Gamification is the process to use game thinking and mechanics for solving a problem and engaging users. It is a trend that has spread to business, effective employee management, and marketing strategies. With time, more and more companies started to use gamification in business to engage workers and customers, gamification can be used by marketers to show their brands.
What is gamification?
Gamification refers to applying gaming mechanics to non-gaming processes for several reasons for adding interest and fun, engaging, and enabling people to experience a sense of competition to gain victory.
Adding a gaming element to the strategies of the companies leads to a combination of business and fun. Thus, all routine activities become more attractive. This has a great impact on the employee performance and marketing of the company. More than half of the world organization has started using gamification for their business operations.
However, just like any new trend, a poor implementation might put gamification at risk of failing its business goals or falling short of expectations.
Using gamification to grow your business
Here are a few ways to use gamification for growing a business.
1. Integrate it with personal development
When you put gaming elements such as points and scores into practice, make them valuable and meaningful to the career and ambition of employees. People prefer self-development. This is the reason gamification has to go along with the real achievements of the employees to become a method to motivate and encourage employees. Do not forget to offer people the ability to share their achievements and progress with others.
2. Use recognition and reward
When employees achieve good results at work through gaming activities, they require recognition and word of encouragement in order to stay motivated. Thus, you have to design the gamification strategy so that workers have rewards and bonuses, like badges.
It should visibly recognize their contribution. This, in turn, will have an impact on the performance of the company and will motivate other employees.
3. Combine teamwork and compete consciously
Even though the two components of work are equally engaging and crucial, they might have disastrous effects when taken to extremes. So, it is necessary to balance them. This makes sure that the competition does not turn out to be a race to the top. It has to serve as a motivation for the employees to work as a team and realize their personal potential.
Gamification is great to improve employee engagement inside the company. Also, it is an efficacious way to attract customers to the brand. If you include gaming elements in your marketing strategy, it can spark the interest of the customers. With the increased usage of mobile devices, the trend has turned out to be highly popular. When you bring some entertainment and fun to the interface of your brand, you will be able to give people a much pleasant experience as they interact with the brand. This, in turn, will improve their loyalty towards your brand.
4. Share socially
A majority of the game developers in the present time add a social element since social media has become a significant part of our lives. The gamification has to be designed to encourage the consumers to share their achievements. Playing the app alone is not going to have much effect. To extend your audience, you will require social sharing.
5. Use gaming to interact
Games offer entertainment and interaction. Common ways to promote in traditional media do not require the participation of the customer, but playing games does. Competition can increase engagement. Thus, you need to integrate contests into the games.