Automation and gamification in Digital Marketing can offer marketing professionals enhanced efficiency, cost savings, and a more satisfying customer experience. Even though you may feel intimidated by automating and gamifying your marketing efforts, it is easier than you think with the right advice!
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1 . Importance of Automation in Modern Marketing
2 . Taking Advantage of Gamification
3. Optimizing your Digital Marketing Strategies
Interactive content, games, and apps engage your audience with your brand. Game-based marketing will keep users interested in your brand and coming back for more, thereby enhancing your results from each marketing channel.
So, what can you do to maximize audience engagement through automation and gamification and automation in your digital marketing strategy?
Before we delve into the nitty-gritty, we thought we should explain the advantages of each concept individually and break down how you can take advantage of an effective combination of the two. Stay tuned!
Importance of Automation in Modern Marketing
Marketing automation offers a lot of promise — with less work, you could potentially get more leads, more conversions, and ultimately, more profit. According to Nucleus, automated businesses generate more leads and sales, reducing their marketing overheads by 12.2% and increasing sales productivity by 14.5%.
Here are a few specific ways automation can fit into your marketing efforts and improve your chances of success.
1 . Gathering Meaningful Analytics
An automation system collects and analyzes data on leads, customers, sales, and campaign outcomes. Marketing professionals can use this data to assess the success of previous and current campaigns and predict which strategies will be effective in the future.
By employing these auto-analytics, every stage of your marketing process can be improved. Also, brands can utilize automated A/B testing to optimize their content in real-time.
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2. Improving Customer Interactions
Developing a relationship with a client or lead requires effective communication. Yet this doesn’t have to mean staff members spend the entire day answering emails.
Automating email messages is a great place to start. For instance, following a conversion, a series of well-timed and well-written emails can follow up to keep the lead warm. There are two obvious benefits to this:
- It assures that a critical bit of information is communicated promptly.
- There’s no additional effort required; you’re done once you set up the rule.
Email marketing is a great way to get a sense of the power of automation. Once you’ve got a firm grip on this, you can move on to other options, such as using chatbots for instant customer support on your website, sending out text messages with limited-time offers, and scheduling phone calls.
3. Getting the Most Out of Your Budget
It is a matter of efficiency; teams are more productive when each member can focus on what they do best. This results in faster project delivery without the need for additional staffing.
You can get the most from specialists when you automate repetitive tasks. In this way, your company can allocate the savings directly back into campaigns to maximize returns.
4. Redirecting Focus
As explained above, increasing efficiency is the goal of any automation. The workload associated with marketing projects is often enormous. Automation allows you to focus your team’s time on tasks requiring expertise, such as communication with clients and strategy.
Top ad agencies use automation to take care of a wide swath of processes, including but not limited to:
- Market research
- Analytics
- Social media management
- Content scheduling
- Lead nurturing
- Customer communication
If a task does not require complete human involvement can and should be automated to a degree. By automating your business processes, you can increase productivity and improve efficiency.
Taking Advantage of Gamification
It is time to introduce the second part of the “out-of-the-box marketing equation” — gamification. It is the combination of the two concepts that can bring the most substantial results, and marketers the world over are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to make the most of a changing landscape.
So, what strategies can you use to boost engagement through gamification in digital marketing campaigns? Let’s begin by defining what gamification is; then, we’ll discuss how you can leverage it.
1. Gamification — 101
The gamification process involves integrating some form of a game into your marketing campaigns. A gamified campaign should have clear goals, fun tasks, clear goals, tangible rewards, and an intuitive user interface. Moreover, the rewards should be highly shareable and encourage group participation.
Some of the most popular games used in brand marketing include:
- Smartphone and tablet apps
- Interactive content (polls, quizzes, etc.)
- Augmented reality projects
Gamification does more than increase brand awareness. It results in greater engagement as well, and engagement has been shown to increase customer spending by as much as 23%.
