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Choosing gamification software can be confusing. Use our interactive market map to narrow your options and find the perfect solution.
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Our fondness for games is hardwired into our brains. If you’re looking to increase engagement, boost brand awareness, and generally make your content more enjoyable, gamification is a strategy you’ll want to implement.
Gamification is a pretty nasty-sounding word, but don’t worry. I’m going to break it down nice and easy. Here’s what I want to do in this post:
- explain what gamification is and
- provide some examples of the ways to apply it.
I also want to be clear about one thing: gamification doesn’t always mean playing games. Gamification is a broader principle that’s about content engagement. Gamification is no doubt an effective way to enhance your content and increase audience engagement. It’s even been found to boost conversions up to 7x! By experimenting with various techniques, you should be able to pull more of your audience in and motivate them to engage more frequently and on a deeper level.
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Digest...
Gamification leverages basic human intrinsic motivators, factors that inspire us to initiate an activity for its own sake, because it is interesting and satisfying in itself. The five most important intrinsic motivators – Autonomy (“I control”), Mastery (“I improve”), Purpose (“I make a difference”), Progress (“I achieve”) and Social Interaction (“I connect with others”) – are common to everyone, and behavioral research has shown that satisfying them can make anyone’s work more productive and more pleasing. Simply put, gamification is a strategy that uses data to motivate performance. Gamification platforms capture the data that employees generate as they interact with systems across your organization and put it to work to create engaging experiences that drive performance, business results and competitive advantage. With gamification, you can use that data to build a 360-degree view of all your employees and take advantage of opportunities to motivate them everywhere they work. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄
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When done right, gamification platforms combine interactive design, actionable data analytics and the latest research about universal human motivators, leveraging them to influence actions by users (whether those users are customers, employees or partners). And it’s not about meaningless trickery or empty contests for valueless points or badges – those mechanics alone won’t motivate anyone. No, when you gamify a workplace environment the right way, you apply the same principles that have always inspired people—achievement, status and rewards, so that employees are motivated to attain certain goals –and you leverage the results to learn more about your audience and how actions shape results. As a result, gamification can lead to real, measurable improvements to a wide range of key performance indicators (KPIs), including those most important to marketing success. ___________________________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Digest...
Benefits of a Customer Loyalty Program for Your Customer -- > Grow Enthusiasm and Excitement -- > Create Loyal Brand Advocates -- > Refer a Friend or Colleague Benefits of a Customer Loyalty Program for Your Business -- > Improve your Marketing and Sales Effectiveness: One of the benefits of implementing a customer loyalty program is the increased visibility you’ll get into your customers’ preferences and business drivers. Customers who feel appreciated and supported are more likely to complete surveys, participate in panel discussions or serve as a reference – all of which can help your business grow. -- > Advance your Customer Insights -- > Boost your Financial Planning You’ll be able to be able to improve retention rates. Customers who are engaged and active are more likely to remain your customers, and the reason they stay with your business? These customers have gained value from your organization outside of your product or service. They feel valued and have developed a valuable relationship with your business. -- > Increase your Competitive Edge __________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Excerpt...
Aberdeen’s ongoing Sales Effectiveness research includes an annual look at the Sales Performance Management (SPM) space, examining best practices around sales compensation, incentives, territory and human capital management. The use of game mechanics increased dramatically in the last year, from only 4% of survey respondents in 2012’s Motivate, Incent, Compensate, Enable: Sales Performance Management Best Practices (December, 2012), to 28% of end-users in the new edition, Beyond the Quota: Best-in-Class Deployments of Sales Performance Management (January, 2014). __________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Digest...
