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digital marketing

3 Ways Gamification Can Help Your Marketing

October 3, 2012 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

What Is Gamification?

Gamification, whether you realize it or not, has already had an impact on your everyday life. If you’ve ever checked-out in an online store that marked your progress, earned badges using Foursquare, or been a part of a customer loyalty or “frequent-flyer” program, then you’ve experienced Gamification first-hand.

So what’s it all about? Gamification is the practice of taking game-design elements and applying them to non-game contexts. The achievements, leaderboards, rewards, and progress bars in our examples represent elements we might find in a game, but are used when we shop or interact on social networks. While the technique has been around for a while, Gamification’s marketing uses have only begun to take hold.

Incentivizing Online Activities

The goal of every game is enjoyment from the user, and one way this has been accomplished online is by offering incentive for completing certain actions. “Sign up and get the first month free,” “Receive 10,000 Bonus Miles after your first year,” and other similar offers have compelled consumers to take action because it results in something of value, i.e., a prize, reward, or bonus. The marketing implication of this lies in the power of achievement and feeling a part of something exclusive. Your customers will be far more likely to sign up for a newsletter, answer a survey, or fill out a form if they feel as though their actions are worth something.

Game Mechanics

The web user experience is often one of the most important marketing materials, as it constitutes one of the first touch points a prospective customer will have with your business. To that point, there are many opportunities to “gamify” this experience, starting with your content. According to a theory known as “Cascading Information,” consumers respond better to information in small pieces, ensuring they fully comprehend everything before delving deeper. How can this apply? Take YouTube, for example. The average viewer will typically drop off after only a minute or so (and you can check the analytics to prove it). By creating shorter sections of this content, you build your audience up to greater levels of complexity. Throw in a call to action (or a reward) along the way, and they’ll come back in droves to see what comes next.

Interactivity & Engagement

As I’ve said, these techniques and mechanics have the central purpose of appealing to the user—making something that is boring or taxing enjoyable and worthwhile. From a marketing perspective, all these translate to better engagement with your target audience. The other great part about utilizing Gamification is that it can apply to all aspects of your Digital Marketing plan, including developing contests via social media, advertising limited-time promotional offers, motivating staff & employees, or combining incentives to create a “meta-game,” the possibilities really are boundless.

If you don’t think Gamification fits in with your industry, think again. Even if it’s not at the forefront of your marketing strategy, game elements can still work behind the scenes to help you define customer behaviors and lead them to your company to fulfill their needs. Let us know what your thoughts on Gamification are in the comments below (1,000 Bonus Points go to the first 5 who post!).

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: digital marketing, engagement, gamification, marketing tactics

The Need for Digital Marketing Education

March 8, 2012 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

In the recent blog “8 Predictions for SEO in 2012”, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz predicted the rise of a serious certification program. I believe that there is a real need for our industry to identify and support a serious certification program; however, I have not seen any organization dedicated enough to establish themselves as an industry leader. Institutions of higher education need to start preparing their students for the “real world”. In my opinion, colleges and universities are doing a poor job of identifying opportunities to integrate traditional marketing knowledge and skills with today’s internet marketing environment.

There are several organizations that offer certification programs, but I am not sure that they can keep up with the changes or obtain a consensus between fact and fiction. Case in point: Several members of our team at DaBrian Marketing Group have taken courses provided by SEMPO Institute, but we have not been notified of what the latest updates were to the course information. As of February 21, the SEMPO Institute closed up shop for their certification program.

The colleges and universities need to introduce their students to internet marketing as a whole. Within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, you will have a difficult time identifying colleges or universities that offer an internet marketing course as part of the undergraduate marketing curriculum. This extends to web design and development area of study, as graduates often lack basic SEO knowledge.

There is a serious need for education within our industry from the university level as well as alternative methods. Even as an adjunct professor, I don’t expect a student to be an SEO expert, but I would expect them to know the marketing fundamentals for an online marketing campaign. At the same time, internet marketing is not just SEO, PPC, and Social Media. We need to align the traditional concepts to internet marketing beyond business or marketing. These concepts should be accessible to IT graduates as well. Internet Marketing is not just for marketing people anymore, but it’s now IT, Public Relations and Math. We need to start demonstrating the crossover of these disciplines within our industry. It starts with us and we need to reinforce the need for education in internet marketing and encourage the progress of certification programs.

Let us know what you think!

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: digital marketing, education

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