Playable marketing is an effective content marketing strategy that combines the excitement of play with your marketing objectives to win new customers, engage existing customers and increase loyalty. Gamification can help you achieve a wide range of marketing goals such as boosting customer engagement, increasing sales, and enhancing brand awareness - but to do this effectively, you need to plan your playable campaign strategy. A well-planned campaign can help you achieve your business objectives, connect with your audience, and provide valuable data.

In this guide, we will take you through the essential steps to consider while planning your next playable campaign.

Before you start planning your playable campaign, you need to identify your marketing objectives – what do you want to achieve with the campaign? How will you track the success of your campaign? Are you looking to drive sales, increase customer loyalty, or promote brand awareness? Defining your objectives will help you focus your campaign toward achieving them. Once the objectives are clear, you should set KPIs that can be measured.

Who is your target audience? What is their age range, location, and interests? Knowing your audience is essential in developing a relevant and engaging game. You should customize your game to appeal to your audience.

Once you know your objectives and your audience, it’s time to develop a game concept that aligns with both. The game concept covers the rules, rewards, and structure (logic) of your game. You need to craft these elements to ensure they are engaging, challenging, and closely related to your marketing goals. Ensure that the game logic is easy to understand, but challenging, and incentivize participants to keep playing or engaging with your content.

You should also consider what resources you have to develop in terms of graphical assets for your campaign, or if you need to hire a graphic designer or use design tools. We have detailed design guides for all our game types, and if you don’t have a paid design tool we recommend giving eg. Canva or Figma a go.

Data collection is one of the highlights of playable campaigns! What data do you want to collect from your audience? We encourage you to think: what is the information you would like to get from your target audience that is hard to capture with regular marketing?

The obvious way of data gathering in games is of course the registration form, but we encourage you to take into consideration also the possibilities of the game data itself, especially if you are using one of our knowledge games. When you carefully design the questions and answer options for a quiz, personality test, or priority puzzle, you have a huge opportunity to get real insights about your players!

The data collected can be useful in understanding your target audience and developing your future campaigns. Utilize Playable’s ESP and CRM integrations for instant data flow. With the integration setup, you can map up the detailed game data to be sent to your customer database, instead of only the information of the registration form. Transferring the game data to your CRM system is a great way to start segmenting your customers. Remember, your customer success manager can help you get started with segmentation, so feel free to reach out to him/her if you want to know more.

The success of a gamification campaign largely depends on its promotion. That’s why it’s important to plan your promotion strategy thoroughly. Choose the channels where you will promote the campaign. Will it be a social media campaign, website promotion, or email campaign? Your choice of channels will depend on your target audience and the objectives of your campaign.

A call-to-action (CTA) is crucial in converting players into customers. You will need to determine what action you want users to take after playing the game. Is it signing up for a newsletter, buying a product, or sharing the game with their friends? The CTA must be clear and actionable.

If you are collecting email permissions, it is essential to follow up with your players after they have participated or when your campaign ends. The follow-up communications will depend on the objectives of your campaign: you can e.g. send a thank-you email, offer a discount on a product, or invite them to participate in the next campaign.

Test, launch, and measure - The launch of a playable campaign is just the beginning of a larger process. You need to constantly test, tweak, and optimize your campaigns to ensure maximum engagement and ROI. Use analytical tools to measure the success of your campaign, keep track of what works and what does not work for your unique target audience, brand and marketing proposition - and even the time of year or specific goals of your campaign, that will often impact your approach and success rates - to allow you to adjust your strategy accordingly. Repeat the process to create a series of ever-improving campaigns.

For example, a game that showed great results in the eCommerce industry targeting women might not show the same results in a B2B context targeting young professionals.

Planning a playable campaign is an exciting process that can boost your branding efforts significantly. Gamification will give your audience an unforgettable experience and motivate them to interact with your brand regularly.