1. Do your homework. Since knowledge is the seed of innovation, you’ll need to begin by developing a deep understanding of gamification –not only its benefits and costs, but also the best vendors out there. 2. Align gamification goals with your business strategy. Once you’ve identified the core problem, consider the results you hope to achieve, the behaviors you’d like to improve and your key audience. 3. Select a method to measure results. It’s imperative at the outset to identify ways to evaluate your ROI. 4. Engage sponsors and promoters. Once you have researched gamification, targeted the issues and identified how you will measure results, you’ll need buy-in from key members of your tribe. 5. Find the money. 6. Build a plan with a strong business case and present your vision to executive management. 7. Bring in technical team for due diligence. After your success with senior management, bring in your preferred vendor for due diligence. Invite your vendor to meet with your core team of advocates. 8. Bring in digital strategy consultants and design advisors. Following up, the vendor should present your core team and IT department with a customized digital strategy, as well as a flowchart that shows how data will be captured and delivered into the gamification platform and back again. 9. Extend consensus across the company. __________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Digest...
Game theory is the study of interdependent rational choice, not independent. More simply put, it is people making strategic decisions based on how they think someone in the group will respond to their decision. Game theory is about choices and outcomes, and can be illustrated in two ways. Think about approaching your content marketing with a bit of game theory. If the game is between you and others creating similar content, you attempt to understand the moves of your competitors and make decisions based on what you think they will do. You want to minimize your own losses. You think several moves ahead. You could apply game theory to your next content planning meeting. You could debate a long time on whether idea A is better than idea B, which is usually futile; both likely have merit, they are merely different decisions that will lead down a different path. The question isn’t which idea is best, but rather which path is the best. Turning the debate into whether idea A or idea B is the better path in the game can be more effective and lest caustic to those whose ideas are rejected. How can you use gamification with your content marketing? The possibilities are wide open, but here are a few ideas to get the wheels turning: -- > Create achievement levels. Create an online course, and track their progress through levels all the way up to “graduation.” -- > Introduce scoring. Reward those who comment the most on your blog (or share your content the most on social media). -- > Suggest skill level. For membership sites, allow them to unlock new content and features as they consume your content. The more they read and share, the more is made available to them. -- > Create a game in your content. Whether you write a blog post where you let people choose the ending If you have gamification in place, game theory may more easily come into play for your audience. There is clear competition. They are competing against the others, and are making decisions to come out ahead. __________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Intermediate/ Digest...
Marketing technology vendor Ion Interactive announced this morning that it is pivoting from providing general marketing tools to helping marketers create interactive experiences the company calls “marketing apps.” These marketing apps could be calculators or quizzes, contests or configurators, and they’re delivered online. “When you’re marketing into a B2B space, typically conversion rates hover around 5-10 percent,” he said. “This client’s 10-page interactive quiz got a 21 percent conversion rate … and that was at the very end of the funnel, people who filled out a content form. 50 percent of people actually engaged with the entire form.” Other companies doing similar things include SnapApp and Wishpond, Brinker says, as well as companies like Offerpop that offer interactive contests and content via social and web channels. The key is engagement and interactivity in a topic that a prospect cares about, that also helps educate the prospect about what they need to do. ____________________________________________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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____________________________________________________ ► FREE: AgileContent™ delivers more quality content to your market! Get your FREE 14 Day Trial NOW!: http://goo.gl/rzeg79. No credit card required! ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Advanced/ Digest...
At its core, gamification is meant to inspire valuable user behaviors that drive your business’s bottom line. However, many businesses implement gamification as a standalone product, independent of the other social elements of their site. One reason why many attempts at gamification don’t reach their business objectives, or fail outright, is that all of their social elements – sharing, commenting, chatting, and log-on – are siloed, stand-alone implementations. In other words, gamification needs to relate directly to the social elements of your site – the user-generated content, sharing, feedback, social login, and scorekeeping. But all these elements need to be integrated in such a way that they work in unison. This is much easier said than done. Such complexity makes it more challenging for your IT team to keep up with social networks and API changes, which can break your site’s social elements and leave visitors confused and unengaged. Businesses looking to get the biggest impact from gamification need to find or build a suite-based social platform that integrates all the valuable social elements that increase brand exposure and drive conversions with the game elements that drive loyalty. __________________________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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I was recently asked whether gamification could be of use to a company. My short answer was "yes, if done right".
