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Using Branded Games for Content Marketing

Branded Games
Branded Games

Gamified content helped car manufacturing giants Ford Motors to increase their revenue by $8million and generate 600% more likes on Facebook.

Verizon’s decision to gamify it’s website resulted in 30% more logins among its user base. The campaign was highly successful, with nearly 50% of Verizon’s 108 million subscribers participating in the games.

Content Marketing – What Is It?

Content Marketing, like its name, is a marketing approach that relies solely on content and its ability to engage and retain users. Instead of traditional ways of pitching your product to a user base, you use sensory material to attract and retain customers as a content marketer. These mediums can be images, videos, games, blogs, printed material, etc. In addition, shareable and interactive content takes this form of marketing even further, beyond conventional demographics.

Content Marketing Institute defines it more elaborately – “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Content Marketing has been born out of the need to engage customers more effectively and at the higher cost of traditional marketing. Recent improvements in technology have created fierce competition in the realms of custom content-based marketing. While traditional content marketing generates about 300% more leads while being 62% cheaper, market leaders have already moved to the next step : gamification. Leveraging gaming principles in content marketing, organizations have reduced banner blindness, attracted and retained more users, and dramatically increased their brand value. Branded games have increased brand recognition for a lot of small, medium, and large organizations worldwide.

As a business leader, wondering how your content-based marketing can benefit from these branded games? Here are two examples for you to consider:

How Can Branded Games Increase Your Content Marketing Potential?

Branded games can spruce up your content marketing potential in many tangible ways, gathering about their interaction patterns much easier. User data collected can be used to customize your product further to suit your user base.

Some Examples of Content Marketing Gamification:

Many of the world’s most successful and unique marketing campaigns have included gaming principles to differentiate them from their competition. Some of them include:

  • American fast-casual restaurant chain Chipotle released a memory-based game, “A Love Story”, in 2016. Intended to be a follow-up after their animated short film of the same name, this game was immensely popular. Not only this, Chipotle also rewarded participants with an online-only buy-one-get-one-free entree offer that players could cash in at any Chipotle outlet in the U.S. or Canada.
  • In 2010, M&M’s Eye-Spy Pretzel game, released on Facebook, gathered 25,000+ likes, 6,000 shares and 10,000 comments. This low-cost, gamified content marketing campaign was created in tandem with the release of their pretzel-flavored candy.

The phenomenal, almost absurd success of Netflix’s Squid Game has taught us many lessons about content marketing. Effectively utilizing social media platforms like TikTok is not enough – creating custom, gamified content across the webspace is essential for your product to stand apart from others. The most successful marketing campaigns of recent years contained some form of gamified content – Starbucks’ Rewards Program is perhaps the best example. Even Google had to give in to the lure of gaming-centric content marketing in Chrome every time it showed you that a website was down. Creating your branded game creates a fun and engaging way for users to interact with your product and creates better word-of-mouth marketing for your brand. 

The question has shifted from if to when is gaming-based content marketing taking over the world – are you all in?Some of the most important ones are:

  • Increased User Engagement:

The biggest and most immediate effect of gamification in content marketing is better user engagement. Games have a universal appeal, and using their principles in your marketing material lessens the chances of banner blindness – a situation where users idly scroll through banner-style marketing content. In addition, gaming-based marketing is interactive, which makes users engage with the material and participate more.

  • Better User Retention:

Gamification in your content marketing campaign rewards users when they complete milestones, or at times even for participating. This instant gratification converts users into customers. Rewards are also seen as a thank-you gesture from your business to your customers, making them stick to your product for longer terms.

  • Improved Brand Awareness and Loyalty:

Branded games not only create awareness for your brand, the overall transcendence of games beyond certain age groups makes the reach much more comprehensive. In addition, well-rounded gamification campaigns deliver your messages to a larger audience – an essential first step towards building brand loyalty.

  • Better Customer Relationship:

Better user engagement and retention improve customer relationships when you use gamification in your content marketing. Your marketing campaign incorporates badges, leaderboards, reward points, and loyalty bonuses to create a sense of bonding between your customer and your product. The more they use certain features, the more milestones they cross and the more rewards they unlock. This cycle ensures long-term relationships are created and maintained.

  • Useful Data Gathering and Customization:

Gaming content is relevant, accessible, engaging, and shareable. Leveraging games in your marketing campaign can significantly increase user participation and make data gathering about their interaction patterns much easier. User data collected can be used to customize your product further to suit your user base.

