Summary

Are you looking for a fun, original and interactive way to strengthen cohesion within your teams or to motivate your employees? Workplace competitions are an effective way of engaging and rewarding your employees while reinforcing their sense of belonging to your organisation.

We’re going to share with you some ideas for competitions or interactive events that can be launched in-house to challenge teams in a fun way.

SUMMARY

• The benefits of interactivity and games to motivate employees
• Our ideas for corporate competitions
• 5 tips for launching workplace competitions

In 2006, Netflix decided to organise an open competition to improve its recommendation algorithm CInematch. The prize is an exceptional 1 million dollars.

Armed with user data, employees of the video-on-demand platform competed to design an algorithm capable of outperforming Cinematch by predicting how users would rate a new film based on their previous preferences.

Three years later, two teams managed to beat Cinematch and ended the competition. This example clearly shows that, used wisely, in-house challenges can be a good way of pushing employees to excel, strengthening collaboration and team cohesion.

On a day-to-day basis, internal competitions can have a number of benefits for your company.

Training your teams the fun way

Rather than organising a traditional training workshop or seminar, a company can opt for an interactive competition. It’s an excellent way of transmiting information in a more entertaining way and boost internal communication.

You can raise awareness of a CSR initiative (such as environmental protection) by organising an interactive quiz around the theme, or a competition such as the Fresque du Climat. In this way, employees are kept informed of the company’s long-term strategy and are regularly involved in its implementation.

Reinforcing a sense of belonging to the company’s values

Internal competitions and surveys, for example, are a simple and effective way of collecting feedback. They will help to improve the company’s internal culture so that it better reflects the expectations and aspirations of its employees. But other team-building challenges are just as relevant for strengthening employee support and improving the company’s image internally (and externally).

Like Netflix, you can challenge your teams by involving them in certain choices (logo change, new product design). The fun, interactive format will bind employees together around a common challenge and help new ideas to emerge.

Boosting team cohesion and stimulating performance

Internal competitions also contribute to employee motivation and productivity. After all, it’s when you’re having fun that you’re most effective, simply because you don’t feel like you’re working.

This gamified format is also an excellent way of rewarding the most motivated employees without creating tension within your teams. Everyone can take part and has a chance of winning a prize (tickets for a show, a trip offered by the company, etc.).

The whole point of workplace competitions is that they can take any form you like, depending on the specifics of your organisation and the objectives you want to achieve. If you’re looking for ideas for workplace competitions, here are some suggestions that you can adapt to your teams.

1. The photo contest

Photo competitions are a great way to unleash employees’ creativity and encourage them to share their personal experiences at work. Phillips, for example, has used this approach to strengthen its employer brand and facilitate future recruitment. Philips employees were invited to share photos of themselves at work on social networks via the hashtag #LifeAtPhilips.

2. The in-house culture quiz

Quizzes such as Trivia (a quiz with several choices of answers) are also a fun mechanism that is particularly well-suited to the corporate world. It’s an excellent way of testing employees’ knowledge of the organisation’s history and values, and strengthen cohesion and a sense of belonging within its teams.

3. The performance challenge

When organised fairly and inclusively, performance competitions are an excellent way of boosting employee motivation. One of the most popular forms of performance competition is based on key performance indicators (KPIs), particularly within sales teams. This internal competition rewards employees who have exceeded their sales target.

4. The treasure hunt

A treasure hunt in the company’s physical offices (or in a virtual recreation for remote teams) is also an excellent way of engaging employees. The company can hide surprise prizes on its premises or within a gamified application.

5. The winning calendar

The game is therefore an original and effective way of engaging employees and strengthening team cohesion within the company. Be careful, however, to ensure that everyone can take part and that it does not create unhealthy competition between its employees.

Adictiz recommends that you :

• Think about the objectives you want to achieve with your in-house game and choose the right format accordingly;
• Choose an easy-to-use gamification tool to organise your digital competition and enable all your employees (even those working remotely) to take part.
• Get your employees involved to come up with new ideas for in-house competitions;
• Choose the right rewards and prizes to motivate your employees;
• Ask for feedback once the internal marketing campaign is over to assess its impact and improve future initiatives.

Commitment has become a very important aspect of online marketing in recent years. With the rise of social networks, brands can no longer simply broadcast advertisements or post a publication and wait for it to generate sales. They now need to interact with their audience and find new ways to increase audience engagement.

In this article, we share with you 10 formidable techniques for creating engaging marketing campaigns.

Engagement has become the key metric for marketers. For many, it replaces so-called vanity KPIs (such as the number of subscribers, for example) and provides a much better assessment of a brand’s reputation and appeal on social networks.

