The intensely competitive marketing landscape is such that not only every trick in the book is required to stay ahead of the pack, but newer methods of user engagement need to be invented on a near-constant basis.
With consumer experience trends now headed towards a preference for personalised, unique experiences for each user, consumer engagement has never been more important. A way for a brand to meet such demands lies in interactive content.
You want to grab the attention of your customers and stand out from your competitors, and this means that you can no longer sit still and provide them with static content. In a manner of speaking, you will have to figuratively grab their attention.
But what grabs the attention of consumers today?
If there’s one word you’ll learn today, make sure it’s this: gamification.
By turning every customer experience into a kind of game, with immediate rewards and perks upon completion, you provide your customers with a tangible source of progress and advancement that keeps them coming back for more.
There is an inherent competitiveness in gamification, which makes it fertile ground for sports fans and the marketing of sports. Gamification opens up all kinds of frontiers for brand management.
While every aspect of the advertising field is profiting massively from gamification, sports marketing is perfectly positioned to reap the lion’s share of the spoils using this extremely engaging method of customer interaction.
With gamification keeping your customers engaged and coming back, it also represents an abundant source of valuable zero-party data of your customer’s habits and preferences, providing a synergistic relationship where the more a customer uses your product, the more engaged they will be, and the better their user experience can be.
This virtuous cycle ensures that everyone profits while maintaining brand loyalty and customer satisfaction at a high level. Connecting to sports fans through gamification is thus, quite simply a slam dunk.
Online interaction and gamification are changing and will continue to change how we watch sporting events today, and the methods by which this can be applied are numerous. Fans can make score predictions in a Premier League match, or predict the number of shots on target, or the percentage of possession a team might have against the other.
By gamifying these predictions, which already take place on a casual basis anyway in pubs and in conversations while in traffic on the way to the stadium, sports fans are rewarded for their knowledge and nous with rewarding in-game points which can be used to further enhance their user experience.
Further intensifying the competitive element of football, gamification can harness the inherent spirit of competition among sports fans, matching them up with other users on a global leaderboard, which in turn drives users to outdo one another, thus engaging with the brand more.
By creating this gamified, competitive experience, sports fans go from devoted fans to highly engaged and interested players in your brand’s gamification, and you will reap the benefits of this by securing a channel for your customers where you have their undivided attention.
With the future of gamification bright and the dawn of the cookie-less Internet experience close at hand, the pieces are now in place for the ultimate be-all-end-all in marketing-consumer interactions. An entertaining approach goes hand-in-hand with the increasingly vital and rising method of data collection – zero-party data.
And for sports brands, this leads directly to increased revenue on all fronts. A gamified experience leads to increased subscriptions, sales of merchandise, tickets, and in some cases, an introduction into an entirely different sporting event.
Using zero-party data, it has never been easier to provide the customer what they want, but more importantly – what they didn’t know they wanted. With data powering and informing marketing decisions and quickly feeding back towards user personalisation, the possibility of increasing a brand’s profits several times over becomes an extremely probable outcome, instead of a mere pipe-dream.
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