Successful Marketing should be a Game!

What keeps your attention? As a small business owner do you find yourself struggling to stay on top of your marketing, always something else to do? I would recommend to establish an effective marketing program that you create a game out of it. Creating a visual process with your Marketing Kanban can effectively do that and make your marketing interesting and challenging.

I read the recent book Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests and they recommended 5 ways to Game your business:

1. What consumer behavior are you trying to drive? Don’t just think about broad or bottom line objectives (“more engagement”, “greater brand exposure”) when considering ways in which you’d like to effect the behavior of your consumer base, but instead, focus in on easy-to-achieve activities that will have an overall impact on your bottom line.

2. Assign points to those behaviors. Think about how much value each of the behaviors has to your business and assign points to each action accordingly. Points should be weighed relatively, so if opening a new account is ten times more valuable than clicking on an advertiser’s link, make sure the point system reflects that reality.

3. Create a leaderboard to display points. Just like the Employee of the Month plaques at restaurants, create a socially-networked leaderboard that allows users to feel like they are accomplishing something relative to their friends and peers—A little encouragement goes a long way.

4. Develop challenges and message them. Just like Frequent Flyer promotions, creating simple challenges can have a profound effect on user behavior once they are connected to your community. Keep your challenges fresh and topical by knowing your players.

5. Make “fun” your goal! Whether your business is finance or funerary, making fun a principal objective will substantially increase consumer engagement and generate remarkable new revenue opportunities.

It is not as tough as you may think. Foursquare, Farmville, Chase, US Army and the old standby Frequent flyer programs are prime examples of Game Marketing. These are all strategies used for your customer. However, using a Marketing Kanban board within your organization can help make your own marketing a game. Think about a visual board showing some basic marketing metrics. If you started showing people how many times a subject was Re-tweeted or a Press Released viewed or published, would the quality of writing improve? What do you think?