However, engagement also translates into very concrete KPIs, such as the number of comments, likes and shares of a publication. Some formulas also include the number of impressions or views, etc.

These community interactions with the content shared by a brand are good indicators of its relevance. But they don’t say much about the intention behind these actions… and even less about how they enable the company to achieve more concrete objectives, such as increasing sales, building customer loyalty, etc.

So before we look at the best levers for creating engaging marketing campaigns, it’s important to think about the objectives that the brand wants to achieve. In other words, what the engagement of its audience can bring to the brand in terms of commercial results.

The different objectives

The objectives of an engaging marketing campaign can be multiple. Interactive content can enable companies to :

• Capture the attention of your prospects and expand your target audience to generate new leads.
• Collect data (feedback, opinions, survey responses) to adapt your offer or marketing to the needs of your community.
• Reactivate existing customers to stay ‘top of mind’ when they need to buy a product/service (particularly before a major marketing event such as Christmas or the launch of a new collection).
• Convert your audience from their social network accounts or newsletters to your online shop (or in-store).

Build audience loyalty by creating a more solid relationship that is not just transactional.

Companies wishing to launch marketing campaigns to increase audience engagement can use a number of levers, depending on the objectives they wish to achieve. Here are the most effective.

1. Listen and respond to your subscribers

The first simple thing to do to increase audience engagement and strengthen the user experience is simply to interact with them. Brands that make a point of replying to their subscribers’ comments, reposting their publications (of the UGC type) or simply asking for opinions (in the form of surveys) are those that forge the strongest links with their community.

Beyond the consideration they show their customers and prospects these brands also take advantage of these interactions to better understand their needs and expectations. Comments or responses to a survey are all first-party data that shed light on consumer trends within their audience. The information collected can then be used to better segment customers or adapt communications, offers, etc.

2. Create exciting competitions

Create an engaging marketing competition is also an excellent way of achieving your sales objectives. Interactive animations such as quizzes, photo contests or instant wins are highly effective to :

• Expand your audience (thanks to the buzz around the prizes to be won, for example).
• Raise community awareness of the launch of a new product or service.
• Reactivate customers by offering them rewards.

3. Launch a viral campaign with a content creator

Partnerships with influencers are also an excellent way of generating more engagement with your community. Content creators have a closeness with their community that can benefit brands, whose communication will appear more authentic.

But account takeovers, for example, can bring a bit of freshness and novelty to the content shared by companies, and so engage their audiences.

4. Capitalise on interactive advertising content

Interactive marketing is, in essence, a powerful generator of engagement. In fact, its purpose is to Invite a community to interact with the content, for example by integrating gamification mechanisms (in the case of competitions or Playable Ads).

5. Encourage the creation of UGCs

UGC campaigns (whether in the form of a competition or a simple branded hashtag) are particularly effective in increasing audience engagement. They enable brands to encourage their customers to share content about their products or services.

UGC will be an excellent way of boosting their visibility, reinforcing their sense of belonging to the brand’s community and converting new customers more effectively than photos from a professional shoot.

6. Organising events

Events (whether virtual or physical) are an integral part of brand community strategies. They allow brands to create much stronger links with its customers and therefore build loyalty. But they are also good conversion drivers (when they are organised to launch a new collection, for example) and engagement drivers (by inviting participants to share content around the event).

7. Doing live shopping

Live shopping is a highly effective form of interactive content for generating engagement and boosting conversion rates. Brands will present their products in a more immersive wayand answer their customers’ questions live. Customers benefit from a personalised shopping experience without having to visit the shop.

It is also possible to integrate interactive experiences such as surveys or games into live shopping. These gamified formats will boost community engagement even further.

8. Use co-creation to engage your audiences

Co-creation is another ultra-powerful form of interactive marketing. It allows customers to participate in the development of a new product or service, usually by taking part in a survey and then voting (to select the best idea).

Not only does this strategy generate engagement. But it’s also an excellent way of activating the data collected from its community to create products for which companies are sure to have demand.

9. Share relevant content

By sharing content with high added value (such as free guides, webinars, tutorials, etc.), companies can respond effectively to the expectations and needs of their audience. It also generates engagement by encouraging their prospects to delve deeper into the subject, ask questions, etc.

10. Share behind the scenes of your brand

Consumers are generally curious to discover what goes on behind the scenes at their favourite brands. Social networks are excellent platforms to share his backstage, give a voice to its employees, etc. Many brands, particularly in the fashion industry, take advantage of these channels to reveal the secrets of their workshops or catwalk shows. An ideal technique for increasing audience engagement while highlighting the company’s expertise.

Create a more engaging marketing campaign using gamification. Adictiz offers you a a wide choice of formats for interacting with your audience, depending on the objectives you want to achieve!