Gamification has long been a tool to drive behaviour change, but the gaming world has had limited impact on the way marketers structure the customer experience. Or at least it hadn’t before the stratospheric rise to ubiquity of Pokémon Go.
Until relatively recently, marketers treated the digital and physical worlds as different sides of the same coin. What Pokémon Go’s creators have done so successfully is recognise that consumers don’t think in terms of offline vs online, but view both as part of a single experience. And the staggering popularity of Pokémon Go (100 million downloads and $268 million in revenue) shows the potential rewards of merging the two environments.
So how can marketers harness the Pokémon effect to drive higher levels of customer engagement?
Use location for personalisation
One of the big draws of Pokémon Go is the way it aligns the content it wants players to interact with to their surroundings; it’s appealing, relevant and changes to match an individual’s context. Perhaps most importantly, it can make customers feel that they’re being given an experience that’s unique to them.
There are a number of ways that marketers can use locational data as a tool to drive engagement. In-store beacons triggering ads, offers or editorial content aligned to precisely where a customer is on a shop floor can bring together online and offline shopping and add digital excitement to the bricks and mortar experience. Research in the States has shown that location based advertising has been proven to lead to a 29% lift in store visits, and costs around $1 per incremental store visit in comparison to $6 for the general industry standard.
And, of course, it allows brands to gain a complete shopper view by connecting online and in-store shopper behaviour. After all, despite the monumental growth of ecommerce (£870.8 million a week), the biggest proportion of money spent by UK consumers is handed over in shops (£6.7billion a week). If marketers understand what is driving people into stores, how long they’re there for and what they do while they’re over the threshold, they can apply this knowledge to digital platforms, targeting customers with the messages that are most tailored to their preferences.
Tapping into the potential of location-based marketing doesn’t have to mean investing in the capabilities within your own organisation; using social platforms to bring a location-specific element to campaigns can help you to engage with new audiences.
For instance, HSBC used Snapchat’s location-based filters to engage with university students during fresher’s week. Across 170 universities, 14 different geo-filters, which placed a student’s face in the centre of a magazine cover reading “face to watch 2026” were activated. This is a great example of a functional, ‘serious’ brand using location to inject personality while retaining the integrity of its aspirational message.
Adopt a mobile first mantra
Many people believed that Augmented Reality (AR) wouldn’t become truly mainstream until VR headsets and similar high-end technology took off. But Nintendo recognised that the camera on a phone, owned by billions of people globally, could act as portal between tangible and digital environments, and unlocked a huge opportunity in the process. Marketers should view mobile with the same ambition; not simply as a ‘must have’ platform to facilitate the customer experience, but as an opportunity to find new and exciting ways to engage.
Consumers use an average of five connected devices on the journey to a purchase, so understanding the action consumers take on mobile compared with other platforms is vital. Once you have this information it’s relatively straightforward to introduce an element of mobile-specific content. If, for example, you know that customers are more likely to browse on mobile during their daily commute, you can tweak your strategy to engage with content-focussed campaigns, when you know they have the time and inclination to read them.
Apps are also a valuable way to make the mobile experience more rewarding for consumers and marketers. Anyone who has downloaded an app is by definition interested in the related brand or company – and as a channel they gather more insights into a person’s behaviour than almost any other – but marketers have been slow to make the most of this to engage on a more personal level. 77% of marketers that have opted for mobile app marketing have reported tangible ROI.
Creating a sense of community amongst consumers who have downloaded the app encourages loyalty and is a quid pro quo for the smartphone real-estate and behavioural insights you’re being given. This could include creating special offers that are only available to app users, giving them early access to new products or exclusive editorial content.
Come back to content
If there’s one thing that the now common sight of a group of Pokémon Go players crowded around a hotspot has proven about consumer behaviour, it’s that by nature we’re interactive beings.
Many marketers are in danger of forgetting what “customer experience” really means when planning how best to reach an audience. After all, banner ads and push notifications alone do not an “experience” make.
There will always be a time and a place for this kind of advertising, especially when retargeting is being used to nudge a customer into a specific purchase, but consumers are increasingly resistant to what they see as “pushy” marketing from brands. For example, 84% of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising, they want something engaging, useful or fun for its own sake.
A strong content marketing strategy can elevate a brand from being perceived as a purveyor of goods or services to a problem-solver attuned to the needs, interests and problems of their customers. This is particularly true of relationship building content, which doesn’t come at the price of engaging with sales-driven collateral.