Some Examples of Content Marketing Gamification:

Many of the world’s most successful and unique marketing campaigns have included gaming principles to differentiate them from their competition. Some of them include:

  • American fast-casual restaurant chain Chipotle released a memory-based game, “A Love Story”, in 2016. Intended to be a follow-up after their animated short film of the same name, this game was immensely popular. Not only this, Chipotle also rewarded participants with an online-only buy-one-get-one-free entree offer that players could cash in at any Chipotle outlet in the U.S. or Canada.
  • In 2010, M&M’s Eye-Spy Pretzel game, released on Facebook, gathered 25,000+ likes, 6,000 shares and 10,000 comments. This low-cost, gamified content marketing campaign was created in tandem with the release of their pretzel-flavored candy.

The phenomenal, almost absurd success of Netflix’s Squid Game has taught us many lessons about content marketing. Effectively utilizing social media platforms like TikTok is not enough – creating custom, gamified content across the webspace is essential for your product to stand apart from others. The most successful marketing campaigns of recent years contained some form of gamified content – Starbucks’ Rewards Program is perhaps the best example. Even Google had to give in to the lure of gaming-centric content marketing in Chrome every time it showed you that a website was down. Creating your branded game creates a fun and engaging way for users to interact with your product and creates better word-of-mouth marketing for your brand. 

The question has shifted from if to when is gaming-based content marketing taking over the world – are you all in?

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How Gamification Can Boost App Sales

Gamification makes money
Gamification makes money

The mobile app market is booming. The skyrocketing number of smartphone users has propelled most marketing, innovation, and cutting-edge technologies to focus on the mobile sector. As a result, 2.5 million Android apps, 1.8 million iOS apps, and another 1.2 million apps between Amazon and Windows stores are used by roughly 5.5 billion smartphone users. With so many apps vying for attention, gamification can grant your app the edge it needs to stand out. Not only are techniques like gamification marketing powerful user attraction and retention tools – should you choose to gamify your app, gamification can also drive your sales through the roof. 

Many organizations have utilized gamifying techniques in the past as game-changers in their respective sectors. For example, airline companies (Delta), popular hotels (Hilton, Marriott), and large beverage chains like Starbucks leveraged gamification strategies to boost their app sales. You can, too – here’s why you should give it a try.

What is Gamification After All?

Gamification, explained in the simplest of terms, is the process of incentivizing user actions as a method of engagement. The name itself comes from games, since this is one of the popular techniques used by games as an engagement hook. Nick Pelling, a British game designer ,and programmer, used the term gamification first in 2002 while trying to develop a game-like interface for ATM and vending machines.

Gamification techniques use gaming principles to transform non-gaming, day-to-day business tasks into user-centric, rewards, and milestones-based activities.

How Can You Use Gamification as a Tour-De-Force in Boosting Your App Sales?

As a product or platform owner for your mobile app, you must have already faced the common hurdles in your business. Cart abandonment and customer loyalty continue to dominate the nightmare list of app-based sales platforms. Here’s how adopting gamified marketing and other gamification techniques can help your app sales blow past these pitfalls:

Avoid Customers Abandoning Carts: 

Cart abandonment is the single biggest problem for E-commerce businesses today. Customers impulsively selecting a bevy of items to buy from an e-commerce platform and then not buying it instantly costs these organizations an astonishing $18 Billion in lost sales revenue each year.

Gamifying the product browsing and checkout experiences can help alleviate this problem. While offering rewards and purchases can further encourage the users, many organizations strategically incentivize the bigger discounts behind gamified walls like countdown times, spin-the-wheels, or even scratch cards. This sense of urgency and excitement is often instrumental in users inclining more towards completing their purchase.

Increasing Customer Loyalty:

Gamification techniques often break non-gaming tasks into several milestones and incentivize each milestone. Users can use these complete-a-step-to-get-prizes mechanisms, dubbed ‘loyalty point systems’, to collect badges, points, rewards, and discounts. Leaderboards brew a sense of competition and social collaboration among customers. Some companies even allow loyalty points to be spent on charitable causes. Increased engagement of gamified apps causes more customers to come back to them, boosting app sales.

Better Customer Engagement and Retention:

By far, the biggest plus side to gamifying your app is increased focus on users and better customer engagement. Utilizing game elements, especially a point-based system that rewards customers for completing tasks – such as adding items in the cart, placing orders, referrals. Gamified apps encourage a sense of achievement in their user base. This results in better user retention. In addition, leaderboards are a clever way to introduce healthy competition between your customers that drive sales figures up. 

