What’s the best way for brands to rise above the noise to reach a wider audience? Sponsorship! This marketing tactic is a great way to build any brand via buzzworthy campaigns and can be amplified with memorable digital engagement.
And gamification is the perfect interactive element for digital sponsorship activation—here’s how you can take advantage of everything it offers.
What Is Digital Sponsorship Activation?
Sponsorship is a form of marketing where a brand pays to support an event or activity to spread awareness to the right target audience.
Sponsorship activation (or a leveraged activity) is an event used to initiate user engagement with a sponsoring brand tied to that sponsorship.
Digital sponsorship activation brings an audience together with a sponsor via digital platforms and technologies, including websites, social media platforms, mobile apps, and email marketing campaigns. Digital activations can encompass virtual events, online games—any form of marketing that takes advantage of the instant, broad reach of the internet to grab your preferred audience’s attention.
When used in the context of digital sponsorship activation, gamification can be custom-tailored to match the theme of an event and the interests of a target demographic. For example, gamified campaigns with rewards, leaderboards, and prizes are an easy, affordable way to help your brand stand out.
What Are the Benefits of Digital Sponsorship Activation?
There are numerous benefits to digital activation, including the following:
Promotes Engagement and Social Sharing
Digital sponsorship activation connects your target audience by engaging them with interactive experiences. People love to share immersive online contests or interactive polls with their social circles, which will help widen your campaign reach.
CataBoom’s ongoing five-year partnership with Learfield has allowed the company to drive advertising dollars by pairing college sports teams with significant brands (including Academy Sports, Ford, McDonald’s, Outdoor Voices, Pizza Hut, and Subway). Fans played games promoting co-branded prizes, building both email lists and foot traffic for participating sponsors. The games were advertised on social media channels to create engagement and prompt play.
Provides Cost-Effective Solutions
Digital activation offers sponsors a lot of bang for their buck. Because virtually anyone can access online engagement activities, these activations expand reach, so engaging with their audience isn’t limited by physical location or setup costs.
The CataBoom platform (aka Catapult) accomplishes this by deploying no-code games to the market within days versus weeks, saving clients valuable time and money.
Offers Unmatched Metrics
The numbers speak for themselves. A brand can analyze how many people engage with their online event and how long they remain engaged. Added insight can be gained from other actions, like when attendees provide input through participating, clicking on links, or signing up for offers.
In a campaign designed and deployed by CataBoom, the cookie company Mother Rucker’s Sweets went from a zero net email list to over 200,000 subscribers in just three days by employing an incentivized promotional engagement using our slot machine mechanic. Players who matched three cookies in the mechanic won the in-home delivery of a delicious treat.
4 Tips for Improving Your Digital Sponsorship Activation with Gamification
However, digital sponsorship activation must speak directly to the user to provide the right impact. Gamification helps brands personalize entertainment to capture an audience’s attention and interest. The following are four tips to amplify your digital sponsorship activation with gamification:
1. Define Your Campaign Goals
Are you looking for broader brand awareness, lead generation, or individual campaign engagement? With clear objectives, gamification can provide the perfect medium for activation.
Specify your goals at the outset of planning. This will allow you to fine-tune your campaign for maximum audience appeal by incorporating the correct gaming elements to drive their interests.
By being specific from the outset, you can position yourself for success with your gamified campaign.
2. Build Strong Partner Relationships for Maximum Engagement
Gamification builds stronger partner relationships by creating awareness with a wider audience through unique experiences and incentives. CataBoom worked with T-Mobile to amplify the T-Mobile Tuesdays program using gamification to engage users with sponsored in-app games and engagements.
This ongoing campaign is a powerful sponsorship activation example of different partners providing prizes for winners of various games tailored to each brand. In trade, brands benefit from engagement impressions for their company.
These quick-play games have been wildly popular, resulting in:
- 3X traffic to sponsor websites
- 95k plays per minute
- 50% subscriber engagement
- 2.5X the normal campaign engagement
3. Choose the Right Game(s) for Your Event and Audience
Any sponsorship activation in sports should make a strong, positive connection with fans. To connect brands to the Edmonton Oilers, Sport Chek created an in-arena activation that invited hockey fans to shoot a puck at a goalie on their smartphones digitally. The game offered the chance to win over 850 different prizes, which were claimed onsite at one of three stations operated by Sport Chek advisors.
4. Create Themed Games and Prizes That Build Lasting Memories
Gamification allows sponsors to create unique, memorable experiences to engage their audience. LG created a 4,500-square-foot activation at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis for their Final Four Fan Fest. This digital sports sponsorship activation allowed fans to explore a “training facility” with different activities and games linked to LG and other sponsors. During the experience, RFID wristbands tracked visitor interactions and linked them to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Participants also used the gesture control feature on LG TV remotes to virtually spin the wheel for prizes, embracing the energy of the Final Four.
See How CataBoom Can Activate Your Sponsorship Campaigns
CataBoom’s digital sponsorship activation campaigns use gamification to captivate audiences and build lasting connections for your brand. And you can personalize every game with team colors, logos, and fonts to better create a custom experience that will drive real results.
Get in touch to schedule a demo with us today!
.svg)