Explore five creative ways to leverage gamification to generate product awareness, educate your audience about product features, and ultimately drive sales.
Putting your product at the forefront of your marketing campaigns, to grab attention and educate your audiences can be challenging. Is it a new product, or one with complex features, or niche product information you want to use to hook your audience? What if you could turn that challenge into a fun and engaging experience for your audience? Gamification offers a powerful solution !
If you are launching a new product and need to generate awareness, you can use a marketing gamification campaign can introduce your new product in a memorable way.
For instance, you could implement a product reveal campaign, such as a ‘guess the word’ game where participants need to guess what the new product is, or a challenging drop game where participants must catch your new product to earn points and win prizes.
Blush, the pioneering sex toy retailer based in Iceland, used a drop game to promote and boost sales for their highly anticipated physical advent calendar. Participants needed to “catch” the advent calendars while avoiding the socks to collect points. The participants who reached the first 3 positions on the leaderboard would get the calendar for free.
Use gamification to educate your target audience about specific features or selling points of a particular product. For example, if you want to inform them about a feature, ingredient, material, flavor or a more specific benefit, such as the sustainability of your product.
There are various games commonly used to educate audiences about products, such as quizzes, polls, and more. Additionally, you could implement a priority game, where people select the right ingredients or materials used in your product, or a skill-based game like hit-a-mole, where participants must quickly click on icons that appear representing your product’s features while avoiding others.
Krüger is a consulting engineering company that focuses on delivering technical, holistic, and environmentally sustainable solutions within water and waste water to industries and public authorities; they wanted to educate their audience about which contaminants could be effectively removed from soil by their Thermal Soil Remediation solution. They used a fun hit-the-target game where participants had to hit the right contaminants while avoiding the ones that could not be removed.
If you offer a range of similar products such as furniture or consumer goods with various flavors, use a playable campaign to assist your audience in finding the one that best suits their needs, styles, and tastes.
One approach could be to develop a personality test where participants answer a few questions, and based on their responses, you recommend the product that aligns with their preferences. This not only enhances the online user experience but also saves consumers from the hassle of individually browsing each product to determine their preferences.
The UK furniture retailer, DFS created the “What’s your thing” personality test where users answer a series of questions about their sofa style preferences, fabric choices, and so on. Based on their responses, the campaign insights enabled DFS to categorize participants into specific style profiles. These profiles then guided users to sofas at DFS that best matched their tastes and preferences.
Gamification can be used to raise awareness about seasonal products. For instance, you could run a gamified campaign promoting potential Christmas gifts, like a gift finder tool, or create a landing page with games to promote Easter-related products such as chocolate eggs, or flower bouquets.
It doesn’t have to be related to a holiday, but it could also be a campaign to promote summer products in a fun way. There are countless possibilities to explore.
For Pancake Day 2023, the convenience store chain SPAR UK, partnered with Cathedral City, a well-known cheese brand. They did a landing page, where you can find a scratchcard game “Grate the cheese”, as well as recipes using Cathedral City cheeses, Cathedral City product discounts, and a “Find your local shop” section.
Gamification can be used to effectively distribute free samples or free trials to your audience. Did you know that consumers value winning prizes? In fact, according to a recent YouGov survey on partnership with Playable, 51% of respondents agree that winning a voucher is more valuable than being given a voucher.
So, if you know that trying your product will support product adoption why not make game campaigns where participants can win samples and free trials?
Würth Denmark, the producer and reseller of fastening and assembly materials, conducted a campaign to introduce their new Multi 2000 Cobra product. Participants played a snake game where they had to collect points to win the product and try it out!
Gamification isn’t just about fun and games; it’s a strategic marketing tool that can significantly boost your product and brand awareness. By implementing the strategies and ideas outlined above, you can create engaging experiences that educate consumers, highlight product features, and incentivize trial and sales.
Remember, tailoring your gamification approach to your specific goals and target audience is key. So, get creative, have fun, and watch your product awareness soar!