How To Boost Engagement With Event Gamification

Events are a great way to harness the strength of community engagement and group creativity by enabling participants to take part in a unique activity.

Marketing events are becoming an essential part of any business’s marketing. These events can reach out to customers and new potential ones while providing an excellent way for companies to demonstrate their products and services.

In 2018, 79% of marketers in the US successfully made sales through event marketing. Also, 95% of marketers believe attending in-person events is essential for achieving business objectives.

Engagement is the key to any event. Event gamification can be a great way to keep your attendees engaged and entertained through the event and helps create a more memorable experience for all involved.

What Is Gamification?

Nick Pelling coined the word Gamification in 2002. It is derived from the words “game” and “simulation.”

Gamification is the process of adding game-like elements to non-game processes to encourage participation.

In the corporate world, Gamification uses game thinking and mechanics, typically as an online marketing technique, to engage users and solve problems.

Are you looking into event gamification for your next event? Check out Emeraude Escape for more information.

How Does Gamification Increase Engagement?

Gamification is a powerful tool that increases engagement. It’s easy to see why: people love games, and when a gamified system is designed well, players will enjoy their time spent interacting with it.

How It Works
The concept of Gamification is simply to provide your audience with directives and feedback through game mechanics and dynamics added to online platforms.

This ensures that the audience gets involved, achieves their goals and objectives on the platform, develops a strong relationship with the brand, and continues to use it for future needs.

For example, when you go to the gym and work out with friends to get in shape, that experience is gamified.

And when Nike created their Run Club app — which uses Gamification to encourage mobile app engagement and retention — they were able to collect data about app users’ chosen sports and increased app signups three times faster than non-users.

Also, the simplest form of Gamification is every time you get a free pastry or drink after finally attaining your final stamp.

Many companies have adopted the gamification technique to keep their users engaged.

How It Boosts Engagement

Companies can use Gamification to improve employee retention, increase engagement, and gain more users. How does it work?

Behavior Reinforcements

Reward, reward, reward! It’s all about the rewards. In fact, it’s all about using behavioral reinforcement by designing game elements to get users to engage with your marketing campaign.

Rewards & challenges are the best way for you to increase engagement and conversion rates, which means making customers feel like they’re part of your brand’s adventure.

The User Is in Control

Directly influencing the user’s decisions is a powerful way to improve customer engagement.

Naturally, people love being in control and tend to enjoy the process. When your customers are having fun designing their own experience and telling you what they like or dislike about things on your site, they’re more likely to tell others about it, too.

People Are Competitive

Think about it this way: Whether you’re competing with one person or if you’re competing against a friend or family member — you’ll have something to strive for. And that will keep people engaged longer than just sending them a message or sharing an item on social media.

The secret to creating an engaging event gamification system is to understand that people are competitive by nature, and it’s in their nature to want to win.

The trick is gamifying something based on competition, making them want and need to keep returning for more.

Users Can Monitor Their Progress

People like feeling like they’re making progress. You can apply this aspect of gaming to your gamification marketing campaign.

By using a progress bar or levels to your game experience, users understand how far they’ve come in a gaming experience and help them see how close they are to achieving the top score on a competitive leaderboard.

You may be thinking, “we don’t really have time to show users a progress bar or play a game. What fun would that be?” Well, not much fun at all if you’re trying to get them to take action.

But if you do it subtly and cleverly, you can make users more likely to follow through on your request, naturally promoting your brand in the process.

Related: Partner Portals 101: Drive Loyalty & Sales With Gamification

How Can You Gamify Your Event?

Gamification can make an event more exciting and engaging for attendees. There are many ways you can gamify your event, and here are some examples:

1. Polling
Polling is a fun way to get your attendees’ feedback about your event. You can even gamify it by awarding badges for each level. The possibilities are endless, with tons of ways to use polls, badges, and prizes to engage your attendees.

2. Gamification Corner
​It is not just the tradition that excites you while attending an event. It’s the fact that there are so many things to do at these events.

From talking to interesting people, enjoying the delicious food, and having fun, most of these events have something exciting for you.

The best part is the gamification corner which has become very popular among people who love to have fun. With games like foosball, chess, and VR games, you can make your events more exciting by adding fun elements with different difficulty levels.

3. Ice Breakers & Networking Games

Have you been to an event where you felt like everyone was getting to know each other and not saying much? Well, that could be because the general atmosphere is pretty quiet. But no more!

You can raise the bar on your networking game by ensuring attendees have fun while networking with others.

For instance, one-word icebreaker is a brilliant way of generating conversations and making people feel more at ease. It can be adapted and used for any issue or topic. People will feel comfortable talking about their experiences and getting involved in a discussion about the topic you are discussing.

4. Incentivized Engagement

An excellent way to ensure overall audience engagement during the event is to incentivize it through Gamification.

As mentioned earlier, rewards and motivation go hand in hand. You can reward participants for their engagement in various aspects of your event.

You can gamify your event by taking the three pillars of engagement (participation, value, and purpose), adding incentives to enhance it, and placing it in front of your attendees. This way, you can ensure that they participate actively in the events, enjoy the experience and learn something new.

