→ Your growth practice

Transform your marketing campaign into a fun virtual game to attract and engage your SaaS leads and prospects.

→ Why it matters

• Engagement drives attention and higher brand awareness. Instead of treating your audience as passive consumers of marketing campaigns, create opportunities to engage and connect with your leads and prospects.
  

→ Definitions

📓 Lead engagement: A two-way communication between brand and leads, which enables SaaS companies to connect and build authentic relationships with their audience.

📓 Engagement marketing: A SaaS methodology focused on developing strategies and practices to increase the active participation of leads and prospects in brand activities.

→ Quick explanation

💥 Problem(s)

• Lack of lead and prospect engagement.
• Your audience may have little to no interest in your brand.
• There’s no authentic relationship-building strategy between your brand and your audience.
• Summertime is awful for sales, as many SaaS companies observe a revenue decrease during the summer months.
  

💡 Solution

Build an environment for interacting with your leads and prospects to:

• Increase the engagement rate
• Make them interested in your brand
• Build strong relationships with your target group
• Survive the sales slowdown during summertime.

Although multiple lead and prospect engagement strategies exist, launching fun summer games for professionals will differentiate you from the competition and win your audience’s hearts.

► Quick note: You can design engagement experiences like cards or trivia games. Card games are based on teams or professionals collecting cards and competing against each other. Trivia games focused on getting competitors to answer industry-related questions.

→ Your growth opportunities

• Increase brand awareness and get people interested in your SaaS.
• Acquire and engage new leads.
• Generate real-life connections with your leads and prospects.
• Keep your leads and prospects engaged during the sales slowdown.
• Be on top of people’s minds if they want to purchase a SaaS solution similar to yours.
• Help people associate your brand with fun and interactivity.
• Different yourself from the competition that is still stuck on launching one-way marketing campaigns and treating people as passive content consumers.
  

→ Case example

>> Jiminny, a sales intelligence platform

In June 2022, Jiminny launched a summer campaign based on an ongoing virtual game for sales teams.

As Tom Lavery, founder and CEO at Jiminny, highlights, High Performers is a summer competition that offers opportunities to learn and grow as professionals.

The sales teams must engage with exclusive content, collect High Performers cards, and compete with other sales teams to win top prizes.

As Tom notes, this campaign is about rewarding curiosity, encouraging a growth mindset, and having fun as a team. The game prizes include party boxes and cocktail deliveries for £150 or (approx.) $170.

To play this game, professionals have to:

• Register their sales team. There’s no limit to the number of teammates.
• Interact with exclusive content to gain unique High Performers cards. There’s one card per engagement. Teams can acquire up to 30 cards throughout the entire campaign.
• Participate in weekly team battles. Each card has five attributes. The highest card value wins each round.

In other words, the game includes three main stages:

🧠 Consume exclusive content

🃏 Earn High Performers cards

🎁 Use cards to battle for prizes

The game culminates at the end of summer with a Grand Finale live on Zoom, where all teams are invited to participate. The grand prize is £3,000 or (approx.) $3,400.

It’s worth noting that Jiminny used LinkedIn to promote the campaign, share game updates, and weekly praise winners.

→ Is this practice good for your SaaS?

Questions:

• What type of game will engage my leads and prospects?
• How can I promote my virtual game, ensuring a high participation rate?
  

Requirements:

• There are absolutely no requirements for launching a summer game for leads and prospects. You only need bandwidth and a small marketing team to deploy the marketing campaign, promote the game, and interact with your leads and prospects.
  

→ How to apply this growth practice

✅ Identify your players. They’re obviously part of your target group, but you’ll want to fine-tune their profile better. For example, do you want to engage professionals or entire teams?

✅ Decide the duration of your game-based marketing campaign. It can be a single game session, a week-or month-long game, or a summertime game. It all depends on your resources.

► Quick note: For better visibility and higher engagement, you’ll want to launch a game that stretches throughout the summer season. This way, you’ll allow people to discover and engage with it regardless of the moment they’ve registered.

✅ Choose what type of game you’ll design for your leads and prospects. You can follow Jiminny’s example and launch a virtual card game.

What’s interesting about Jiminny’s game is the requirement for players to consume the company’s content. In other words, Jiminny’s team combined passive content consumption with an interactive game. You can do the same and follow steps such as:

• Launch a series of educational pieces
• Decide their sequence and how many pieces you’ll unlock per week
• Offer one card per content engagement
• Run weekly battles, allowing teams to compete against each other with the cards they’ve collected
  

✅ If you’ll follow Jiminny’s example, you’ll want to engage your designers to launch a card series for the game. You’ll have to assign different values if people compete with the cards.

✅ Make a list of prize items. The rewards have to be motivating. Apart from physical items, you can also offer lifetime SaaS discounts.

✅ Promote your virtual game on your home page and social media. Keep engaging people on social media by announcing different game updates and praising the winners.

✅ Make sure everyone understands the game rules. Follow Jiminny’s example and record several videos to explain it.

✅ Culminate your fun campaign with a live Grand Finale. You can take advantage of the occasion and launch a virtual event with knowledge sessions and networking.

✅ Track KPIs such as the number of game participants who are:

• Leads
• Users
• Customers
  

Also, you can identify whether your game participants moved further through the marketing/sales pipeline or became users / paying customers. These KPIs will give you a clear overview of this practice’s impact on your growth.