In part 1 of our look at how Content Marketing needs to be engaging, we established that your content marketing strategy needs to be engaging and I suggested that gamification would be a good route to consider when executing the campaign.
Looking at the most popular Social media for B2C content marketing we can see that many of these sites use scoring as part of their gamification of social media
- Facebook – number of friends, shows who is the most popular
- Twitter – number of followers shows who is the most interesting
- YouTube – the number of views shows the most engaging videos
- LinkedIn – do you have 500+ connections
- Google+ – number of friends, shows who is the most popular
- Pinterest – repins signify the popularity of your images
The still well-known but less used social media sites for content marketing all use various forms of gamification:
- Vimeo
- Foursquare
- Flickr
- Stumbleupon
- Slideshare
- Tumblr
But that is social media and these are the sites that form part of your content marketing campaign and not all of it, so how else can you tie gamification into your whole strategy?
Sometimes it’s not easy to tie in the whole campaign as you don’t have control over your target audience on other sites and cannot easily follow them but keep these tips in mind when developing your gamification strategy:
- The game belongs to the user, give them the option to play or not
- What challenge will receive what reward – people like to earn rewards
- Give them a path to mastery, allowing them to grow their skills over time
- Allow side challenges and multiple paths to cater for your audience
- Create a compelling narrative
- Have clear goals and rules of play
- Give lots of feedback and encouragement
While tips are all well and good for a general idea, I thought I would also include a few practical suggestions that may help spark an idea that is more specific for your campaign:
- Profile progress bars
- Badges, from newbie to pro
- Rewards – sample packs, exclusive events, limited competition entry
- Trophies – digital kudos badges showing all what has been earned.
- Leaderboards – most comments on the blog, most influential person (the one who has generated the most comments in response to their comment/article)
- Level Up – By completing a series of straightforward tasks or missions users are rewarded with a higher level
- Apps, ads and videos that unlock achievements and exclusive deals after engaging with them.
- Facebook Apps – the more you do the more chances you have to win
- Social loyalty schemes with points accumulated for reviews, comments, answering other queries
Gamification like games is a wide open field, you should always try something new and don’t be afraid to take a chance. If you have any further ideas or suggestions for gamification for content marketing do let us know.