More Long-Term Relationships with Your Customers:

Offering prizes and rewards to your customers while they shop using your app also shows a form of gratitude towards them – further bolstering their relationship with your platform. Instant gratifications granted by gamified steps like spin-to-win, lotteries, scratch cards help your customers resonate with your app better. Long-term customer relationships thus created result in better app sales.

Better Branding and Product Recommendations:

Gamified marketing can create the buzz you need about your app and the products you sell via your app as an e-commerce platform owner. Many top gamified apps have utilized product quizzes, trivia, and mini-games as effective user engagement strategies. These techniques have boosted the brand identity; they also helped collect essential customer data and create a more personalized experience.

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Together with gamifying your business tasks, gamification marketing can be a major motivator to drive your app sales. Leveraging the power of popular gamification techniques, you can take your business to the next level as a marketer, product, or platform owner. Gamifying techniques like spin-to-win, loyalty points, and trivia increase user engagement and retention, promoting sales. Software giant Autodesk had tested the power of gamification in an exercise that ended up being a tremendous success – with a 54% increase in trial usage and 15% increased clicks on ‘buy’ links.

The industry as a whole has shifted towards mobile, and the competition has gotten more fierce in recent years. Gamifying your app can become the unique step that puts you ahead of the competition, boosting app sales and revenue that you can further invest in research, development or expansion.

Don’t forget to check out our video below for more info on what else happens when you gamify your app with Goama!

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Why Opt for a White Label Solution to Create Your Own Game?

Why Opt for a White Label Solution to Create Your Own Game?
Why Opt for a White Label Solution to Create Your Own Game?

From gamification marketing to learning and healthcare solutions, using the user-centric concepts of games into non-gaming, day-to-day activities are gaining traction nowadays. To gamify different aspects of their business, organizations are often turning to white label solutions. But why would you want to follow suit and leverage white label platforms to build a highly customized, gamified app for your purpose? Read this article to find out.

What is a White Label Platform or Solution?

Any solution, product or platform created by an organization to sell or lease it to its customers who can then rebrand it for their purpose can be termed white label. However, keep in mind that the company that makes this product remains responsible for any support and troubleshooting.

A simple example of white label products would be the stuff you see in a supermarket sold as their in-home-brand moniker. These are often made by third-party vendors and branded by the supermarket chain to look like their own.

Why Building a Gamified Solution for Your Business from Scratch Might Not be the Smartest Idea:

Many entrepreneurs or start-up owners might take it upon themselves to design or create the perfect solution to gamify their processes. Unfortunately, while the approach is commendable, this try-to-do-yourself solution has many pitfalls, including:

Trying to build a solution similar to others already present in the market is akin to reinventing the wheel – something that causes a lot of wasted effort, cost and time.

Gamification marketing and gamifying other processes are still niche and may require your organization to step out of its core competencies to develop. The increased learning curve also lengthens the time-to-market of your gamified app or solution, negatively affecting your business.

Going out of your comfort zone also means you miss out on already available expertise in the market while developing a focused, gamified solution.

Last but not least, learning new technologies and developing highly customized solutions that gamify your non-gaming standard business processes cost significantly more than using an already available white label solution.

Benefits of Using a White Label Solution While Gamifying Your Business:

White label solutions by their generic, rebrand-able and re-sellable artefacts come with many benefits. 

Quick n’ Easy branding: White label products are often offered as fully integrated suites and ready-made solutions. This makes branding them to your business very easy. You do not need to develop or modify code to ensure your branding and identity is present across your gamified marketing campaign or app. This saves you both time and money that you would spend on research and development otherwise.

Saves time and money: Developing a customized gamified solution from scratch for your business is financial, human capital, and time intensive. While many organizations prefer to build their own products, the time to architect, design, build and test the solution can take a significant amount of time and cost a lot of money. 

Especially if you are looking for faster time-to-market, white label solutions are invaluable. They rid you of the complexities of building and maintaining a product, and are more cost effective, both to buy and in long-term ownership.

Retain your focus on the core competency of your business: More often than not, investing in research and development to gamify your business may fall outside your areas of expertise. It bodes well to pay heed early to compare the gamified solution you need – be it in marketing or to gamify your learning – to the competencies of your available resources to understand the level of time, effort and cost required. 

