What is Brand Engagement and how to increase it with Gamification

Traditional marketing campaigns no longer keep up with the modern world and aren’t enough to effectively engage customers and foster long-term loyalty and brand advocacy. When audiences expect businesses not only to provide products and services but also to contribute to society and embody high-quality values and a unique brand voice, something called brand engagement takes center stage.

By tapping into humans’ psychological and emotional motivators, brand engagement creates an entire community around the brand and engages users not only to purchase products or services, but also fosters a faithful and loyal audience that returns over and over again. And one of the crucial parts of successful brand engagement is gamification. That’s what we’ll talk about today, and we’ll start from the brand engagement definition.

What Is Brand Engagement and Why Is It Important?

Brand engagement definition is something that has become very crucial in recent years because of the rise of social media and closer interactions between the brand and consumers. So, brand engagement is the relationship between both: the company and its audience, its quality, its style, and its longevity. Brand engagement exceeds transactions and product purchasing, and builds strong bonds, where the audience participates in the brand’s activities and values creation.

Brand engagement and the gamification in modern marketing.

Did You Know?
Through gamification, users shift their perception from the passive buyer to an active participant in your brand, which makes interaction almost like a shared journey. It’s not even marketing, it’s deeper and emotional relationships.

While traditional marketing focuses on dry numbers, clicks, sales, and revenue, brand engagement prioritizes emotional response from the audience. The recent survey shows that 89% of customers are loyal to brands with shared values, while 76% are more likely to purchase from brands with a strong emotional connection. It clearly shows that nowadays, brands can’t limit themselves only doing business in their specific area. To earn the audience’s loyalty and remain competitive and modern, they also have to transmit their values, respond to social media trends, and challenges of society.

Emotional connectivity between the brand and customers lies deep in psychological motivators. Brand engagement exploits the sense of belonging to something greater and bigger, being part of a group of like-minded people. Bonded together through emotions and shared values, customers are more likely to participate in brands’ activities, social media interactions, user-generated content creation, continuous usage of products, and word-of-mouth referrals.

How brand recognition influences consumer decisions.

Since consumers are more likely to make purchase decisions based on brand name, it’s becoming more and more crucial for brands to build strong brand engagement. It also entails long-term value and multiple other benefits. When the audience is loyal to the brand, they’re more likely to choose it among competitors, forgive mistakes, and accept new offerings. When the current market environment is overwhelmed with offers and businesses, it’s crucial to build a unique brand with a recognizable communication style, continuous interactions with the audience, and powerful engagement.

Benefits of Brand Engagement

Brand engagement has become a fundamental rule for all companies that want to build an engaging and effective marketing strategy. Aiming into emotional and psychological patterns, brands create strong connections with audiences that bring solid benefits, including:

Increased Brand Awareness

Improved brand awareness engages not only customers, but also active users, participants in your activities, and real fans of your product and business. It’s a hot audience that likes, shares, and comments on your publications on social media, tags friends, creates user-generated content, and promotes your brand across the web. It’s an army of fans that improves your brand visibility and is crucial for your brand awareness.

There is an effective tip on how to improve your brand engagement and, consequently, increase your brand awareness. Using Winday (gamification platforms for gamified marketing campaigns) allows businesses to enhance brand awareness. Fun and entertaining instant games and tournaments engage passive users in activities, turning them into active participants.

Pro Tip:
When competing on leaderboards, winning games and tournaments, participants are more likely to share their results in social media, expand the reach of your business, and increase brand awareness.

Gamified content encourages users to interact with the brand’s activities, and as a result, brands gain attention and build long-term awareness and affinity.

An example of an instant game on the Winday platform created for Camper shoes brand.

Improved Customers Retention and Loyalty

Strong brand engagement strategy creates efficient customer retention and improved loyalty. Nowadays, many users choose brands not only by their business and product quality, but by shared values and common beliefs. This common ground makes users much more loyal to the chosen brand, and they’re more likely to return for additional purchases. For instance, latest insights shows that 59% of US consumers will more likely stay loyal to a brand for life once committed. Talking about cost-efficiency, retention of the existing users is significantly more effective than acquiring new ones.

Loyal customers tend to spend more time on your platforms, explore additional offerings, and purchase more products, and they cost less than engaging an audience that knows nothing about your brand.

