Sometimes, brand communities coalesce naturally as fans of your product or service meet at events, find each other online, or chat in the comments of your social media profiles. Otherwise, it can take a little encouragement to form and grow a community of loyal customers.
Gamification offers an effective way to cultivate connections between your business's fans and create an environment conducive to community growth. By integrating gamelike elements into non-gaming contexts, companies can promote participation, community engagement, and brand loyalty. Here's how.
How can gamification help form a brand community?
Gamification engages customers through friendly competitions and challenges in which participants earn rewards and recognition. When structured well, gamification isn't just fun — it holds your followers' attention and fosters bonds among participants.
"At our core, all of us get a little rush when we're told we did a good job — and it makes us want to accomplish more, and help others succeed, too," wrote Circle, a community management platform. "So it's unsurprising that consistently recognizing and rewarding members creates a strong sense of belonging that makes your community a place people want to be."
Gamification attracts people to your brand by offering rewards and recognition for their participation. Once they start playing to win, you can keep participants motivated with prizes, leaderboards, and progress tracking. Plus, the activities you choose to host can bring people together to share content that boosts your brand and creates camaraderie.
[Read more: What Is Gamification? And Is It Right for Your Business?]
Using gamification to grow your community requires careful strategizing. Start by understanding your goal: What do you hope to achieve next with your brand community?
How to use gamification to grow your community
Before you get started, it's important to recognize that for gamification to work, it must meet a member need.
"[Rewards] must not be solely treated as incentives for transactional activities," wrote Bettermode, a customer community platform. "Rewards must be given to recognize the contribution and valuable social behavior — it could be reputation scores, badges, or anything else."
Communities thrive when members are given (often unofficial, unspoken) roles, such as mentors, opinion leaders, heroes, and historians. Gamification enables teams to recognize when someone excels in a particular role. For instance, someone who regularly creates unboxing content when they receive a new product from your company could be given a special "early adopter" badge for their profile.
Using gamification to grow your community requires careful strategizing. Start by understanding your goal: What do you hope to achieve next with your brand community? Some companies want to add new members, while others want to learn more about their customers' goals.
Once you have a goal in mind, think about what mechanism you can use to incentivize customer behavior to reach your goal. For a brand that wants to add new members, a good option is to create a referral competition. Use affiliate links or a gamification platform to track which participants bring in the most new customers. Show the results on a leaderboard to create a little healthy competition. Reward all participants with referral discounts, with one big prize for the winner at the end of your campaign.
This is just one way to gamify your community. Plenty of other tools — usually embedded in loyalty programs or gamification software — make setting up and running contests easy.
[Read more: 5 B2B Customer Loyalty Strategies for Thriving Businesses]
Best practices for community gamification
Gamification isn't a silver bullet for community engagement. It cannot replace consistent communication or the autonomy communities need to thrive. In addition to creating fun, rewarding experiences, you also need to regularly connect with customers to hear their feedback, answer questions, and make them feel valued.
"Although you are facilitating the discussions and managing the community as the owner, the community is not about your brand — it is about your customers and members. So, when you define the gamification rules, ensure that the participants are getting value and they must realize that they are in control," wrote Bettermode.
Gamification works best when it's used intentionally to satisfy a specific goal and with thoughtful, unique rewards. Reward contribution rather than competition to facilitate authentic connections among members.
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