detail in Chapter 10.
Look into your competitors. What are their customers saying about their campaigns on social media? You can identify a whole host of things not to do by looking at what has annoyed and put their audience off.
Exhaust your existing resources. Do you have mini client databases in other departments of your company? Collect them all and analyze them for key data points.
Conduct A/B testing. Create two versions of your core message and measure the difference in performance. After you’ve created your two versions, give one version to one group and the other version to another group. You can then monitor and review the responses and level of engagement each version received.
Be as specific as possible. Drill down on who your audience truly is, and study their online attitudes and pain points. By identifying a specific target audience, you can make decisions that are dictated by your customers, which sets your campaign up for long-term success.
Segment your audience (see Chapter 9). Locate all the data you can about how the target customer behaves and any basic information about them. This will help you identify your audience. This data can include the following:AgeLocationGenderIncome levelEducation levelMarital or family statusOccupationEthnic backgroundInterestsHobbiesValuesAttitudesBehaviorsLifestyle preferences
Taking a Closer Look at Your Current Customer Base
By knowing your target audience, you can maximize the results of every campaign launch. This means that as you launch more gamification marketing campaigns, you’ll find that it’ll take less effort, giving you the opportunity to grow and evolve your audience comfortably.
How do you even know what your target audience might look like? Instead of going through experimentation and trial and error, you should look to your existing, loyal customer base. Also, a large portion of the audience who will visit your campaign will be people like your existing customers. Defining these customers can help you refine your campaign’s messages to deliver a more personal experience.
You’ll gain the following benefits by successfully targeting your gamification marketing campaign to existing customers:
You can tailor your campaign’s content to ensure that it will appeal to the right people.
You can gain a better understanding of the needs of your audience.
Your campaign will provide a more beneficial and engaging experience.
There will be a higher rate of conversions and call-to-action (CTA) engagements within your campaign.
Establishing existing data points
Initially you need to look at your existing database, whether that’s in the form of your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, SQL/MySQL database, or even Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Make sure you have each customer’s contact information, as well as their purchase and engagement history with your company. Using this information, you need to identify customers by:
Purchase history: How much they’ve spent over their lifetime and the most they’ve spent on one order
Referrals: The customers who provide the most identifiable referrals
Feedback: The customers who have provided feedback or reviews regarding your company, products, or services
After you’ve identified this information, you can perform an analysis to discover and understand your customers’ defining characteristics. From there, you can create your audience profiles and then target people who fit the same mold.
Here are some of the data points you’ll want to include in your analysis:
Personal information: This kind of information includes your audience’s age (a rough age bracket), gender, income, and occupation.
Geographic information: This is where your existing customers live, as well as their time zone.
Language: Don’t assume your customers speak the same language as the one that’s dominant in the place they live. Identify their native language.
Interests: Interests are a hugely varied piece of the target audience. What do your customers like to do, besides using your products or services?
Purchasing potential: This not only includes the amount your current customers spend but also their income. It’s better to have a set bracket of income (for example, $50,000 to $65,999).
Stage of life: Are your customers likely to be college students? New parents? Retirees?
By the time you’ve analyzed your data points, you’ll have defined an understanding of each of the following:
Who is going to engage with your campaign
Which gamification platform will appeal best to your customers
Why your audience should choose to click on your campaign
Tailoring for B2B
If your campaign is targeting a business-to-business (B2B) audience, you’ll want to change the data points:
Contact’s details: Define the ideal position you’re looking to engage with (for example, marketing managers or sales managers).
Communication: Don’t assume that email is the best way to communicate. With certain professions, it may be more appropriate and engaging to inform them of your campaign via LinkedIn.
Company: This information includes the industries your audience are typically working in, as well as the size, location, and department.
Decision making: Look at what decision criteria your customers have when it comes to finally making a purchase. It would be ideal if you could understand what was most attractive and unique about your product.
These points can help you tailor your campaign to better appeal to and engage with your B2B customer base. To do this, your campaign will need to contain the same unique features and benefits you’ll find in these data points.