Gamified marketing campaigns are a perfect way to reinforce customer loyalty. Brands can create engaging instant games or challenging tournaments and customize skins, gameplay balance, screens and rewards according to their brand style and their audience preferences, boosting customer retention and loyalty. One of the examples of how brands use personalized bonuses and challenges is Starbucks’ reward program, which significantly improved their retention rates.

An example of a tournament game on the Winday platform created for Tavern and Trail wear brand.

Did You Know?
When emotionally engaged, users are more likely to purchase more products, promote your services, stay loyal much longer and, ultimately, maximize brand engagement. Emotionally engaged customers are more valuable than usual ones.

Vibrant Community to Support Your Brand

Efficient brand engagement brings like-minded people together around your brand and builds a loyal community around it. This community becomes a powerful support group where everyone is on the same page, and they foster communication, shared values, and experiences. These communities thrive on the open platforms, like social media groups, Telegram channels, or brand-hosted Discord servers, which are the perfect playground for their communication, discussions, providing feedback, and gamified activities. These communities build a whole brand ecosystem.

Through gamified brand engagement strategies, you can boost and enhance these communities. Multiplayer competitions, shared goals, and leaderboards aim right into users’ sense of belonging to the pack, social recognition, and connection. By adding gamification, brands can significantly increase brand engagement, and gamification platforms are the best place to do it seamlessly, cost-effectively, and easily.

For example, Winday offers a wide range of in-built tools for gamification that spark engagement and streamlines community activities.

An example of a Bubble Shooter game mechanics available on Winday platform.

Brand Advocacy or Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Effective brand engagement strategy leads to brand advocacy and highly valuable word-of-mouth marketing, which is priceless for every brand. A loyal audience is the free megaphone of your brand! When successfully engaged, they gladly promote your products and services to friends and subscribers, sharing their positive feedback.

Efficient brand engagement boosts conversion rates and drives word of mouth.

According to McKinsey, word-of-mouth drives from 20% up to 50% of all purchases. People seem to trust the recommendations of friends and influencers when choosing a brand for purchase. Word-of-mouth marketing is a highly influential form of advertising that is efficient and free for brands, generating organic traffic and high conversion rates.

Word of mouth is one of the most effective marketing strategies that drives sales growth.

Advocacy is something that brands can amplify through the gamification features, such as referral-based challenges, “share to earn” mechanics, and “invite-a-friend” features. These gamified campaigns tap into intrinsic and extrinsic motivators to drive users to spread the word about your brand. In platforms like Winday, it’s easy to build such mechanics and launch a gamified campaign that turns on your brand advocacy.

Increased Sales and Upsales

Of course, smooth and successful brand engagement directly affects the sales and upsales. Loyal audiences are not only open to repeat purchases but also to upselling, discount offers, and promotional offers. Engaged users trust your brand recommendations, pay attention to your promotions, and are more ready to fill a shopping cart with one brand.

Additionally, successfully engaged customers mostly have a higher Average Order Value (AOV) than usual or random customers. When users feel invested with time or money in a brand, the more involved they become in the brand’s activities and offerings.

Gamification is a great tool for increasing your upselling rates through fun, game-like activities. For instance, progress bars, dynamic discounts, tiered rewards, and bonus offers motivate users to increase their purchases in order to get additional rewards.

Product of Services Improvements via Feedback

Successfully engaged users become active contributors to your brand, sharing their feedback, reporting issues, writing reviews, and promoting your products and services through social media. Additionally, engaged users are more likely to create user-generated content, which also contributes to your business improvements and business growth. This thoughtful, baked-in experience feedback loop allows brands to rapidly improve their services and offerings, increase customer satisfaction, and establish substantial growth.

Traditional Strategies to Boost Brand Engagement

However, the efficiency of modern marketing is not measured only by gamification and fast, entertaining features. Traditional brand engagement strategies are still the key to engaging users with your brand, and you cannot afford to neglect them. Let’s take a look at core marketing strategies that can also be fundamental tips for boosting brand engagement.

Content Marketing

It’s a fundamental and essential strategy in digital marketing. Without content, there is nothing to show customers and nothing to engage. Content is the main bait for users that offer them valuable information or entertainment in exchange for time, attention, and, eventually, purchase the product or service. Content can take different forms: blog articles, videos, social media publications, infographics, how-to guides, case studies, user stories, and testimonials.

Content marketing is still fundamental for brand engagement.