On the contrary, white label solutions are built by companies with strong expertise in that field. Leveraging one of these solutions lets you avoid similar pitfalls that others have made earlier and use a trusted, stable platform. Moreover, troubleshooting, support and maintenance headaches are also offloaded from your org to the supplier org.

Happier Customers: When it comes to deploying your gamified solution – speed is the name of the game. The more delay you make to deliver your product, the more chances there are that your customers may end up looking elsewhere. On an average, gamification creates 6x more new business users for a business. If you want to tap into this potential, prepackaged white label solutions grant much faster time-to-market for your business, even with your org-specific customizations.

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More and more companies are taking advantage of the universal appeal of games to implement their mechanics into their daily processes. For example, Starbucks and Deloitte have all but pioneered the modern gamification bandwagon, with the former redefining marketing via their gamified rewards and the latter introducing gamified learning. White label solutions not only take away the pain of developing a gamification solution for your business, but they also are easier to own or leverage. Moreover, white label gamification platforms cost significantly less and have a faster time-to-market, making them a win-win across all accounts.

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What is Gamified Marketing?

Gamified Marketing
Gamified Marketing

The term refers to utilizing strategies and components from games within marketing campaigns and instruments. This process seeks to play on fundamental human impulses that seek challenge, accomplishment and rewards, in order to capitalize their attention, interest and hopefully, their purchasing power.

As early as 1896, S&H Green Stamps  sold stamps to retailers who used them to reward loyal customers.The method has stood the test of time, and is probably one of the most effective ways to communicate creatively with potential customers. Unsurprisingly, marketers across industries are ever eager to use gamification-driven techniques to supercharge their campaigns and get the most out of their investments. 


Benefits of Gamified Marketing

Why does Gamified Marketing work? It’s easy to answer this question once you look at the many advantages provided by this phenomenon.

·  Makes things fun: The entire point of a game is to be fun. No game, in all of human history, was played just because it was informative or educational. We come to games for fun.

Gamified Marketing zeroes in on exactly this intent. Human brains are wired to seek out pleasure, fun and rewards – fundamental components of every game. Gamified Marketing makes marketers think of people as purveyors of games, and thus designs campaigns to be as enjoyable as possible.

Above all else, fun is marketable. By making a campaign enjoyable, it has a much higher likelihood of actually cutting through the noise and being seen and heard.


·  Fosters engagement: Given that users actually have to participate with games, they require a level of engagement that cannot be matched by text or video. Furthermore, a game cannot just barge into a user’s feed and try to get their attention. Users actually have to actively play the game, which means that their engagement will be proactive and intentional.

When you gamify marketing campaigns, you interact with people who are focused and looking forward to the next stage in the game. Brands and businesses can display their messages throughout the game to already interested users. They don’t have to worry about people looking away, as they do during TV commercials or skipping intrusive ads before Youtube videos.

Gamification offers people a few moments of stimulating activity, an escape from an otherwise mundane day. By associating a brand with this good feeling, marketers can create positive product and brand awareness – the first step towards inciting an eventual purchase.


·  Wide, multi-generational appeal: The mobile gaming industry alone made 77.2 billion U.S. dollars in revenue for 2020. There’s been no sign of any slowdown in 2021.

Additionally, 35.4% of gamers in the US are in their late 20s and early 30s. The 18-24 age group counts for 24.9% and the 35-44 age group counts for 23%. About 80% of smartphone users play games on their phone. 50% of them play for about 1-2 hours each day.  That means people in key spending groups are deeply invested in games, which makes their attention highly desirable for marketing campaigns.

As mentioned before, when playing games, people are engaged in a way they are not when watching video or reading something. They have to constantly participate to progress, which means they are not zoning out. Consequently, brand messaging in games is more likely to be perceived positively and with more attention. This also stands true when you actually gamify the campaign itself.


·  More effective data collection: In the digital realm, data is gold. The more marketers know about their target audience, the more they can appeal to their preferences in order to sell a product.

However, collecting data that actually matters can be difficult if users are not actually interested or engaged with whatever digital avenue they are handling. Therefore, by generating interest through gamification, marketers can inspire users to engage. By building positive brand association through gamification (ideally through some kind of reward), users are more likely to give accurate and useful data, which helps with better understanding them.


·  Increased conversion rates: As users continue to interact with gamified elements of a brand, there is a much higher chance of clicking on or responding to a CTA. Traditional banner ads and other common marketing methods are known for being notoriously ignored. However, creative and interactive gamification strategies give users a real reason to take action. Needless to say, this will improve conversion rates.

