As customer preferences continue to evolve, it's imperative for brands to connect with their audience through genuine, customized interactions that reflect their appreciation for each individual consumer.
According to research conducted by Microsoft, today's consumers possess an attention span of merely eight seconds, and this duration diminishes by 88% annually. Consequently, marketers face the challenge of capturing consumers' attention within a brief window. However, it's evident that deeper engagement with consumers yields more favorable outcomes, whether it's influencing purchasing decisions or fostering increased brand engagement post-experience.
Games and gamification offer valuable moments of engagement, allowing brands to immerse their customers in captivating experiences that guide them on a specific journey. This prompts behavioral changes, be it driving a purchase or enhancing engagement with the brand after the experience.
Through gamification, brands can cultivate trust, loyalty, and authentic relationships with customers by acknowledging and rewarding their engagement, rather than relying solely on chance. By using gaming elements, brands can tailor experiences to specific customer archetypes or personas, enhancing the connection between the brand and its most engaged users.
Why is measurement crucial in this context?
In today's competitive landscape, every brand employs a diverse marketing mix encompassing above, middle, and below-the-line campaigns. However, with numerous customer touchpoints, it becomes challenging to attribute results to specific marketing efforts and understand how these activities translate into tangible outcomes.
Moreover, in an era where digital experiences are garnering more investment amidst budget constraints, CMOs increasingly prioritize the returns on digital initiatives. The adoption of scalable, measurable gamification enables brands to access real-time data, extract valuable customer insights, and leverage actionable metrics for informed decision-making.
Marketers often incur multiple costs to reacquire users. Employing gamified experiences allows brands to maximize engagement from a single acquisition. For instance, while it may cost a brand $5.48 to acquire one user, guiding that user through a measured gamified experience can ensure they return an average of three to five times, ultimately reducing the long-term cost of customer acquisition.
What can we measure with these experiences?
Gamification occurs within a digital realm, facilitating the measurement of user interactions with content, including their viewing patterns, frequency, and content revisits, providing a comprehensive view of the customer.
By transitioning competitions from physical settings, like customers needing to fill out and drop paper entries into a box at a physical store, to a digital environment, brands can achieve several benefits. This shift enables them to implement precise tracking mechanisms, demonstrate the fairness of competitions, and most importantly, reshape the customer-brand relationship to be founded on the individual efforts of customers.
This digital transition empowers brands to thoroughly assess customer behavior at every touchpoint throughout a marketing campaign, eliminating the need for guesswork and enabling real-time adjustments to the campaign. If early campaign data indicates that a brand has achieved its target goals through organic engagement, they can make informed decisions about whether to reallocate the media budget initially designated for the campaign.
Conversely, if a brand identifies a drop in engagement midway through a campaign, they can opt to increase media spending to ensure the campaign's sustained effectiveness, thereby maximizing the return on investment.
So, why should brands consider gamification?
The crucial question brands should be asking themselves is how to leverage their brand equity to reward their most engaged users, cultivate authentic relationships with customers, and gain deeper insights into their customer base.
In today's competitive landscape, brands can no longer rely solely on differentiation through price, product, or service. To stand out from competitors, they must distinguish themselves by offering consumers genuine value in the form of customer-centric experiences.