Intermediate/ Excerpt...
Some say gamification is currently at a state of inflated expectations. If pursuing gamification solutions, their recommendations are: -- > Organizations must understand the potential of gamification to design behaviours, develop skills, enable innovation and begin to deploy low-risk applications. -- > Gamification project managers must engage game designers or organizations with experience in gamification in early implementations. -- > Strategic planners must learn how gamification is being applied in their industries and how their organizations can leverage gamification to engage employees or customers. -- > Business managers must assess the impact of the longer-term discontinuities that gamification will cause and begin to position their organizations to capitalize on the trend. -- > Any design with gamification in mind must have business objectives clearly defined in order to design an experience that does not disappoint. -- > In addition, the user experience should be thoroughly and iteratively tested during development. __________________________________ ► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
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Digest...
Pros -- > In-depth engagement. Game mechanics provide more in-depth engagement than other forms of digital advertising due to its ‘additive experience’ for users. For example, one FarmVille advertiser is Green Giant frozen vegetables. -- > Inherent motivation to return to the source of interaction. Achieving a certain level of status motivates consumers to engage frequently with the brand. -- > Uses fun to embed brands in customers’ lives. Cons -- > Marketers provide no long-term value to users. Without a competitive ‘me too’ aspect, minimal levels of engagement could result in virtual ghost towns. -- > Game-based marketing has the potential to disrupt traditional loyalty rewards programs when customers feel it takes too long to consider engaging worthwhile. -- > Confusing ‘free’ with ‘status’. Not understanding what it is about video games that engages consumers is a recipe for failure. Tips to Keep Your Gamification Strategy on Track -- > Take the best lessons from games and apply them to your specific business model; it’s not about turning everything into a game or turning your business into a gaming company. -- > Identify behaviors fans are already performing and reward them appropriately for those contributions. -- > Offering free products is a quick win, but offering customers status above their peers has the potential to create more long-term brand loyalty. -- > The key reward that marketers can offer consumers is status, followed by access to new content, power over their peers, and free stuff, according to Zichermann. ___________________________________ -Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected). -If you like this scoop from The Marketing Technology Alert (brought to you by iNeoMarketing), PLEASE share by using the links below.
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Digest...
Tips for using gamification in your content marketing strategy 1. Start small. If you've never tried gamification, it's a good idea to start with a simple "game" so you can gauge results and become familiar with how the theory works. A good way to start is rewarding visitors for liking your Facebook page, following your company site on Twitter or viewing your videos on YouTube. 2. Break up the "game" into manageable pieces. If your game or the reward system you're creating for your Web site is so complex that you need a two-inch-thick manual to figure it out, your site visitors are going to throw up their hands in dismay. A better approach is to divide the new activities and new goals into small pieces that visitors can learn about gradually. 3. Tie gamification to your marketing goals. While it's exciting to see a surge in site visitors due to your new gamification plan, make sure to structure your plan so that such visitors don't just "play" your game and exit the site, doing little towards increasing your bottom line or creating better product awareness. 4. Get help. Gamification can be a little tricky, especially when you first begin. Plus, unlike traditional content marketing, it requires regular maintenance and updating. If you're like most small business/Web site owners, you're already wearing a number of hats. There are several companies, such as Badgeville and Gigya, that specialize in creating and administering gamification programs. ___________________________________ -Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected). -If you like this scoop from The Marketing Technology Alert (brought to you by iNeoMarketing), PLEASE share by using the links below.
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Today, we decided to answer all the questions you have (or could have) when planning a contest on Facebook, the web and mobile. This infographic is mostly based on internal data, that means on all the contests created with Kontestapp.
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For the in-trial marketers at Autodesk, gamification is not a toy. Because of gamification, Autodesk experienced a 40% increase in participation in a free trial for one of its products.
