games, but use them with caution in your campaign.
When designing a gamification campaign, I like to imagine that the audience is sitting one desk away from their manager. If you think of it this way, the elements you develop will be subtle and stress-free so that everyone can enjoy and engage with your campaign, wherever they are.
Assuming your audience will understand games
Unless your company is in the gaming and entertainment industry, your audience may not be familiar with gamification campaigns. I see this as a major plus.
All marketing campaigns are looking for some way to create a disruption within their industries. Gamification helps to get your audience’s attention and promote your message. If you suddenly launch a game to an audience who isn’t usually presented with this type of marketing, you’ll pique their interest.
The mistake I see is assuming your audience will understand the point of the gamification elements. They won’t. To overcome this hurdle, introduce as many help elements as you can. These may include videos, FAQs, in-game instructional messages, and a chat window.
If you accomplish this goal, once-unknowledgeable audiences will see your company as the pioneer and voice of authority in gamification marketing. For me, this is the best possible result for your team’s hard work.
Part 2
Beginning Your Gamification Marketing Quest
IN THIS PART …
Define your audience and deliver a uniquely engaging campaign to them.
Explore the various types of gamification engagement tools available for your campaign.
Assemble a dream team to help you design, build, and maintain your gamification model.
Understand the technology that will power your gamification marketing campaign.
Chapter 3
Identifying Your Target Audience
IN THIS CHAPTER
Ideally, your gamification marketing campaign will deliver a personalized experience to as wide an audience possible. To accomplish this goal, you can’t afford to take a global and generalized approach to your marketing efforts.
You need to gather key data on precisely who your target audience will be. After you find this data, you can target your campaign directly to them. However, to obtain the best results, you’ll need to exhaust all data channels you have on your existing customers and social media followers. These are people who already know about you and have engaged with your company.
After you’ve mined this data, your campaign will be sending messages that are customer-centric and content that targets your audience. Identifying your target audience will make your gamification marketing campaign far more efficient and successful.
Defining Your Audience
The key to defining your target audience is to be as specific and as visual as possible so that your marketing message feels very personal to them, almost as if you had written to them personally.
Start by defining one specific group of people you want to reach with your marketing message. This group should be interested in your solutions and very likely willing to purchase your products or services. The more specific you can be, the better.
By defining your audience, you’ll have a group of people who are most likely to lead to conversions after encountering your campaign. Keep narrowing down this audience in as much detail as possible.
In the following sections, I walk you through how to define your audience.
Throwing out everything you think you know about your audience
Companies often are blind when trying to create target audiences. They feel like they already know who their target audience is, instead of conducting independent audience research.
Poorly judged creative decisions
An unengaging campaign style and personality
Misjudged promotional strategies
A campaign that doesn’t resonate with your audience
Conducting research to find your audience
In a perfect world, every single person on the planet would love your gamification marketing campaign. But this isn’t possible because your campaign needs to deliver a personalized experience, and not every consumer is the same.
Conduct your own primary research. You can do this by conducting surveys and assembling focus groups to analyze your campaign’s objectives. Surveys are efficient because you can receive a large volume of customer feedback without investing a lot of money. Although focus groups are expensive, time consuming, and resource dependent, they encourage productive, interpersonal discussion, which