Imagine that you are offering a 20% discount on a brand-new product if users take a quick 2-minute quiz about themselves. Users are far likelier to answer those questions, grab that discount and actually use it. So, not only will marketers get information about them, but will also end up making a sale.

To gamify campaigns is to empower them in unique ways. By using techniques that make games endlessly fun and addictively engaging, gamified marketing has the ability to supercharge it’s impact and gain results unimaginable by traditional marketing tactics. 

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5 Ways to Drive Engagement with Gamification

How Gamification Can Increase Engagement
How Gamification Can Increase Engagement

A recent study by Microsoft concluded that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds – shrinking nearly 25% in just a few years. Keeping users engaged with any content has become quite a difficult task, especially when it comes to digital content. With smartphones or laptops in hand, people have so many options for entertainment or education, that they often switch between them in a matter of seconds. 

To retain user attention, an increasing number of digital avenues (both apps and websites) have resorted to gamification.

In 1998, British professor Matthias Koepp studied how games influence the human brain. He found that as the players progressed through the game and encountered more difficult challenges, their brains released more dopamine. 

Gamification leverages this instinct in the digital realm. By incorporating elements of online games to an app, developers stand a greater chance of keeping users interested and invested in the app at hand. 

However, gamification must be implemented with a strategic approach. This article will discuss five game mechanisms that should be included into any gamification blueprint in order to improve engagement: 

Gamification and user engagement
Gamification and user engagement

·  Drive action: Motivate users to undertake some kind of action on a regular basis. If individuals actually have to take an action, they are more likely to pay attention to the content of an app. An effective example of driving action would be Facebook’s notifications on memories – older posts from the same dates in past years. By asking users to share older posts, the platform doesn’t just cause them to take action, but also formulate an emotional connection on the basis of nostalgia.
Another example would be how the language learning app Memrise notified users that they are on a rampage for a certain number of days (if they complete daily lessons for those days), and that they shouldn’t stop. This generates a sense of personal accomplishment, and motivates users to keep going back and making progress.


·  Offer rewards with an element of uncertainty: The brain’s reward system is closely linked to dopamine. Neuroscientific studies suggest that a variable rewards system triggers dopamine secretion. Essentially, people’s attention and motivation is commanded not so much by the actual moment of reward/pleasure, but rather the expectation and anticipation of reward.
When you gamify an app, there are multiple ways to leverage this instinct. It could be something as simple as showing the number of unread messages waiting for a user. It could even be displaying how many people viewed a profile (people love to feel seen and heard).
Think of how headlines work these days. Successful articles, like the ones on BuzzFeed, offer a gist of the article with eye-catching, usually long headlines that capture attention and build anticipation. Some examples – This Girl Matched On Tinder With An Olympic Athlete And Here’s What Happened Nextor 19 Things Only Women Who Lift Weights Will Understand. It doesn’t give away the story, but it creates curiosity, and leads people to click and engage.
Essentially, don’t start with offering obvious rewards (badges, points, actual money/products). Try to tease and interest them first. Make them want it.


·  Incentivize user participation: Coding app SoloLearn encourages users to participate by giving them points/XP for every lesson they complete and every exercise they correctly solve. These points can be used to unlock more practice exercises (important for complete beginners). Users can also participate in coding projects/contests where they can display their work, communicate with other coders, and get their names on a leaderboard based on their performance.These elements improve engagement by incentivizing users to keep crossing hurdles and progressing. It gives them a sense of accomplishment, which keeps them coming back to the app to get more of the same feeling.


·  Use visual and sonic appeal: The Duolingo app uses cute animated pictures, videos, gifs and upbeat sounds to help users learn. When you gamify an app, literally make it a game. Engage the eyes, ears and curiosity of your user.
Above all, make it fun. With a million distractions at hand, no one will bother to interact with your content.


·  Utilize existing trends: The Pink Nation app asks shoppers to pick products and decide if they “want” or “need” the clothes in each day’s showcase. Users have to swipe right or left, Tinder-style, to indicate their interest or lack thereof.
In this case, to gamify is to tap into an already popular user action. By now, swiping is a common occurrence in most people’s lives. Incorporating it into a new app brings familiarity and ease to the user journey. Much like Tinder, Pink Nation is easy and fun – essential elements of gamification.