Digital marketing gamification tends to attract new customers, promoting word-of-mouth marketing and customer loyalty. The more fun your branded game is, the more likely users are to share their achievements via social media. This builds momentum and gets more eyes on your business.
So, gamification in digital marketing aims to increase engagement, enhance customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive sales. Let’s explore how all this works.
2. Increasing Engagement
You can create a framework for continued engagement and sharing by implementing a game into your marketing efforts. This also encourages the creation of user-generated content (UGC). By leveraging your audience’s word-of-mouth, you will increase brand awareness across all channels.
Many brands have seen excellent ROI by incorporating games into their brands, including the likes of Domino’s and Teleflora.
Incorporating a game app that lets you create your own pizza boosted Domino’s earnings by 30%. On the other hand, Teleflora customers receive points for interacting on social media. Once it introduced this strategy, the company experienced a 105% increase in Facebook traffic.
Game-based engagement also boosts customer satisfaction for brands that use it to raise engagement. For some demographics, logo animation may be a factor that encourages people to visit your site. Engaged audiences drive revenues, and using a game to keep customers informed about special offers, services, and products is an excellent way to keep them interested. In turn, they’ll spend more on your business.
3. Targeting the Right Demographics
Digital marketing with gamification performs well across all age groups and demographics. Still, it is especially effective with young Millennial and Gen Z users due to their overall understanding of gaming concepts.
While Generation X and older Millennials experienced early gaming in their childhoods, younger Millennials and Gen Z grew up with games as an almost indispensable part of their upbringing. Games are inherently part of the digital world that they’re accustomed to.
Many Millennials and Gen Zers believe technology is intrinsic to their identities. A vast majority (68%) of male Gen Z respondents say gaming is an integral part of who they are. Video games have become an indispensable part of social life, and the brands and media users consume are heavily influenced by the games they love.
It’s great to create a game that will appeal to a broad audience, but make sure it’s tailored to the people who will engage with it most. Investigate popular games among young people and consider implementing a similar strategy in your marketing efforts.
Optimizing your Digital Marketing Strategies
If you are considering automating and gamifying your business now, here are some tips:
1. Customer Experience Is Key
Customer response ultimately determines whether any marketing attempts are successful, including automation and gamification. The good news is that the latter can help you gather data for the former. You can then use this data to establish critical touchpoints and map the customer experience.
You can then adjust your approach and add new features to your gamification strategy where necessary.
2. Personalization Makes a Difference
Piggybacking on the entire customer experience argument, we would be remiss if we didn’t discuss personalization. A generic strategy doesn’t cut it in this day and age. Brands need to show their thanks to their loyal customers, and personalization is one of the best ways to do that.
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Gamified automation can customize content for each user, creating unique customer journeys across the board.
3. The Fundamentals Haven’t Changed
Despite the massive leaps digital marketing has made in terms of automation and overall technology in the last few years, the fundamentals remain the same. Before embarking on any marketing campaign, you need to know precisely what you want to achieve.
Unless you know your message from the get-go, the effort will likely be rudderless and unlikely to yield much. No matter what you want to accomplish, automation and gamification can help you achieve it, but make sure not to forget marketing basics.
Conclusion
Automation and gamification in digital marketing offer many benefits. Marketing professionals find these benefits irresistible. Higher efficiency, cost savings, increased productivity, more insightful analytical data, and better customer service are all highly sought-after items in the digital marketing world.
Using gamification in digital marketing concepts and marketing automation can be a highly successful strategy for any company, as long as they have good planning, clear goals, specialized training, and optimized content.
At their core, automation and gamification are all about raising brand awareness and driving sales. Keep your outreach consistent, and encourage your users to join in. This is the only way to see a bump in interactions and sales as the word spreads and more of your audience begins to realize your brand’s potential.
Author Bio
Kevin is a Marketer that works as an SEO Manager and is a Passionate part-time blogger.
