In our past gamification articles, we have identified how gamification can help transform your marketing outreach by focusing on key objectives such as increasing engagement to speeding up business processes (such as a gamification program for salespeople or an HR onboarding program for new hires)
In today’s article, we will dive into some key behaviours that drive those objectives and one of the core foundational bases of Thinklogic’s gamification demand generation program.
Behaviours are the foundation of all gamification programs. It is not enough to define your business objectives; you must also determine which valuable user behaviours will drive them. In our gamification program, we often take these behaviours into our gaming design considerations and from market feedback.
- Reviewing of product/solution
- Ranking of one’s understanding of the specific product/solution
- Self-learning or knowledge updating
- Making a purchase decision
- Challenging oneself to be self-fulfilment or brand-recognised
However, it is important to distinguish between what is valued and valuable behaviours for the purpose of our gamification program.
Valued behaviours are behaviours that your target audience already performs because those behaviours have an inherent worth to them. For example, a valued behaviour might be reading or posting content on a content site such as your business blog. On an e-commerce site, valued behaviours may be accessing product reviews and purchasing items. Valued behaviours are innate behaviours people naturally perform on your marketing or sales methodologies.
Valuable behaviours are behaviours that are important to you. Such behaviours are the ones that drive revenue or growth on your site. Similarly, they are also the ones that help you meet the business objective you have identified for your gamification program. Using the above examples again, a valuable behaviour is probably to have them review, feedback or comment on your business blog. Or executing a higher valuable behaviour, such as resharing the chosen content to their peer network.
In a perfect world, your target audience’s valued behaviours will align perfectly with the behaviour that your marketing plan views as valuable. However, if they don’t align, it is on each of us here to figure out a way to make it so!
That is where gamification, specifically rewards, comes into play. As we build your gamification campaign, we often start by rewarding valued behaviours, such as
- Taking part in the gamification campaign
- Answering the questions in a logical and orderly manner
These are the ones that a user is likely to perform because they are of some worth or necessity to the user, but recognition of the effort on the user’s part is the important point here.
Then as those rewards gain acceptance, we slowly layer on rewards for the behaviours that we want users to perform, such as
- Clicking on the hints provided, which link to the specific section of your digital asset for consumption
- Downloading the respective materials on their result page that cater to their gamification result.
If the progression is seamless for the user, eventually, those valuable behaviours will become valued behaviours!
WORD OF CAUTION!
Even sometimes, as we applied this highly successful approach, there are still times when a behaviour we encourage is not applied as we expect. Then there is a need to rely on the reward being crazy compelling. Such an example could be:
– Users try out the crossword puzzle in no logical order and get frustrated despite the hints provided.
- Users randomly put an answer to each quiz question in the hope of completing it fast to be one step closer to the reward.
- Users taking part in the gamification program did not pay attention due to other distractions. Taking a longer time than usual to complete the program.
In such cases, the user might view the reward receipt as more like a business transaction than true e-learning.
Disclaimer note:
The opinions expressed in this post are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ThinkLogic Media Group or any company and their associates.
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