- Contest Factory
- February 21, 2023
Businesses of all sizes and verticals strategically use marketing to expand their reach. Today, gamification marketing and contests are becoming more and more popular to attract customers, especially through the use of virtual rewards and badges. Contest Factory’s gamification marketing services offer many solutions to common customer pain points, including the implementation of virtual badges.
Virtual or digital badges build confidence, recognize achievement, and get your brand’s name out there. Contest Factory provides innovative, results-driven marketing solutions to help you achieve your marketing goals, and using virtual badges is just one way to do that. With experience helping major brands and enterprise companies level up their marketing initiatives, our expertly-designed solutions help boost customer experience to keep them coming back for more.
1. Use Virtual Badges as Rewards for Customer Actions
A badge is one way to strengthen the customer relationship by identifying your network and including members in the community. Badges may help with understanding your customers’ actions. You can use badges to reward members for their loyalty, along with rewarding them for completing specific actions, like filling out surveys or sending bug reports. People enjoy being included and recognized for their achievements, and badges help build community in this regard.
When customers use badges, they support your marketing and branding efforts by sharing your company’s logo on social networks and other high-visibility areas. You can also use badges to further promote your company, enticing potential customers with the prospect of inclusivity. This is a simple way to encourage a strong customer experience with the long-term potential of strengthening the customer-brand relationship.
The psychology of badges for competition provides more value than you can consider – in our experience, adding badges has turned a top 25 page into the #1 page by creating competition for a previously, “optional” website activity. Once adding a badge and leaderboard – your audience will seek the glory and fame of the top badge as well as leaderboard recognition.
2. Give Out Virtual Badges as Contest Rewards
With gamification strategies such as using contests to drive engagement and build awareness, virtual badges align perfectly when recognizing your customers’ achievements. You can deliberately choose to recognize the achievements of customers, commenters, or winners, and they can use their badges in their profiles, handles, or signatures.
When they share their badges or display them, it solidifies their loyalty and resonance with your brand, creating further brand awareness for your product or service.
Don’t shy away on badge levels – you want plenty of them, as some of your audience will show enthusiasm and competitiveness to try to win the highest each available reward / badge there is – make plenty available and continue to issue new opportunities and limited edition badges.
3. Give Influencers Special Virtual Badges to Show Off Your Brand
When you work with influencers, give them a specific virtual badge to recognize their alignment with your brand. When they represent your brand visually to their followers, your brand stays top of mind with potentially millions of consumers. This strengthens your brand’s reach and influence, especially across social media.
4. Encourage Event Attendance with Virtual Badges
Virtual badges are an excellent way to gamify an event or to acknowledge attendance. Offering badges during events is an easy way to motivate attendees to show up and get involved. Badges also help boost customer experience through rewards and recognition; customers appreciate when you recognize them!
Badges are trackable, supplying ongoing data and metrics that you can analyze over time. If you hold yearly events, you can compare badge data year by year. Using this data, you can boost customer experience by learning what events attract the most attendees and putting on more events like that.
5. Retarget Your Customers with Email Marketing
Virtual badges connect to email addresses, which provides ample opportunities for continuous marketing down the road. For many businesses, email remains the most powerful marketing channel, giving you an inside track directly to customers. With badges, you can build and strengthen your email list and provide an even better customer experience through personalized marketing.
Additionally, badges are very useful for providing customer support, which is a key component of boosting customer satisfaction. They may indicate a certain status a customer achieves or demonstrates how long they’ve been a customer, which is great for identifying their commitment to the brand.
Improve Your Customer Experience with Contest Factory
Rewards work; that’s the simplest premise behind the success of virtual badges. Virtual badges create more engagement and strengthen your brand’s customer relationships because customers can share them all over the internet. Badges are a simple and versatile way to promote your brand and provide continuous virtual, visual branding while giving your customers a boost of recognition.
Contest Factory is a full-service marketing agency catering to modern gamification needs. We focus on contests and gamification to support both digital and traditional marketing strategies. We tailor our services to each client to drive engagement, boost customer experience, and deliver conversions through exciting new technologies.
Our services include customer retention best practices, custom promotions, UGC moderation, prize acquisition and fulfillment, sweepstakes, surveys, native mobile apps, video production, custom API integration, social media advertising, and more.
To learn how we can help you take your customer experience to the next level, contact our Contest Factory team today at 855.774.6966 for your free strategy call.
