10 reasons to explore branded hyper-casual games for marketing campaigns

Are you more likely to remember an ad on your Instagram feed about a sale in five days’ time, or one that wins you vouchers for that same sale? If you picked the latter, you might be interested in understanding how you can leverage gamification marketing to help users experience your brand, rather than just see it on various platforms

We've spent the last five years designing and building hyper-casual games using Newsfeed SmartApps, for brands across the world, while also studying how these impact user-experience and return on investment for brands. Here’s our list of the top 10 reasons why you should consider adding gamified experiences to your marketing mix.

1.) The lean, mean, engagement machine

We all know that games are fun, interactive and engaging if done right. But with Newsfeed SmartApps, you get to measure in real terms just how big an engagement-monster gamification as a tool can be. All the engagement through this tool is a proactive effort from the customer to engage with and experience your brand, instead of having a one-directional ad follow them on all their social media accounts. One of our most popular games that had amazing engagement was something that we built for Disney+ when they launched in Singapore.

2.) Hyper-casual games are an amazing way to build your first party data in a cookie-less world

Branded games are a great way to build your voluntary first party data. When you incentivize a game and users voluntarily submit data and consent to marketing material, you are building first party data that you can leverage for future campaigns. One of the best examples is a retro style pin-ball game that we built for a Puma, which gave users a chance to unlock a discount coupon based on their score. Once they earned the coupon, customers were happy to submit their contact details to receive the voucher and even consented to receive future marketing/promotions emails.

3.) Authentic and re-targetable data

There are multiple advantages of building a genuine database of leads for any brand, and it’s a great value addition towards marketing efforts. Within hyper-casual games we can incorporate data validation mechanisms like verification through OTP or e-mail to ensure users submit genuine data. This ensures the authenticity of the data collected and is a fool-proof claim of gratifications.

4.) Do more with their limited attention span

In a world where the consumer’s average attention span is just about eight seconds, Newsfeed SmartApps give your audience up to 60 seconds of uninterrupted engagement with your brand in several different formats, making it easier to remember an experience with your brand. This is evident through the robust dashboards built for each experience that give statistics for the number of games completed, user data collected, and more. For example, this game we built for Amazon Prime had amazing repeat plays, increasing average time spent in the game per user.

5.) Built from scratch and customized for each brand

Speak to your customer in your colours and fonts. With Newsfeed SmartApps, you have complete control over the UI and what you put out for your customer to see and experience, leading to higher brand recall, awareness and a positive increase in brand retention. That's why brands work with us also to also built in-app games to reflect the existing mobile app's look and feel. This game we built for Tide was easily recognizable as a game from Tide Detergent as we used their distinct colors and branding.

6.) If they’re having fun, they’re going to tell others about it

With built-in social-sharing features in each Newsfeed SmartApps experience, you can substantially extend your campaign’s reach, leading to up to 50% lower costs per unique user engagement. Here’s an example to put things into perspective: brands around the world are spending billions of dollars per year on influencer marketing, because people respond to people and trust people. With the built-in social sharing features on all our Newsfeed SmartApps experiences, you turn each unique user into an influencer for your brand for less than half the cost. One of our most shared experiences was a game we built for Domino's which gave away coupons. In addition to the normal promotions, lots of users shared the game on social and messaging apps, resulting in amazing organic traffic as well.

7.) Tap into competitiveness

Gamification taps into consumer behavior and the consumer’s innate competitiveness and need for accomplishment. With rewards, you can win more sales with gamification than with any other traditional marketing tool. This particular game that we built for Pepsi Max had competition written all over it with users trying to beat their own scores and aim for the top stop to win a trip to New York City.

8.) Incredible conversion rates & how game mechanics can drive actual revenue

The simple fact is that people don’t like being sold to. But gamified experiences don’t feel like hard marketing, and as a result consumers are more likely to respond to a branded game ad than its traditional counterpart. Think about it, if an easy-to-follow 45-second game wins you vouchers to a big sale, there’s no way you’re going to want to ignore the massive discount voucher to make a purchase on the website. For one of India's leading multi-brand e-commerce portal, AJIO, the game we built was a massive success resulting in thousands of coupons being redeemed during the big bold sale. This was a classic example of converting a player in a game to a buyer of a product with instant gratification.

9.) Platform agnostic feature equals wider reach

Newsfeed SmartApps experiences are mobile-friendly and can be adapted for different devices. With in-app browsers on most of the social media mobile apps, users can launch these experiences right from their feed or swipe-up stories without having to break the user journey. This gives your branded game massive potential to reach your target users through several platforms: Google display network, in you existing apps, e-mailers, SMSs, web banners, QR codes in print ads or in-store, social media paid/organic posts and stories, and more. Build once and launch across platforms.

10.) Don’t lose out potential users to ad blockers

Let’s face it, pop-ups can be very annoying and with several people using ad blockers, you could lose a lot of revenue for traditional banners and video advertisements. The good news is, Newsfeed SmartApps games do not fall victim to this as there's massive traffic to these kind of games from sources that are not effected by ad blockers.

To find out more, watch this video on why brands should add hyper-casual games to their marketing mix.