The role of gamification to improve engagement is beyond question at this point. Utilise the ideas here to give your app a greater likelihood of keeping users hooked, interested and fascinated with what you have to offer. 

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Advantages of Using Games as a Marketing Technique

Why Opt for a White Label Solution to Create Your Own Game?
Why Opt for a White Label Solution to Create Your Own Game?

Games have emerged, in recent years, as the dominant app category across all platforms. Their proliferation has led to massive revenue gains. A 2020 study valued the mobile gaming market to a staggering $98 Billion, with a forecast to reach $272 Billion in 2030. Companies have started to gamify their marketing campaigns – though many are still struggling to recognize the incredible potential of gamification marketing. 

Large organizations like Starbucks, Deloitte, and Chipotle have already used gamification in their marketing to reap rich dividends. For example, Starbucks’ gamified rewards program has been a big hit among its customers, while Chipotle promoted its sustainability initiatives via interactive games. With platforms like Goama providing easy-to-use solutions to gamify any app, using the power of gaming to turbocharge your revenues is super easy.

Gamification of an app or gamification marketing has a few benefits that you as an organization should know and leverage, including:

  1. Incredibly High Engagement

People engagement is one of the biggest plus points of marketing gamification. Marketing via interactive games holds the attention of customers almost 3x more on average. In addition, the audiovisual nature of games is an essential factor in engagement and user retention.

  1. Fun Without Using Pop-up Ads

Gaming is fun, and fun is marketable. Interactive games that most gamified marketing techniques utilize focus on the fun quotient to attract potential customers. Gamification marketing also benefits from not being annoying like a traditional pop-up or banner adverts. These conventional methods have caused more adoption worldwide for Ad-Blockers, causing millions of dollars of lost revenue for organizations.

Fun, quality content in a gamification marketing campaign increases brand loyalty as well.

  1. Increased Quality of Content

Games are near the top when it comes to content. In a world where more users are young and tech-savvy, furnishing marketing via interactive games increases the quality of the advertised content. The audiovisual nature of games is an important factor in engagement and user retention.

  1. Platform Independence

Gamified marketing techniques can be applied irrespective of platforms. With users split evenly between mobile platforms like Android and iOS, similar gamification procedures can be replicated to reap dividends. Be it smart devices, laptops, or desktop machines, games are universally accessible. As a result, your marketing campaigns or strategies can be aligned to provide a seamless customer experience everywhere.

  1. Increased Affordability

Traditional marketing budgets can reach an astronomical value depending on the brand’s requirements and reach. However, the linear nature of these marketing techniques means that they are not easy to configure according to changing trends and organizational needs. Platforms like Goama can help keep the costs down by using a pay-what-you-need approach and granular levels of customizability. The cost-measuring controls are driven by analytics, presented in an easy to understand dashboard to clients.

  1. An Interactive Way to Tell the Story of Your Brand

Gamified marketing techniques help tell a brand’s story in a more effective way to its target audience. Interactive games require active participation from the users, making them feel like a part of the story being told. Brand storytelling benefits from gamification marketing’s ‘personal’ approach – and results in piquing more interest about a product or a brand. 

  1. Greater Message Retention

From time to time, an organization may choose to create awareness across its user demography of its goals and commitments. Gamified marketing techniques help achieve a wider reach for these kinds of campaigns. Chipotle’s 2013 environmental marketing campaign is a prime example of this. Gamified marketing led the organization to receive worldwide acclaim for its sustainability message.

  1. Easier Collection of User Data for Analysis


Games that are run by gamified marketing techniques can collect user data via interactive surveys and other methods. User data can be analyzed to attract your products towards demographic needs further. What level of data is collected can be customized, and additional security measures to safeguard the data can be applied.

  1. Wider Market Reach

The multi-generational appeal of games has made marketing through them incredibly effective. According to a recent study, games account for 43% of smartphone usage, something that gamified marketing techniques employ to increase their market reach. A global phenomenon, gaming can help your products reach previously impenetrable markets.

  1. Community-Focused

Successful marketing techniques that employ a gamified approach often cultivate a sense of community across its users. Social, multiplayer games are among the top played gaming categories in the world today. In addition, human-focused design elements in gamified marketing campaigns promote social drive in consumers and better the community outlook of a brand. 

