05/07/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 05/07/2024 13:47
Glazed eyes, disengaged attendees mindlessly checking email, tumbleweed rolling through the chat… we've all experienced the struggle of keeping virtual event audiences hooked.
Virtual event fatigue became all too real after the pandemic drove events online. Too many video calls, webinars, and virtual events can make remote audiences tune out. Banzai's research report data shows that it's harder to get people to maintain focus rates during live virtual events compared with on-demand webinars.* When people attend live events during busy workdays, they're more prone to distractions.
Thankfully, a powerful new approach is keeping attendees focused and engaged no matter when they attend: virtual event gamification.
The desire to connect, compete, and be recognized is hard-wired into our psyches. By injecting elements of community, competition, and achievement into virtual events, today's savviest marketers are boosting attendance, engagement, and ROI.
Gamification transforms tedious online sessions into immersive, interactive experiences that build your audience. Whether it's a virtual scavenger hunt, a webinar quiz, or a live streamed leaderboard, gamified events spark that neurochemical rush of accomplishment.
Keep reading to learn how gamification can turbocharge engagement for your virtual events. From gamified event promotion to live games and follow-up, we'll share creative ways to make your events unforgettable.
Virtual event gamification refers to incorporating game-like elements, interactive experiences, and elements of play into your events - from webinars and virtual conferences to product demos, online training events, and more.
At its core, gamification taps into the psychological drivers of motivation, friendly competition, and achievement. It's about finding ways to immerse your audience and make them active participants, not passive viewers.
Common ways to gamify a virtual event include quizzes, contests, leaderboards, point/badge systems, and interactive challenges with clear wins. The key is creating an experience that's inherently fun and engaging while still delivering value, educating your audience, and supporting your marketing goals.
For example, you could take a leaf out of Banzai's book and turn a product demo into a game show webinar, with the audience winning freebies by correctly following scavenger hunt links and answering questions.
Demio's engagement features make it easy to create a fun, interactive, gamified virtual event.Or attendees could collaborate to "escape" from a virtual escape room by exploring your digital assets (website, resources, demos, etc.) to find clues about your service offerings that unlock doors. Offer prize packs or exclusive discounts to the first team to escape.
For conferences and trade shows, you could use gamification for booth activities (e.g. play to win branded merch), session check-ins, networking competitions, and more.
The possibilities are virtually endless (pun intended) when you start thinking about creative ways to add games, teamwork, and rewards into your online events
Gamification isn't just about making events fun - it delivers powerful business benefits for marketing and sales teams. When done right, it can help you avoid virtual event fatigue and boost your attendance, engagement, and overall results at all stages of the marketing funnel.
Key benefits include:
Higher Attendance & Registration Rates
Let's face it - monotonous webinars with one-way presentations generally don't grab attention. Framing your event as an entertaining, interactive experience instantly makes it more appealing for attendees. By gamifying your event with prizes, competition, and achievements, you can build buzz, anticipation, and FOMO that drives registrations.
Increased Audience Engagement
Gamification stops people from tuning out or multitasking by prompting them to take actions, collaborate, and stay focused to win prizes or take part in challenges. In fact, Banzai's Webinar Statistics Report shows that the mere inclusion of engagement elements like polls and featured actions can significantly boost attendee focus rates, likely due to how our brain responds to unpredictability and anticipating rewards. Active chat participation, polls and surveys, games, and interactive conversations will all help your attendees engage.
Better Data
With engagement data like poll responses, quiz scores, interactive submissions, comments, and focus times, you gain powerful behavioral signals for lead scoring and prioritization. Banzai's virtual event tools help you segment your most engaged attendees for follow-up - and give you overall focus time and engagement metrics to understand where your audience drop off and keep improving future events.
Demio's virtual event analytics show you exactly how your audience engaged.More Effective Education
Embedding your messaging into interactive polls, puzzles, or roleplays means attendees will absorb insights through active participation versus passive consumption. This is a great strategy as learnings stick better - in fact, the latest academic research shows that challenge-based gamification strongly boosts educational achievement.
This can help inform your TOFU educational content, online training, and courses, but also sales-focused events and demos where you want to bring the audience to a deeper understanding of your Product/Service.
