Decoding Marketing 2.0: How Newsfeed SmartApps is Helping Brands to Excel Through Branded Games

Exercising native advertising at its best, the Newsfeed SmartApps tries to combine branded content with interactive opt-in tools like games to foster two-way relationships with consumers for which the company has garnered appreciation globally.

Reaping traction and hooking the audience through varied content types is a constant grappling that brands go through to sustain the competition and remain a victor. Since there is always room to maneuver, marketers try to employ a gamut of content marketing techniques to deliver perpetual, yet targeted messages to the scrupulous audience. The new engagement technique, among the others, that’s seizing hold of brands attention is the ‘gamified content’ that further grasps higher audience engagement. One such platform is Newsfeed SmartApps, that facilitates and develop interactive games/experiences for brands based on their brief. Once the gamified content is produced, the brands can launch it across various social media avenues, messaging platforms, and app ecosystem. Exercising native advertising at its best, the Newsfeed SmartApps tries to combine branded content with interactive opt-in tools like games to foster two-way relationships with consumers for which the company has garnered appreciation globally. This technique includes customized gaming experiences and challenges to tug the patrons into branded content without positioning a brand’s involvement in direct advertising.

Unraveling Content Marketing Issues Through Experiential Tech Deliverance

The stress-inducing issues that every marketer face while including content marketing in their marketing budget are how to increase customer engagement, brand awareness, and get better conversion rates. The Newsfeed SmartApps, through experiential tech deliverance, stay focused on solving such content marketing related issues of the brands.

Adhvith Dhuddu, Founder/CEO, AliveNow (the creative tech company that has built the Newsfeed SmartApps solution), says, “If you look at all the content that is created by brands, it falls under one of these categories – videos, GIFs, images, and text. In these four content categories, a user is only ‘passively engaged’. However, with Newsfeed SmartApps branded games, users are ‘actively engaged’ because when a user interacts with a branded game, they are more involved than watching a video or GIF. The average time spent by a user when interacting with a Newsfeed SmartApp is much higher than a normal post on social media.” With an average dwell time of 42-50 seconds, conversion rates of 16-22% and 700+ Newsfeed SmartApps experiences deployed globally, this content type of Newsfeed has been used by brands like Pepsi, Amazon, Royal Enfield, Future Retail, OnePlus, ISL, Big Bazaar, and many others.

Big Bazaar Bachat Run Game by Newsfeed SmartApp

Taking the Revolution-Course in the Indian Advertising Business

The gamified branded content has exploded so fast internationally, it became difficult for the home-grown brands in the country to comprehend the algorithm behind. Brands, often, struggle to identify popular or promising ways through which they can market their product. Unless trending, brands remain self-effacing while trying something new. Thus, finally, gaming content has gained momentum among marketers and brands are well-conscious of the high ROIs they are getting through such content in comparison to normal content types. “We have actually had a great experience with most of our clients because what we are offering is fresh, different, and not the usual content. Brand and agency teams see the work we have done and the kind of brands that have used Newsfeed SmartApps. The results we have generated, justify the cost as well,” adds Dhuddu. It won’t be wrong to say that gamified content has clasped the revolutionary course in the world of advertising, which can be taken as subtle yet powerful. Done right, and through right means (like Newsfeed SmartApps), it can be content marketing at its best.

Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Gaming Content by Newsfeed SmartApps

The Easy Battle Between Cost and RoI

There are marketers who remain too cautious when trying new technologies or accepting new trends. Also, such clients decipher the budget of such campaigns to be too much in comparison to normal content. The case, however, is different internally. Dhuddu explains how such content operates at a good scale in terms of budgets. “We have the ability to build customized branded games at a very reasonable cost. Most of our build’s range from $3,000 to $8,000 and these are not too high when the brand assesses the RoI on Newsfeed SmartApp campaigns. With very healthy engagement and above average conversion rates justifying the cost hasn’t been an issue for brands,” he avers. Brands prefer Newsfeed SmartApps because it goes beyond static uni-directional content like normal videos, photos, and GIFs. Users are involved resulting in significantly more engagement – RoI on rich media, and also the dynamic interactive experience is 3.5-4 times higher than normal content.

Sales-Centric V/S Customer-Focused

Consumers today are excited about new technologies, especially those that bring an element of gamification. However, it is crucial to understand how to promote a product in the most favorable and ethical manner to the consumer. An ideal way for telling brand stories and promoting products in a manner that does not feel sales-focused, but customer-focused. “This is one of the reasons brands love our product and brand/agency teams keep coming back every time there’s a key campaign. With Newsfeed SmartApps, we’re giving them the ability to not only have a gamified experience but also convert an engaged user to a lead, and deploy gamified creative assets across social and mobile ad networks. While we can classify branded videos, GIFs, photo’s as passive content consumption, Newsfeed SmartApp games can be classified as active content consumption because the user’s involvement is key to any gamified experience. When a user plays a game they are choosing to engage with the game, and in turn with the brand. And given that, branding in the game is subtle it doesn’t come across as sales focused at all,” states Dhuddu.

Ideation, Design, Development, and Deployment

The gamified content is first devised to fit the brand and the specific campaign needs and goals. Effective content customizes the message and format to the target audience. For instance, the new gaming campaign created by Newsfeed SmartApps for Pepsi, which launched in Norway, Denmark, and Finland, targeted young audience to remain engaged with the UEFA Champions League. “We take anywhere between 5-15 working days to build and test a Newsfeed SmartApp experience. A structured 4 step process is followed: Ideation>Design>Development> Deployment. The best thing about our team is we are not just a ‘tech’ or ‘development’ team. We have an in-house strategy and creative people and almost 90% of the Newsfeed SmartApps that we have built and launched is conceptualized by our team to fit the brand’s need and brief. The process is quite simple. Once we have a brief, we ask the brand team to review similar work we have done in their sector and we will also come back with custom ideas for that brief. Based on the client’s budget, timeline, brief, target audience, etc, we shared different ideas and concepts,” he speaks.

Newsfeed SmartApps Game for Pepsi Max

Digitally Transforming the Retail Business in 2019

Looking at the reception of such content by the brands, Newsfeed SmartApps are digitally transforming the retail business experience in 2019. Since digital transformation in retail is key to differentiating and outshining competitors, it makes sure to reach maximum brands and introduce them to this kind of immersive marketing of their products. “A large number of our clients are in retail and we have even got many success stories from the retail sector. One of them being the various brands under Future Group. A major area where Newsfeed SmartApps has helped is in converting online users to customers in the store. We work closely with brands like Big Bazaar to track to the last detail, how many users played a game, how many got a coupon, how many redeemed the coupon and what was the average bill value of the users who redeemed the coupon,” Dhuddu concludes.