Are You Playing Games With Your Customers? You Should Be

Who didn’t love a scavenger hunt at summer camp? Now online scavenger hunts are a terrific way to engage your customers through “gamification,” a marketing tool that incentivizes your customers to take action on your behalf.

While gamification has been around for several years, businesses are still trying to determine the best way to use it to boost brand awareness and help foster a strong connection with their customers.

Gamification can enrich a person’s experience with a business by creating incentives for interaction. While there are endless ways to implement gamification in your marketing strategy—loyalty programs, special offerings, social media contests—one of the best ways to spark engagement using gamification is the modern, mobile app scavenger hunt.

Scavenger hunts are a way to engage existing and potential customers because they invite people to interact with their families, friends, and your company for more than a few minutes. While social media is a great tool for promoting your brand, scrolling, clicking, sharing, and liking only go so far. Posts and photos on social media sites may grab your attention for a few minutes, but they do not necessarily stick with you.

In a scavenger hunt, contestants commit to an activity that will be enjoyable and stimulating, and provide them with a chance to win great prizes. You’re promoting your own company and services, not by just placing clever, aesthetically-pleasing ads in a newspaper or online for people to see, but by designing a competition for people to partake in and directly engage with you. Participants are committing to your hunt for the afternoon, and possibly with your organization in the future.

Tips for Running a Successful Scavenger Hunt

Hunt The City D.C. Scavenger Hunt participants and winners of the Best Team Costume Contest, Sam Stitt and Morgan McGovern. Photo Credit: Lisa Ferguson Schmidt

Have fun: This goes without saying, but your hunt better be enjoyable for all participants!

Know your target audience: Is the hunt designed for children, teens, adults, or families? The tasks in the hunt should be challenging but doable for the segment you are trying to attract. Not sure who you want to target? Go for the millennials who love staying on top of new trends, using their IPhones in everything they do, and are always looking for different kinds of entertainment.

Set goals: Your business should have specific goals in mind for what you want the hunt to accomplish. Whether it be sales, building loyalty, developing brand awareness, or raising money for a cause, the mission should be clear. With the right goals in mind, the scavenger hunt will be easier to design.

Offer prizes: Hopefully participants are genuinely interested in having a fun day scavenging around, but there still needs to be an incentive for glory at the end! A grand prize and smaller prizes throughout the hunt will enliven the competition.

Engage in social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest—these social media platforms have become an integral part of business marketing strategies. A scavenger hunt should have a social media component that engages users online before, during, and after the event. Advertise before the hunt, insert clues for tasks on social media sites throughout the hunt, and talk about the hunt’s success when it’s over so that participants will be inspired to “play again.”

This past summer, Global Vision Communications planned a scavenger hunt— HuntTheCity DC—that took participants all around our nation’s capital to complete as many of the 55 tasks as they could within a three hour time limit. Points were awarded through an app on a smartphone for tasks such as photo challenges, GPS check-ins and challenge questions. A sidebar on the scavenger hunt app allowed participants to see the other hunters’ points, establishing another incentive for hunters to pick up the pace and rack their brains even harder on the next challenge question.

Sponsors for the event included Coca-Cola, Uber, the Citi Open Tennis Tournament, and CQ/Roll Call. All the sponsors appreciated having a captive audience directly engaged with their brands for an afternoon.

So the next time you’re thinking of a fun way to engage customers, think scavenger hunt!

The post Are You Playing Games With Your Customers? You Should Be appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post Are You Playing Games With Your Customers? You Should Be appeared first on AllBusiness.com.