Excerpt...
In this B2B Summit presentation, you will learn: - How gamification has been conditioned into our lives
- Autodesk's two approaches to in-trial marketing
- How gamification was implemented into a free trial of a high-end product
- The next step for Autodesk
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Fun and games go hand-in-hand, and businesses have started to harness the power of that winning combo for their own benefit. This clever pairing is officia
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Gabe Zichermann, chair of the Gamification Summit, tells why games will remake employee learning and boost performance.
Gamification is transforming business strategies across organizations large and small. It sounds like child's play, but getting it right takes work. Here's why gaming is worth the time and expense: 1. Games boost intelligence. 2. Games make annual evaluations better for both bosses and employees. 3. Games engage millennials. 4. Games succeed when they give players a higher purpose. 5. You won't believe how much work they'll put into a game. 6. Games boost performance.
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Email Marketing - Landing pages running $500 giveaway contests generate 700% more email subscribers than landing pages not running contests, according to a recent study by Incentivibe.
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Key excerpt...
As you can see, gamification can also work in marketing. Just keep these four things in mind. - Identify the behavior(s) you want to modify. Don’t simply use gamification tools to make something more fun; make it more fun with a goal in mind.
- Know your audience. Every audience has different needs and will respond to certain triggers in different ways. Use a trigger that appeals to your customers and makes sense.
- Set realistic goals. Goals should be attainable, but they shouldn’t be no-brainers. Folks have to do some work to feel a sense of accomplishment.
- Recognize and reward. One of the most powerful features of gamification is the social aspect. Ensure that people are rewarded for doing what you want them to do and encourage social sharing of good news. People love to see their names in lights!
So, how can you challenge your customers? How can you give them something that they care deeply enough about to impact a particular behavior? The answer is different for every company, for every customer base, and for every behavior—but gamification can be done in a fun and engaging way. It’s all about finding the right levers to pull!
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Summary...
Gamification platform provider Badgeville yesterday launched a toolkit for the Salesforce.com cloud platform for building enterprise apps.
Badgeville for the Salesforce Platform empowers business leaders to drive higher user engagement across cloud-based applications built on the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution.
The announcement follows the launch of Badgeville's AppExchange solution, which enables businesses to increase engagement within their CRM applications.
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Eloqua had a captive audience for gaming mechanics in its Topliners community. Adding leaderboards and game elements energized its community.
Excerpt...
Adding the gaming module has raised engagement—blog posts, status updates, comments, and so on—by 55 percent, according to Jive's own measurement tools, but it's also improved the quality of the interaction. People who previously would have swooped in, found an answer to a question, and left are now compelled to post, Foeh says. Lots of people who aren't even customers check out the community. "The community is open," she says. "It's actually helped us close a lot of deals."
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Four reasons these apps fail and what you can learn from them.
Summary...
Here are four reasons why poor implementations of gamification will fail: 1. Lack of planning and strategy. Gamification is only effective when it encourages specific behaviors to achieve specific goals. Too many business gamification implementations don't identify success factors and therefore don't incentivize the right behaviors. 2. Bad processes. Game mechanics can motivate people to operate in accordance with specific goals when those goals are well defined. But even if the goals are clear, they might not align with business objectives. Gamifying bad goals can be just as destructive as ignoring goals altogether. 3. Poor design. Poor game design was one of the major reasons Gartner predicted the demise of so many gamification apps before 2014. Expectations for games have never been higher. 4. Unrealistic expectations. Business gamification can be effective when it's directed at a specific audience, supported with specific, effective goals, and built professionally to ensure engagement. But of course it has limitations. It's important to remember that game mechanics are most effective for jump-starting behaviors, not sustaining them. That's because at a certain point, the impact of any game mechanic will begin to fade. When done right, however, by the time the extrinsic motivator has worn thin, users will have recognized the value of the new behavior and continue it based on their own intrinsic motivation.
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