Content marketing is like the building blocks you use to build effective brand engagement. Consistently producing valuable and relevant content for your audience, you foster deep emotional connections, build trust relationships with them and boost brand engagement. Also, the content marketing is deeply aligned with brand identity and values, becoming more than just a source of information; it’s like a character itself that engages users to participate in its life and story.

Personalized Customer Experiences

Nowadays, personalization has become a vital part of successful marketing. Powered by AI and machine learning solutions, utilized by CRM platforms, personalization allows businesses to offer customers recommendations tailored to their preferences. By tracking customer journeys, gathering and analyzing vast amounts of data and user behavior, advanced technological models build highly accurate personalized recommendations that are aimed directly at the consumer’s needs. As a result, organizations significantly boost their customer satisfaction and conversion rates, and increase brand engagement.

According to classic Epsilon research, 80% of customers are more likely to buy products when brands offer them personalized experiences. When customers get exactly the same recommendations that they need, they feel like someone read their mind. It creates bonds of appreciation and even friendship with the brand, and therefore, leads to business growth.

Social Media Activity and Marketing Campaigns

In the modern digital environment, social media has become a major platform for communication not only between people but also between brands and customers. These platforms are a perfect spot for continuous real-time communication, storytelling, and building an emotional connection.

Social media marketing campaigns allow organizations to develop their unique brand voice and use it in regular publications, create Instagram Stories, polls, Q&A sessions, and live videos, to increase brand engagement and grow not only subscribers, but also active participants and buyers. It gives brands an opportunity to boost brand engagement and the organic visibility of the organization.

To leverage the full potential of social media engagement, it’s important to use it not only for promotion but rather for communication with the audience. Respond to comments, share user-generated content, and turn on gamification campaigns. Little fun games, like tournaments, instant win games, and challenges, drive traffic and turn subscribers into participators and loyal community members.

The reward setup for a tournament creation on the Winday platform.

Brand Engagement Tips:
Not every brand engagement marketing campaign requires a huge scale and a great budget. Sometimes, a small gamified campaign, using spin-to-win or instant game mechanics, is enough to engage an audience and create the first community around your brand.

Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are the classic and effective way to engage customers in repetitive purchases and continued interaction. By rewarding returned customers and offering them personalized perks, brands build long-term relationships with audiences and foster loyalty. Among the most effective options of loyalty programs are:

• Point-based systems, where users earn points for actions like purchases or leaving a review on products, which they can exchange for additional bonuses.
• Tiered rewards, which benefit users for level passing based on activity or purchasing.
• Surprise-and-delight perks, which benefit customers with discounts or exclusive perks and gifts on special occasions, like birthdays.

Brand Engagement Tips:
Analyze your audience to understand what they value the most: discounts, recognition, exclusive content, or access. Then, adjust your gamified campaign according to their preferences to maximize the outcome.

Winday Analytics provides valuable data on how users interact with your campaigns, with a particular focus on engagement, time spent with your brand through play, and conversions.

The efficiency of loyalty programs lies in their simplicity and perceived value. Clear rewards and easy-to-understand structure of these programs drive better engagement, customer satisfaction, and higher retention. However, one of the ways to enhance brand engagement and their loyalty programs is through gamification features, such as mini-games to point collection, unlocking achievements, and passing challenges. This “fun factor” creates an additional layer of engagement, entertaining users and motivating them to participate.

Community Building

One of the ways of creating long-term engagement and customer loyalty is to build a strong community around your brand. A sense of belonging to something bigger is a powerful motivator for users to gather around the banner of your brand. Usually customer loyalty exceeds products and connects more to the brand’s values. United by these values, customers create a community, ready for advocacy, retention and organic growth.

The best platforms for these communities to grow are social media and forums, such as Discord, Telegram groups, Instagram and Facebook accounts, and TikTok communities. When enhanced with brand ambassador programs, such as affiliate networks and partner collaborations, these communities become even more engaging and robust.

Successful brand engagement fosters the creation of a strong community.

However, as a brand, you can’t just let it go and expect that the community will grow and engage users on its own. You must utilize additional engaging brand tactics. For example, host virtual and in-person meetups and events, motivate audiences to create user-generated content and showcase their works, and facilitate peer-to-peer discussions and challenges. These activities foster relationships and recognition far beyond just product or service selling.

