
Getting to Know Gamification Models
IN THIS CHAPTER
You and your team have lots of gamification options and elements. The key is understanding all these options and how they can benefit your campaign.
Be sure to keep your intended audience in mind when you’re building your campaign. Understanding your audience will help you make the right choices and, ultimately, the most engaging campaign.
In this chapter, I walk you through the various settings you can make for your gamification campaign and fill you in on some of the mistakes I’ve come across in gamification marketing.
Exploring Your Options
When you’re just starting to think about developing a gamification marketing campaign, you’ll be glad to know that you have lots of options! But the options may be overwhelming. There is no definitive list of all the options at your disposal, but over many years working with many clients, I’ve come up with ways to make sense of all this information. And that’s what this section is about.
Here, I introduce you to the six game types you have to decide on:
Classic
Enterprising
Disrupting
User experience
Contributing
Community
In the following sections, I walk you through each of these game types in greater detail.
Discovering game types
In this section, I walk you through the six game types that have individual elements that you can choose from. As you read the sections that follow, think about your target audience. First, rank the game types that your campaign associates with best. Then choose the elements that will work best for your audience from each of the game types. For instance, if your target audience is made up of other businesses, you’ll probably want to base 70 percent of your campaign on the enterprising game type and the rest on user experience and classic. Alternatively, if your clients are in the 18- to 25-year-old market, you’ll want to focus more on the community and user experience game types, because that’s what 18- to 25-year-olds are into.
Classic
The classic game type includes gamification elements that are intuitive. You can
