Unlock the potential of playable marketing by learning how to effectively promote your campaigns!
Planning and creating a great playable campaign is only half the story – getting your audience to participate and generating buzz around your campaign is equally important. You could say that a game only exists once you drive traffic to it!
Here, we outline some effective strategies to promote your playable campaigns to ensure they are a success. Plus, we highlight great examples from various brands!
The most important thing is to consider all the touch points where you meet your target audience in their journey with you. When you have this perspective in mind, you will find many great opportunities that will enhance your campaign’s reach. We often see that campaigns are only shared on social media or via email, which are great promotional channels, but it can be great to try other channels too!
Showcase the benefits of participating in your playable campaign (including your prizes and rewards) in social media posts. Bear in mind that the average attention span on social media is short – so you should be quite precise & to-the-point, to make sure you catch your audience’s attention at first glance. We recommend highlighting the game already in the graphics of your post or even creating a screen recording of your game to really bring your customers’ attention to it.
Encourage your followers to share these posts with their friends to reach a wider audience. You can also create a branded hashtag that participants can use to share their experience with your campaign.
DFS, the well-known furniture retailer in the UK did a fun “What’s your thing” personality test, where consumers could discover their best couch options. They promoted the test largely on their social media channel as seen in these screenshots from their Instagram account.
Email marketing is a great way to reach out to your existing customers and subscribers to promote your campaigns. Create a dedicated email campaign that highlights the benefits of participating in your campaign and includes a call to action to encourage them to join in.
You can also use email to send reminders and updates throughout the campaign to keep participants engaged and motivated (especially to those who haven’t yet participated!) With our ESP integrations, you can include the information of participation in your customer database. Email marketing is also a great way to utilize always-on campaigns. Why not create a triggered ‘Always-on’ game for your customers’ birthdays, or one to use in your welcome flow for new subscribers?
Chopstix, a Pan-Asian quick-service food chain, decided to have a fun game on their app to engage their users on Chinese New Year. Amongst other places, they promoted the game in their email newsletter as seen in this screenshot.
Paid ads are an effective way to promote your campaigns and reach a wider audience. Google Ads and Meta Ads allow you to target specific demographics and interests, ensuring that your campaign is seen by the right people. You can also use retargeting ads to reach people who have already interacted with your brand but haven’t yet participated in your campaign.
For Plumber’s Day, Wavin France introduced their plumber’s quiz campaign to gain new leads and generate brand awareness. They promoted the quiz using mainly Facebook and Instagram ads specifically targeted towards plumbers.
If your marketing mix includes partnering with online influencers, we encourage you to incorporate promoting your playable campaigns as well. Using your collaborators’ reach will help you to share your campaign with a larger audience.
If you are collaborating with different influencers or using different social media channels you can use UTM parameters to track the effectiveness of your influencer marketing efforts.
Aqua D’Or, the mineral water brand, leveraged gamification to generate awareness for their new Bobli Vitamins waters. They introduced a personality test entitled “Which Bobli are you?” and they had partnerships with influencers to promote the campaign.
Promoting your playable campaigns at your brand events, such as conferences, fairs, sports games, etc, can be a great way to attract your audience to your booth, and collect their marketing permissions.
At a recent Bakken Bears match, sponsored by them, Sparkassen Danmark wanted to engage the audience with a fun quiz about the bank. To promote their campaigns, they distributed flyers at a “festival area” before the game, as well as had banners with qr codes at their stand.
Utilize QR codes on your in-store POS materials, on your products, on purchase receipts, flyers, ads, merchandise, etc.
Having displays with QR codes in the waiting lines of your store is a great way to make the waiting time of your customers more enjoyable. Plus, they could participate to win extra discounts. This is an amazing way to collect new emails and possibly valuable data points.
The Playable platform provides each of your campaigns with a unique QR code with just one click.
Kop & Kande did a fun memory game for Mother’s Day in 2023 where participants could win 12 gifts for their moms. The campaign was promoted online via various channels as well as using qr codes in their physical magazine and on streamers in-store.
Gamification is a valuable technique to use in-app to increase engagement, app usage, user satisfaction, and overall revenue generation.
Used within an app, gamification can also provide valuable data and insights that can be used to improve the app features, design, or marketing strategy, which leads to greater success for the business.
Adding a game with rewards that can be played once a day by users is very successful at making sure visitors come back to your app daily. This way, you are always at the top of mind!
COOP is one of Denmark’s largest consumer goods retailers. For Christmas 2023, they decided to launch games every day from Dec 1st to Dec. 24 in their COOP app. The game was promoted in-feed as seen in the picture.
Playable marketing is a great way to get visitors to interact with your website. By encouraging visitors to participate in your website’s activities, you can increase the amount of time they spend on your website, reduce bounce rates, and drive conversions. You can publish your campaign in an iframe to let visitors play the game without leaving the website.
A great initiative could be to create an always-on campaign that appears as an exit-intent popup. This way, you get one last chance to give a good impression and turn visitors into potential customers.
For Pancake Day 2023, SPAR UK did an interactive landing page campaign, with a scratchcard game “Grate the Cheese”, as well as recipes, product discounts, and more. They promoted the campaign on various channels, including on their website homepage using this banner!
You can create versatile pop-ups to showcase your gamification campaigns on your website. You can use them to capture the attention of visitors and direct them further down your page, promote a specific offer or campaign, encourage email sign-ups, reduce cart abandonment, or provide other valuable information. Pop-ups can also provide an additional layer of personalization and help to create a sense of urgency that leads to increased conversions.
A great way to promote a gamified campaign could be to create a pop-up on your website with a CTA that leads visitors to the landing page of your campaign. This is particularly great if you have a lot of visitors to your site to begin with.
Lampemaseren, a Danish reseller specializing in selling all kinds of lamps, wanted to boost their online sales, so they added a pop-up on their website with a wheel of fortune where website visitors could win a discount for their next purchase.
We’ve even seen (or you could say heard) our customers drive traffic to their campaign on the radio or in podcasts! An idea would be to have a podcast listened to by your audience to promote your experience, a bit like influencers would do on social media. Or, you can also have audio ads specifically made to appear on Spotify, Apple, and other services where people listen to their favorite podcasts.
For audio content, you probably will succeed better with a shortened URL that is easy for people to spell!
Always consider all the channels and places where your target audience meets your brand! Sometimes, the best results come from the least expected places.
Keep in mind that each of these strategies requires a different approach and tactics, so it’s essential you experiment and find what works best for your brand and your target audience.