Gamification in Business for Marketing and B2C and B2B Sales

Before you move on to the next lessons and really go deep into discovering what is gamification and how can you implement it in your business, we would love to ask you for a super simple, yet very important, favor.

What is gamification? this is a question that we hear all the time. If you are enrolling in this gamification course, you probably already know the answer to this question, but how could we not include a lesson explaining what is gamification and of course starting with an example of how one company uses it to change the behavior of its customers to get them to be more loyal and consume more products.

Gamification is extremely useful for business and entrepreneurs, and it is much more than just increasing sales. You can implement strategies to make your customers more loyal, to motivate your employees, to change behaviors.

The options with gamification are huge, and it works for B2C business as well as in B2B business,  small and mid size companies or solopreneurs and coaches.

You can have a Dental Clinic or be an online marketing consultan, you can have a restaurant, a car dealership or a clothing store, it doesn't matter what business you are in, gamification can help you take your business to the next level.

This course was first created in Spanish by Neftali Claros Carretero. He is a sales and team management consultant and coach, who uses gamification strategies to help mostly European and Latinamerican companies develop better sales systems and team-work environments. The Spanish version of this gamification course is now part of Udemy For Business, which speaks about the quality of the course.

This English version was created along with Gustavo Escobar Henríquez, who is one of Udemy top instructors with over 30,000 students and more than 1,000 positive reviews.

This is a very common question. A questions that some times is even asked with a bit of caution and fear, as if you will be charged thousands of dollars just by asking or wondering what will be the cost of implementing gamification techniques in your sales or in your business in general.

Well, fear not, gamification is not expensive, it can be of course, but it can also be ridiculously cheap.

Eventhough this is a course on gamification for small businesses and entrepreneurs, in this lesson we will share an example of a big company that with a simple, simple game got their employees to do a task that saved the company tens of thousands of dollars, and allowed them to have the project done in 3 days rather that a year.

That is how powerful gamification can be.

One of the types of gamification and probably the one most of our students are searching for is when it is used to increase sales, to motivate customers to buy something that they do not buy often, or to push them to buy more than what they normally buy.

You can also use gamification to motivate your team or particular departments to do specific tasks. In most of the world sales team have already implemented simple gamification elements into their everyday, but there is more departments than can do the same, and also more ways to do it.

Behavioral change gamification is probably the most popular one, then one you probably have seen in news or going viral in social media. This is where you try to influence the behavior of people. When this works, it can do wonders.

The well know progression bar which you probably have seen a thousand times (or more) is an extremely efficient way to motivate people to do something more, since everyone of us wants to make sure that bar go to the end.

Now, the question is, how can you use the progression bar in your business?

The point system is one of the most notorious elements of gamification, or of any games in general.

Some of you might even already use some sort of version of the point system in your business, but are you really gratifying it to make it at least a little bit fun?

So you learn what DIA did to gamify their sales, and why that wasn't right. Now you will practice what you have learn so far to offer solutions and or improvements to their strategy.

Do you know what is an avatar and what does it have to do with implementing gamification in your business? Well, fear not, if it is not clear, we will certainly find the answer in this lesson.

What do we mean with resources when talking about gamification?

Well, this would be objects that by mixing them you get another one. In many games they will use raw materials, like gold, stone, wood, etc., which are used to build houses, towns, armies, and so on. They aim for the user to do various tasks to obtain the different resources, this way investing themselves even more with the objective.

Did you get that?

Hehe, don't worry, it will be pretty clear once you are done with this lesson.

Implementing leadership boards in business as a way of gamification is one of my favorite techniques. I just love those leadership boars or rankings. They can be so powerful when used properly.

You can use them for people to buy more, for employees to do specific tasks with more motivation, and much more.

Lets find out how you can use a leadership board in your business.

How you ever wonder how companies use the status element to gamify their business?

Well I hope you have, because "status" is an extremely powerful element, I also love this one by the way, and if you use it properly you can make magic with this!

Definitely an element that you must consider using to gamify your business.

Challenges are fun! If you are a solopreneur, a coach, or you have a small business and want to implement gamification to boost your sales or get your team to achieve some sort of goal, using challenges can be one of the best ways to make it happen with very little investment.

But, what are challenges in gamification for business exactly?

When talking about cheap and effective ways to implement gamification for employee engagement, insignias might be the king. This is extremely  affordable (I even feel like affordable too expensive for this element), and easy to implement.

Of course you can use insignias in a very complicated worked out, super gamified structure, but you can also do it in the most easiest and simplest way.

In this lesson we want to help you understand what you should take from this gamification examples so that you can replicate some of these ideas to implement them in your business.

Here we will se an example of gamification implemented in a dental clinic using the status element to help increase customer loyalty.

A summary of the most important ideas that you should take with you to make sure you can implement all these techniques in the most effective way and make sure that you can make the most of gamification