When children play, they are utterly absorbed. They ignore hunger. They ignore cold. They just keep going, completely absorbed by the world they have created.

That engagement is not unique to childhood. It’s unique to game-playing, a form of behavior that touches our core feelings and emotions. It appeals to our sense of competition, meets our demand for immediate satisfaction, and enables us to achieve goals quickly. That’s why content marketers have used gamification to take the most engaging aspects of game-play and work them into brand content.

At its simplest, gamification takes features from game-play, such as challenges and rewards, and makes them a part of the user experience. As the strategies become more complex, brands have created entire gaming worlds which entertain and engage while increasing brand awareness.

The biggest benefit of gamification is engagement that’s both deep and meaningful. When leads play they interact directly with the brand, investing not just time and effort but also emotion into their brand experience.

But gamification doesn’t just pull leads in; it also pulls customers back. The promise of future rewards that may be delivered in the form of a higher status, badges or score, motivates the brand’s audience to continue interacting.  Gamification has been shown to motivate adherence to weight loss plans and even help patients to take their medicine on time.

And it’s fun. A well-made game brings pleasure, a positive emotion for a brand to be associated with.

Challenges Need The Right Difficulty Setting
But the games have to be carefully planned. Just as a thriving gaming environment is a visible sign of high engagement so an empty gaming world is an obvious sign that the gaming content has failed to resonate with the brand’s audience. That can happen when challenges are too difficult or take too long to complete, when the rewards deliver too little motivation or when the features of the game have failed to match the interests of the audience. The sort of gaming elements that would engage users of a travel service may not engage the buyers of insurance. The game doesn’t have to be complex or even look like a game; it only needs to embed aspects of gaming into real life issues to motivate customer engagement.

Content marketers also need to be careful that the games that form a part of the brand’s content strategy work with—and not compete with— any loyalty or reward programs already in place.

Gamification doesn’t have to be targeted only towards consumers. Brands have used the features of gamification to make the product user experience more enjoyable. Buyers who post the most reviews on Amazon, for example, are rewarded with higher status and a climb up the leaderboards, adding a competitive element to product reviewing.

Workplace gamification is used by large firms to make training effortless and to build team spirit among employees.

But gamification is never about the game. It’s always about how game-based interactions help to form content-driven relationships that serve and support the content strategy.In this series of posts, we’re going to focus on marketing gamification. We’ll look at the benefits of bringing gaming elements into marketing content, explore how those elements and features should be implemented effectively, and examine how gamification can keep leads engaged and interacting with the brand.

Content marketers understand that you don’t have to be a child to enjoy game-play—and that people who enjoy playing a brand’s game, enjoy the brand.

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