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4 reasons to add gamification to your channel strategy

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DQW Bureau
New Update

The 21st century has introduced channel heads to a powerful yet cluttered communications platform - the internet. And, today we need to think in terms of communications tools that capture the mind space of channel partners, amidst the chaos that this medium brings. Gamification, a tool formerly used as a tool to make learning fun and engaging for children has found new application in business to increase consumer (in this case being the channel partner community) mindshare. In business, it has seen success in the past in changing and motivating customer behavior.

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Gaming piques the competitive spirit in each of us and is changing the way companies do business. And channel heads are realizing the importance of gaming in improving participation & engagement of channel community to change behaviours, develop skills or solve problems. When combined with social media platforms, this engagement doubles and there is greater visibility for the brand among the channel community. Companies across the world have been able to reap the benefits of Gamification and are employing it in their channel marketing strategies. Here are four other reasons why you should include gamification to your channel strategy:

Gives potential consumers/ channel partners simulated demos of your product

Words can sometimes never be enough to demonstrate the benefits of your new product over your competition. Gamification is a creative and useful way to demonstrate the product or solution that your company has to offer, without the channel partner having to buy the product.

Track your prospects

Such games especially ones that are associated with mobile and social often require participants to fill in their complete log-in details such as designations, place of work, valid email addresses, phone numbers etc. This can be useful to gather information about your prospective customer/ channel partner and build a database on the profile of users that have shown interest in your product. In many cases, depending upon the game in question, it is also a useful platform for user research and for gauging how the channel partner thinks.

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Engage customers on your website

You can use Gamification as a tool to engage your channel partner audience on your Facebook page or website. By tracking the number of times a particular user enters your website and rewarding them based on this, you can gauge the interest levels of your channel partners for the products that you are selling. Backing this up with an interesting and interactive website can go a long way in educating your end audience about your products and solutions. Another technique that you can use is to encourage other users to share your page and reward them accordingly. This way channel partners are directly involved in inviting others to engage in the product.

Make crowdsourcing fun

Gamification is a useful tool to attract channel partners for crowdsourcing to solve a business problem. Organisations can use channel partner feedback from games and apply it to business issues that they are trying to solve. Hence engaging a channel partner on a gamification platform helps generate direct feedback received from their engagement with customers and these insights help us manufacture good products.

Gamificiation is an interesting way to reach out to the channel partner community and a good way to allow them to engage with your products without purchasing them or selling it to prospects. Indians have been traditionally conservative in adopting marketing methods that appear to trivialize the brand image such as social and Gamification. However in the case of B2B enterprise products, Gamification is an innovative way to help find an opportunity in the challenge associated with capturing the interest of channel partners.

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