Gamified marketing continues to be a hot trend. A 2019 study by Forbes showed that gamification marketing boosted the registration of new users by 600% every month. Nevertheless, many organizations are still in the dark about the positive results of gamifying their marketing. Intelligent, modern gamification platforms like Goama can help your business grow manifolds, gain new customers, and open newer horizons. Gaming has a universal reach – and teaching the power of games in marketing techniques can make the difference between your business and the competition.

If you want to find out more about how Goama can build a game for you to use as marketing or for branding check out our page here.

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How To Gamify Your App

How To Gamify Your App
How To Gamify Your App

Here’s an interesting stat: in 2019, 79% of employees claimed that gamification of activities resulted in increased motivation and purpose in their workplace. In addition, studies have shown that gamification increases customer interactions and employee productivity. Gamification is most apparent in mobile apps – since smart devices have emerged as our preferred choice of content consumption. Gamified marketing is another hot trend – a 2019 study by Forbes shows it boosts newly registered users by 600% monthly. 

All this hoopla around gamification, however, may confuse organizations trying to join the bandwagon. So, in this article, we’ll discuss ways to gamify your app and how new gamification platforms can help achieve that faster.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the process of improving systems, services, organizations, and businesses to create gaming-like experiences to motivate and engage users. Organizations utilize gamification as a tool to encourage application participation, develop programs, and even reward employees. Gamification in marketing focuses on bringing in more customers by gamifying a non-gaming context and incentivizing specific actions.

Many experts believe that gamification has more to do with the analysis of the human psyche rather than technology or methods. Some have even linked it to theories like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: physiological, security or safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. As a result, more organizations are saying yes to gamify their regular apps or super apps to increase traffic and engagement.

Several key industries have adopted some form of gamification in their products, with key ones being Learning and Healthcare. Gamification in the education market is poised to grow to a staggering $1.8 Billion by 2023, at an annual growth rate of 23% between 2018-23. Badges, leaderboards, and points-and-scores systems continue to increase in popularity in many market segments, including the Corporate sector.

How to Gamify Your App:

There are some rules that every organization should follow while gamifying their apps. Gamification rules often are more psychologically attuned rather than relying on technological standards.

  1. Setting Clear Objectives:

As with marketing an app, gamification requires proper reasons and a well thought-out plan behind it. Organizations must not be swayed by the increasing trend of gamifying applications or non-gaming contexts. Instead, they should focus on clear objectives that gamification should aim to fix.

Gamification techniques can be used for benefits like community-building, user acquisition, engagement, and retention. In addition, it can be used as a morale-boosting mechanism in employees. Gamified marketing has often been behind some of the most viral social loops in recent years. Defining a clear objective of why you want to integrate gaming dynamics into your app is the defining factor between the success and failure of that effort.

  1. Adding Value:

Gamifying your app should provide its users with tangible values. For example, the sense of accomplishment plays a vital role in customer engagement and retention. This is crucial in organizational apps intended for employees. For example, 72% of employees believe that gamification in the workplace inspires them to work harder, according to a 2018 Medium survey.

  1. Ingraining with the Ecosystem:

Incentives that a gamified app provides must be in line with its core intention. Deciding on what type of rewards your gamified app should provide as users pass milestones should be ingrained in the app ecosystem. That way, users get a seamless experience that connects between their actions and their rewards.

  1. Keep it Simple and Entertaining:

Gamifying your app need not be a daunting task. Often, simpler gaming apps engage more users. The entertainment quotient increases the retention potential for an app. Mixing these two key aspects results in a winning formula for the app. This translates into gamified marketing campaigns as well. My Starbucks Rewards is a good example of this.

  1. Build Sharing Loops:

A key rule while gamifying your app is to incentivize customer gratification. In this day and age of social media, sharing one’s achievements is key to getting brownie points. Social media looping is a popular way that superapps like Uber use to generate hype for their array of products.

For example, Cred, the credit card payment app, has easy sharing user-earned badges on various social media platforms.

  1. Quick Rewards:

Almost all good gamified apps and marketing campaigns break down the prizes milestone-wise. A grand reward at the end of the complete experience is a surefire way to attract users. But smaller, gradually increasing incentives at the completion of smaller milestones while leveling up through the app creates more user engagement.

Smaller rewards like new badges, unlocking additional levels or content and app currency payouts drive curiosity among users. Microsoft’s learning platform, MS Learn, provides users with points upon finishing a topic. These in-app currencies can then be used to unlock paywalled content.