5. Create an Event App

Gamifying your event app is an excellent approach to engaging your audience. This will also increase their engagement level and adoption rate of your app in the future.

Gamify your event app with fun and simple games on it, integrate augmented reality (AR), and increase your event’s app adoption rate. Make sure to include online event networking games as well.

6. Familiarize the event attendees

How do you gamify your event and make the attendees interact with your venue?

The event’s location plays a significant role in the overall attendee experience. It can majorly affect the attendee’s feedback regarding the overall event organization and management.

To get your attendees involved, you need to make them feel like part of your team and familiarize them with the venue – for instance, with a scavenger hunt through the venue.

7. Encourage Q & A’s

Question & Answer sessions are a great way to engage audiences and build knowledge about your topic. Organizers can use a gamified system to encourage attendees to ask questions publicly, exchange ideas and share knowledge.

A good question can spark great conversation, which is why event organizers need to make this part of their events.

8. Create Mini Sessions

The concept of mini-sessions is becoming very popular these days. And there are numerous creative ways to use it at events. You can have an interactive digital video, live online webinar, or even an online game that people can play while you present information to them.

Social media is the best way to get the word out about your event. You can leverage it in various ways and get your attendees more involved.

For example, you could reward people whose topic was selected. You can also have a mini-session co-created by attendees. This will make your event fun and engaging for everyone attending it.

Related: LMS User Engagement Tips: Boost Engagement With Gamification

What Are the Best-Gamified Games to Boost Engagement at Events?

The best gamified games are those that are interactive and fun but also make use of the competitive nature of people.

Some ways to boost engagement through games for events include:

1. Digital Seminars

Getting lost in a seminar or event is easy when it becomes too much work. Without interactivity, the employees are likely to jump from one activity to another without allowing active participation. Gamifying your event can help save time and make for a more engaging experience for everyone involved.

There are many ways to gamify your digital seminars, such as puzzles, video games, adventure and mystery walk-throughs, escape rooms, trivia games, scavenger hunts, and more.

Companies have adopted interactive and gamified digital platforms for events. For example, in a bid to simultaneously welcome 300 new workers during a fun, digital event and forge team bonds during the Covid-19 health crisis, Wavestone, a French consulting company in corporate transformation, used a fully digital onboarding seminar.

The firm is currently focused on permanently retaining this resource for newcomer training, as the game promotes interaction and enables people to understand new developments in a lighthearted manner.

Also, the largest renewable energy company in Switzerland, Axpo, hosted its annual strategic management seminar. The objective was to engage employees, impart important knowledge entertainingly, establish connections across diverse departments, and share new corporate strategic messages and emerging environmental challenges.

Players in the 2050 setting of the futuristic escape room had to cooperate and use brand-new renewable energy exclusive to the planet. At Axpo, 450 managers from around the world took part.

2. Collaborative Workshops

When you have a group of remote workers, the usual formats for cooperation become problematic. You cannot meet face to face, and this makes the workflow more difficult.

Gamifying is fun, rewarding, and motivating. It allows you to create a new experience that engages your users in a non-traditional way.

The collaborative game format is a unique way to meet the needs of companies in remote work. Geographic constraints, accessibility, and social distance are nonexistent.

Collaborative workshops can exist in various digital formats such as Metaverse, treasure hunt, cross-media, quiz race, speed gaming, Cluedo/ digital investigation, digital escape room, physical escape room/hybrid, and more.

3. Product and Service Launch

Promoting a new product launch is a strategic activity and should be well thought-out, irrespective of the size of your business.

Games can be created (or adapted) to suit any business or event. They offer a great way to leverage your brand, attract attention and gather data on your target customers.

The games exist in various digital formats such as Metaverse, treasure hunt, simulation game, digital champion, cross-media, quiz race, interactive video, speed gaming, Cluedo/digital investigation, digital escape room, physical escape room/hybrid, and battle royale/squid game.

4. Press & Influencer Campaign

What if there’s a way to gamify your event or brand so influencers, blog writers, and media partners can participate? Rather than doing an interview with a journalist or presenting something on stage, they’re participating in an entertaining event where they can win points. Digital game solutions allow companies to invite influencers or partners to be part of their operations.

Different digital formats are available such as Metaverse, treasure hunt, simulation game, digital champion, cross-media, quiz race, interactive video, speed gaming, Cluedo/digital investigation, digital escape room, physical escape room/hybrid, and battle royale/squid game.

Entice your guests to work together or panic when there’s just one hour left? Work with Emeraude Escape to create the perfect challenge!

Why Choose Emeraude Escape

The future of game-based incentive programs lies in striking a balance between novelty and familiarity.

Offering players a new experience is important. Having fun is certainly something at the core of Gamification, but that can only be effective if it is not at the expense of perceived relevance.

Escape games are an exciting way to energize your next event. From corporate teambuilding to live entertainment and charity galas, no matter your guests’ age, sex, or skill level, you can rest assured that everyone will be engaged and entertained.

Emeraude Escape creates game designs that leave clients raving about their experience for months afterward, and they have the reviews to prove it. After all, if no one sticks around long enough to get anything out of it, what does it matter how much fun it is?

Related: What 4 behavioral scientists have to say about virtual team building