Stronger Brand Affinity
Adding elements of play, rewards, and fun memories creates positive associations with your brand. Virtual event gamification helps forge an emotional connection so your attendees see you as innovative and customer-centric.
Clear Competitive Differentiation
Stale webinars are a dime a dozen. But interactive, creatively gamified events provide a truly enjoyable audience experience that will set your brand apart and leave lasting positive impressions.
Interactive quizzes and polls are a simple yet powerful way to gamify webinars, online training, conferences, and more, transforming passive audiences into active participants.
Polls keep attendees interested as they wonder whether others will share their responses. Quizzes create a game-like atmosphere of friendly competition and achievement that promotes engagement and reinforces learnings.
How you can use quizzes and polls in your virtual event:
Banzai's webinar tool Demio lets you embed interactive polls seamlessly into your virtual eventsLeaderboards and point systems introduce gamification by allowing attendees to compete and gain visual recognition on the board based on their participation and knowledge. Public leaderboards build buzz and excitement as people try to move up the ranks - and adding points-based prizes like free tickets or discounts really amps up the competition.
How you can use leaderboards and points systems in your virtual events:
Gamification isn't limited to the event itself - you can bake it into your promotion and pre-event nurturing too. Gamifying your pre-event promotions builds anticipation and FOMO from the start, getting people invested in your event experience before it even happens.
How you can use gamified event promotion in your virtual events:
You can give your attendees a chance to win prizes before your webinar's even started with Demio's BoostOne of the most engaging and memorable gamification options is creating a virtual escape room experience centered around your event topic.
Escape rooms inspire teamwork, creative thinking, and build an atmosphere of friendly competition as groups race to "escape" first. They create powerful brand associations based on positive experiences.
How you can use virtual escape rooms in your events:
Directly involving attendees and putting them in the spotlight can turn a passive viewing experience into a gamified, collaborative event, overcoming common virtual event challenges like boredom or distractions.
Being acknowledged and applauded by peers taps into strong psychological motivators around status, achievement, and even friendly competition.
How you can use audience spotlights and participation in your events:
Adding in spontaneous celebrations, giveaways, and unexpected treats creates audience delight and buzzworthy virtual event moments.
Unpredictability and the surprise factor trigger psychological responses like excitement, happiness, and social motivation, keeping attendees continuously engaged in anticipation of the next reward.
How you can use surprise rewards and celebrations in your events:
The gamification doesn't have to end when your live virtual event wraps up.
Fun, interactive follow-ups nurture attendees along the funnel and prevent drop-off after the initial event hype. They also provide opportunities to re-engage people who missed the live session and pull them into your gamified experience.
How you can use fun follow-up after your virtual events:
Successful event marketing today means interactive, gamified experiences that captivate your audience's attention and leave lasting impressions.
You don't even need complex technology or gaming expertise to get in on the engagement revolution.
Banzai's audience engagement tools empower marketers of all levels to transform monotonous virtual events into immersive, engaging webinar adventures.
Our all-in-one webinar platform Demio makes it easy to run polls and quizzes, direct attendees to freebie downloads and call-to-action links, and spotlight audience members.
But we don't stop at just making virtual events fun. Demio gives you all the rich engagement and webinar data you need to demonstrate ROI and identify your most interested prospects for targeted follow-up.
Banzai also offers Reach tools that ensure you pack your events by doing targeted outreach for you and a Boost feature that gamifies event promotion by incentivizing registrations with rewards and social sharing contests.
We envision a world where marketers can tailor compelling virtual event experiences to each unique audience. Banzai is leading the way toward the future of events that inspire people to show up, stay engaged, absorb your messaging, and forge lasting emotional connections with your brand.
Gamifying your virtual events doesn't have to require a lot of extra work and time, especially with solutions like Demio that make it easy to incorporate engagement features like polls and quizzes into your webinar. Simple games, collaborative challenges, and freebies can go a long way.
More advanced options like custom-built games or full virtual escape room environments will involve more upfront effort but can pay dividends in wow-factor engagement.
Gamified virtual events provide a wealth of valuable engagement data that helps you measure your ROI. Solutions like Demio track metrics like poll responses, downloads, chat engagement, and focus time, as well as webinar KPIs like registrations, attendance, and drop-offs.
This gives you powerful data on the effectiveness of your virtual event as well as behavioral signals to score leads and segment your hottest prospects.