Conclusion – Platforms that Can Help:

Superapps from tech giants like Facebook, Amazon & Google have all but skyrocketed the hype around gamification of apps. The projected total market value is projected to be $12 Billion by the end of 2021, causing more organizations to come on-board. While opting to gamify your app, consider the goals carefully and integrate it closely with your ecosystem. Gamification platforms like Goama can simplify the migration procedure. Goama offers various features, like lightweight integration, customizable UI and advanced security features to name a few. With instant gratification among the key behavioral patterns of this decade, gamifying your app may be the level-up your organization needs to tap into that potential.

Don’t forget to check out our video below for more info on what happens when you gamify your app!

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The 5 Key Criteria That Makes a Super App, Super!

Gamification services
Characteristic of a Super App

“Super App” is a term coined by Blackberry founder, Mike Lazaridis, defining it as “a closed ecosystem of many apps that people would use every day because they offer such a seamless, integrated, contextualized and efficient experience.” He envisioned a collection of apps that serve people’s multipurpose needs, seated in one mega platform. As prophesied, the age of super apps has already taken over our lives. 

The digital transformation across the globe and the rising demands of end users has pushed developers to create the ultimate “ecosystems of various offerings. ”Super apps or ‘digital front-doors’ have further evolved to a mass marketplace, offering a variety of products and services made possible by in-house technologies or through third-party integrations.

One of the leaders the Super app realm is WeChat, initially an instant messaging app that transformed into an ecosystem of services including but not limited to taxi booking, virtual wallets, payment channel, hotel reservations and of course, gaming.

Map of the WeChat mini program Ecosystem

Similar super apps have sprung up over the past years, starting off as a single use focused app and that eventually morphs into a multi-purpose mega platform that offers a variety of services that addresses people’s needs. 

 Contenders to WeChat are the likes of Grab, Gcash, Paymaya, Gojek, MPT4U in Asia Pacific, Tata in India, Yandex Go for Europe and Careem in Dubai. There are a wide number of tech companies aiming to be THE ultimate super app. Even The Facebook Company, with their purchase of WhatsApp depicts its ambition to bite into Super app market pie.

 So what makes a super app really super? We’d say it has to do with the elements and characteristics of being able to provide an all-in-one or one-stop-shop capabilities to end users. The more service or functionality being offered by a mobile app, providing convenience to end users, the higher its level of superpower.

Let’s deep dive into the the 5 characteristics of a super app:

  1. Super apps are the ultimate go-to app on the phone

The ease of use and search of products and services in an all-in-one app holds more value to end users because it is convenient and saves time. Imagine it as another home copy of your home screen where you can get to all the services you need to sort out your daily life within just one app! e-Wallet, check. Bills payment, check. Games, check.

Grab
  1. Has at least one service or function that has a high open rate

Super apps like Gojek and Grab started off as a ride-sharing app and each added functions such as instant messaging and e-wallet. Gcash started off as a mobile wallet and payment center, and now offers multiple verticals in-app. Whatever a super app was initially built for, it was doing its ‘job’ superbly, allowing them to morph into an ecosystem of offerings.

Gojek vs. Grab
  1. Easy access to end users’ wallet

Why let your end users keep money in another app when you could have direct access to their wallet? This is an important function being done by many apps with the ambitions of being a super app, even such as the likes of eCommerce platforms Lazada and Shoppe launching their own e-wallet function that enables ease of access to payments for their users.

Lazada Wallet
  1. Open and welcome to partnerships with other platforms

Super apps are like your malls with multiple shops offering various services. The very reason why they are what they are is their ability to be open to collaborations and partnerships. Their app structure allows for other platforms to be seamlessly integrated within the ecosystem they have built. Gamification platforms like Goama enjoy partnerships in over 24+ countries across the globe, providing a highly curated library of addictive games.

  1. To sum it up, from a business perspective, a super app provides much value to businesses in general

The capabilities of a super app can increase growth, and engagement. Additionally, having lots of services that cater to different needs of consumers will help with retaining users.

It is no secret, Goama loves super apps and integrates seamlessly with one, providing the fun aspect that retains the end user on that super app, lengthening end user time spent while they are not using the key service that the super app provides. It is entertainment within reach, without having to install multiple game apps on their phone. 

End users simply need to tap into the super app and they will have access to high quality casual gaming. Goama also provides monetization opportunities through game tournaments that makes end users hooked on further.

Super apps are here to stay, and ever ready to serve end users’ multipurpose needs. What about you? What do you enjoy about the super app that you are using?

Source:

https://www.techinasia.com/heck-super-app

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