Promo games for your company

According to statistics, a person receives from 6,000 to 10,000 marketing messages per day, so it becomes increasingly difficult for a business to win the attention of potential customers. However, according to a report from the Digital Marketing World Forum, 60% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand if they enjoy playing the game with it.

This is because people love video games. At the end of 2021, this market reached $180 billion, and the most profitable game projects bring publishers millions of dollars a month.

But this doesn’t mean that you need to change the field of activity. Instead, you can use gamification to attract customers and increase sales in your company.

Promo games are used in their marketing strategies by many large corporations, including Microsoft, Nike, Starbucks and Samsung. In this article, we will talk about how they can affect your business.

Gamification is a technology for adapting game mechanics to non-game processes to increase engagement. In companies, it can be used for different purposes:

• attracting a new audience;
• customer retention;
• increase in the average check;

• staff training and motivation;
• conducting interactive installations.

Promo games have proven their effectiveness not only in B2C, but also in the B2B segment. They are especially useful in cases where you need to sell a complex product and convey the value of the offer to a potential audience. Instead of a long presentation or another commercial offer sent to the mail, you can invite a potential client to play a game that will fully reveal the benefits of the product and is guaranteed to leave a mark in his memory.

Gamified marketing is a valuable tool in the world of e-commerce. It will help the company:

• Get to know your customers better. As practice has shown, in exchange for participation in the game, the audience willingly shares their personal data with the business – e-mail, mobile phone, etc., which can be further used for other marketing purposes.
• Increase awareness. A person sees thousands of promotional offers a day, but he will remember his own gaming experience much better.

• Convey the value of the product. An interactive game can be a fun way to tell your audience about your offer.
• Use viral marketing. A person is more likely to share an interesting game with his acquaintances than a regular promotional offer.
• Make repeat sales. The integration of points or discount coupons upon achieving certain gaming successes will motivate customers to contact the company again and make additional purchases.

The process of creating promotional games differs from traditional game development, as their main task is not only to provide exciting gameplay, but also to fulfill specific business objectives. Consider the main stages of production.

For a game to be in demand, it must satisfy the needs of the potential audience. Therefore, when forming a strategy, you need to start not from your personal preferences, but from real analytical data. At this stage, several questions need to be answered:

• What is the average age of the audience?
• What game genre is of interest to customers?
• Which platform would be the most preferable: web browser, Android, IOS or PC?

• What rewards motivate the audience?
• How much time is a person potentially willing to spend on achieving the goal?
• How and what business tasks will the game solve?

It is also worth considering that simplicity is important for promotional games. A person needs to be provided with clear rules and provide quick access to the gameplay.

When the strategy is determined, specialists create prototypes of the future game: characters, environments, game mechanics. This allows you to understand how the project will look before its actual implementation. If necessary, any adjustments are made at the pre-production stage that do not have a significant impact on the budget and production time of the game.

Production

This is the most time-consuming stage of production, during which designers create character models, level designers bring to life an immersive game environment, audio designers work on soundtracks, and a programmer writes thousands of lines of code to bring the in-game content to life.

Also, at the production stage, APIs are connected and a connection is established with the company’s CRM system. Thanks to this, in-game achievements of customers will be automatically recorded and transferred to the sales department for further processing.

Testing

The playesters identify all possible bugs that may have been made during the production stage, and also determine the “fun factor” to make sure that the project will really be interesting for the potential audience. This helps to identify and fix any bugs to provide players with an excellent user experience.

Launch and updates

This is the most exciting part of developing a promo game when it gets into the hands of the end user and shows the first marketing results. However, in order to maintain people’s interest in the project in the long term, it must be constantly developed. New game mechanics, levels, events – all this will help to establish constant interaction with the client, so technical work does not end after the release.

Promotional games form the first impression of the client about the company and its product, so their development requires not only skills, but also real experience on the part of technical specialists. If you want to upgrade your marketing and take it to a new level, contact AVADA MEDIA. We will help design and implement an effective tool for interacting with the audience.