In a previous post, we talked about “The Benefits of Gamifying Your Content Marketing.” Today, we’re going to go a little more in depth on the steps to actually doing that.
Step 1: Crowdsource Your Content to a Team
First, you’re going to need to have a number of different people developing posts and articles for you. If you just have one or two people, gamification is not going to be as fun and it won’t work as well. The key to gamifying your content – and the reason it works to incentivize better posts – is competition. And for competition, you need a large group of people who can compete against each other.
We’ve written at length about employee advocacy. We think you should give all of your employees – from every division of your company – the opportunity to become a creator for you.
But if you aren’t ready for that, you can hire a diverse group of freelancers and influencers and get something almost as good.
Step 2: Track All Content
Once you’ve got a solid team producing content for you, you’ll want to start tracking it. The more granular you can get, the better. You’ll want per-post stats: clicks, likes, shares, comments, overall engagement, revenue-generated, and more.
Track everything posted by your team. Luckily, Mobibi handles all of this for you and can give you the most relevant metrics without the noise.
Step 3: Leaderboard(s)
Tracking the performance of your creators’ content lets you measure how well each of them are doing. That’s actually the point. You’ll be able to know who crafts the best posts for your company on any given day, as well as who does the best job overall. Once you know that, you can incentivize competition between your team members by creating a leaderboard. Or – depending on the size of your team and how detailed you want to be – multiple leaderboards.
If your leaderboards update in real time, your creators will instantly be able to know who is creating the best stuff. They’ll be able to see who’s ahead of them, and by how much. You can display engagement-per-post, revenue-generated-per-post, or any relevant metric that you think will give your team the most buzz. You want the competition to be exciting. If a revenue-per-post leaderboard is more exciting to your people, go with that. If you prefer to keep that information discreet, base the leaderboard on engagement-per-post.
Mobibi can make this very simple with a points system that makes your leaderboard look more like, well, a game.
Step 4: Reward Your Team
Next, everyone on your team gets a trophy.
Just kidding. Actually, while you can reward your entire team if you want to, we think you’ll get the best results if you reward your top performers.
Now, with rewards, your competition has stakes. Your leaderboard means something. It means your team knows who’s in the running to win rewards. It means each individual creator knows how much better each of them has to perform to beat the person leading the board.
Make sure you publicly reward the team members whose content performs the best. Public recognition plays a key role in incentivizing competition.
Also, make sure the rewards actually mean something. A gold star doesn’t really drive anyone to get creative with their posts. A bonus, or a meal out on the company, or a bottle of Scotch, does.
Step 5: Iterate
You can think of each time you hand out a new reward as the end of a cycle. Each cycle is an opportunity to improve. Better metrics, more camaraderie, better communication, more interesting rewards, whatever you think might get better results.
We recommend you keep testing out different rewards to keep the competition fresh. And keep trying to add new members to your team, especially outsiders or employees not traditionally in public-facing roles.
Sound Complicated? Don’t Worry.
It may sound like a lot of work to set up the leaderboards, recruit your team, track your metrics, assign points, come up with rewards, and keep iterating. But don’t worry. While we won’t push you too hard, we do want you to know that if you use Mobibi, we actually make it very simple for you. All you have to do is recruit your team and hand out the rewards.
And we can even help you recruit your team! We’ll do all the heavy lifting on the tracking, aggregating, scheduling, managing, and even the leaderboards.
In a future post, we’ll also give you a list of potential rewards, in case you’re struggling for ideas. Until then, please let us know if you have any questions. You can reach us on your favorite social media platform.