Use Gamification to Boost Summit Engagement with Kimba Cooper-Martin
If you’ve ever taken part in my challenges, summits, live trainings, or even been an affiliate for our programs, you know that I love to include games, prizes, and engagement aspects to make things fun and give people a reason to participate.
I never really thought much of it when I started. I just tried it once, noticed that it increased show-up rates and engagement, and then just kept on going. After a while, I found out that this is an actual thing called gamification and I have the absolute expert of gamification joining me on the podcast this week to talk about what exactly gamification is, and how you can use it in your business and summits.
You might think of gamification as a strategy that can make your life or business more "fun". But as this week's guest, Kimba, shared the truth is, "fun" isn't a business objective and gamification is so much more than that!
In fact, in the world of summits you can use gamification in your marketing, presentations, live show-up rates, community engagement, all-access pass sales, affiliate promotion, speaker motivation, and so much more.
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Episode at a glance:
[4:17] Kimba started out as a VA and then a digital marketer, but ended up niching down to gamification when she saw the results it had in her personal life and figured out how to apply it to online business.
One day my partner said to me, "you know, you never exercise unless you set yourself a challenge." And when I thought about it I realized it was true. You will only catch me doing a press up if I'm doing a 30 day challenge, you'll only catch me running if I am training for a half marathon, and I have a training plan with things I can tick off every day. The more I though about it, I realized that maybe I'm doing this everywhere. I then remembered that I'd heard this buzzword 'gamification,' at a marketing conference probably 10 years before, and it had gone out on my brain until then. So I started looking into it more and realized that I was already using gamification in so many ways in my business, and I decided to go all in with it from there.
[7:46] Kimba sees gamification as a motivational tool. It's not just about making things fun - fun means something different to everyone! - but it's about achieving business objectives and helping your customers achieve THEIR objectives. Your offer needs to work already before you add gamification, but if it's working, gamification can level it up.
I need to make sure that the thing that you're offering works. I need to make sure that the challenge is working. Then we can use gamification for marginal gains, like, we can use gamification to tweak this stat and to make this thing slightly better and to help those people achieve that thing in a slightly better way.
[12:03] You can use gamification all over the place for your business! Kimba outlined some of the different places she's seen gamification used, for summits and beyond. It can be used in the marketing of summits to get people in, in your presentations to get people engaging and participating, in your community, to help with your launch, and to motivate your speakers. There are so many possibilities!
Anytime you identify a "motivation problem" it's an opportunity to add in gamification.
[16:59] There are so many ways you can gamify your marketing! It can even be used to segment your audience so you know their preferences. There are really so many possibilities for how to layer gamification into your marketing, and you can go as deep and complicated with it as you want to, but it also works when you start small.
Gamification can be as simple as a poll. It doesn't have to be huge. You can just start by engaging your audience with some polls, by adding in some silly Instagram stories where you have on one side a picture of pumpkin spice latte and on the other side a black coffee, and you just say, which one would you prefer? Think about how you can increase engagement using silly games and silly activities like that that seem irrelevant, but by increasing increasing engagement on those other posts, those people are going to see more of your content when you're promoting something.
[21:35] "Gamification won't work for my audience because..." This is something Kimba hears all the time - and it's not true! In fact, some of the people her clients think are the least likely to enjoy gamification have become the most engaged with it.
[25:02] Gamification isn't a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. You need to come back to it periodically, and tweak things, and update things in order to keep it working. Keeping your gamification novel is absolutely crucial to its long-term success.
Gamification is an art as well as a science. You can you can try and guess what's going to work for your audience, but you don't know until you try. And so you can't set and forget. Unfortunately, you do have to test and learn. You do have to iterate. You do have to keep changing things.
[27:29] Is gamification just a way to manipulate people, though? It can be! Just like anything, it can be used for good or for bad. Kimba outlined some ways to make sure that you're using gamification ethically for YOUR specific audience.
You need to really understand who the people are, so that you can gamify properly, and so that you're not doing something that could be considered to be negative or evil.
[34:43] Kimba wrapped things up by reminding us not to overuse gamification. That may seem like a strange thing for a gamification consultant to say, but if you incentivize things that people would naturally do anyway, it can actually backfire.
If something is inherently motivating, if something is something that people want to do anyway, do not give prizes for that thing. In some cases it might be better to give them some praise, or a virtual badge. It doesn't need to be a real thing or even an incentive at all. For some people, simply finishing and achieving is sufficient.
About Kimba Cooper-Martin
Kimba is a successful, innovative, and creative entrepreneur based in Bristol, England.
Kimba has been using Gamification in her personal and business life to improve results and meet her goals for as long as she can remember.
As well as running a flourishing business, in her spare time, she’s a sponsored hula hooper and has used gamification to outsell the other sponsees by 10x.
Gamification has enabled Kimba to improve all aspects of her business leading to more sales and greater results for everyone involved. Whether it’s engagement on social media posts, an increase in the number of people completing her courses or showing up live to online events, better participant retention in her challenges and membership,s or getting higher quality testimonials.. everything she’s gamified has seen a marked improvement!
Kimba has gamified other areas of her personal life too, to help her fit in extra reading, exercise regularly, or learn new skills (all while having fun!)
Kimba now helps other businesses to apply gamification techniques to boost results for themselves and their customers/members. By working in this way everyone is a winner!
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