To strengthen your brand community and give your audience shared achievements, you can implement gamified campaigns and challenges. Using the Winday platform, it’s easy to host group-based challenges, team competitions, and co-op missions to entertain your brand community, reward them, compete on leaderboards, and maximize brand engagement.

Usage of Gamification to Improve Brand Engagement

Why to add gamification if your business is far from the game development industry? Well, the answer is that gaming elements help non-gaming businesses entertain users and turn boring processes into fun, engaging activities. Gamified strategies aim right into deep psychological and emotional motivators of users, such as:

• Achievements. By incorporating levels, badges, and points, gamification drives users to participate in activities in order to achieve a new level or earn some points on the way to bonuses.
• Competition. By implementing challenges, tournaments, and leaderboards, brands tap into the sense of competitiveness of users, motivating them to compete with each other in game-like activities.
• Reward Systems. By rewarding users with tangible and intangible rewards for specific actions, brands foster deep and long-term customer loyalty.

Game creation flow and Rewards Settings step for Kinguin brand game on Winday platform.

Gamified campaigns are highly efficient digital strategies for brand engagement, and an increasing number of brands are adopting them. There are several benefits of why organizations implementing them into their brand engagement marketing operations:

1. Enhanced Interaction. Fun and entertaining experiences motivate the audience to spend more time with the brand and participate in its activities.
2. Increased Customer Engagement. To engage customers and motivate them to return for repeat visits and ongoing interactions, businesses can utilize progress tracking features, challenges, and achievements.
3. Improved Brand Loyalty. When customers earn rewards or reach new heights and levels in your brand’s activities, it creates a deeper emotional investment, which results in brand loyalty improvements.
4. Data Collection and Customer Insights. Gamified marketing campaigns help businesses collect valuable data about customer behavior, preferences, habits, and motivators, which they can later use efficiently in subsequent brand engagement marketing tactics.
5. Higher Conversion Rates. When signing up, purchasing, or sharing content is made entertaining through the gamified campaigns, it helps businesses to reduce friction and increase conversion rates.
6. Stronger Emotional Connections. When tapping right into deep psychological motivators, like competition and achievements, gamified campaigns create deep emotional resonance that goes far beyond short and strict transactional relationships.
7. Target to Specific Demographics. If your brand aims at young, digital-native audiences like Gen Z, gamification is a must. This audience is insensitive to traditional marketing campaigns. When gaming is a significant part of their life, they require more smart, fun, interactive, and game-based experiences to connect with brands.

Implementing Gamification in Brand Strategy with Winday

By implementing our ultimate tool for creating and launching gamified marketing campaigns, you can involve customers and maximize brand engagement. We provide brands with a simple tool to build gamified campaigns that doesn’t require technical knowledge, coding skills, or game development expertise. As a brand, you have to do only three steps before launching your successful and efficient gamified marketing campaign.

The skin of the game for the e-bikes brand Jansno on Winday.

1. Identify your objectives. To efficiently utilize the gamification platform Winday, you must determine your goals. Whether it’s website visits increase, product or service promotions, social media audience expansion, or customer feedback improvements, we cover all these needs and adjust the gamified campaign according to them.
2. Choose your game type. At Winday you may find various types of games, such as instant games, that are short, interactive experiences that allow customers to win discounts and special offers; tournaments, more long campaigns with leaderboards that fosters repeat engagement and social sharing; and define required gaming mechanics, like Match 3, Match 2, Bubble Shooter, or Draw a Line game.
3. Customize and launch your game. Configure easily your game rules and visual style, set the rewards and bonus actions. Define what your customers would win: coupons, points, or exclusive content. And what bonus actions would be: newsletter sign-ups, referrals, or product sharing. Then, use Winday’s multi-platform capabilities to embed your game in all platforms: websites, mobile apps, and social media.

Winday is the effective marketing tool for creating and publishing branded marketing games.

Final Takeaways

What Is Brand Engagement?

Effective brand engagement is a vital part of building lasting customer relationships, loyalty, and advocacy, and no business can neglect it. But in the heart of successful brand engagement always lies gamification, which makes interactions between brands and the audience fun and emotional. Platforms like Winday offer businesses a streamlined approach to the simple and effective implementation of gamified features into their marketing campaigns. Winday delivers brands an easy-to-understand, no-code toolset and a wide variety of customization options to execute their gamified campaign.