Organize workplace competitions is an excellent way to engage employees and strengthen team cohesion. The fun, interactive aspect of these animations can also be used to serve other strategic HR objectives, such as improving the employer brand, helping employees to develop their skills or retaining talent.

Depending on the expected results, but also on the specifics of the workforce (who may be working face-to-face or remotely), the corporate competition can take different forms.

In this article, you’ll discover 4 ideas of workplace competitions adapted to the professional world.

SUMMARY

• 1. Use edutainment to help your employees develop their skills
• 2. Boost employee engagement with creative competitions
• 3. Strengthen team cohesion through fun activities
• 4. Loyalize and retain talent by rewarding them through workplace competitions

Edutainment is the concept of combining learning and play. Introducing gamification mechanics into a professional training course or awareness-raising workshop not only increases participants’ attention, but also encourages the retention of new information.

Competitions can be used to encourage employees to improve their skills. On the one hand, the fun dimension makes professional training more enjoyable for learners. But by introducing a points system or a ranking between participants, companies can also boost their teams’ motivation and push them to excel.

A quiz shared after a training session, for example, can be a very interesting edutainment format for ensuring that employees have assimilated the new knowledge they have been given.

But the competition can also take place directly during the training module via gamified mechanisms such as the 7 Errors Game, for example. As part of a marketing training course, participants might be asked to identify the elements that need to be changed in the visuals of an advertising campaign, for example.

Today’s companies are facing many new HR challenges. Younger generations, for example, are known to be more volatile and stay with the same company for shorter periods. There is also growing talk of quiet quitting, i.e. the gradual disengagement of employees who no longer feel part of a collective.

To engage their employees, organizations can again rely on competitions. The key is to offer activities that encourage employees to get involved in strategy and the company’s future. A good idea might be to ask them to come up with a new product or service.

This is what Lidl has done with its voting competition. The aim of this corporate competition was to engage employees by asking them to create the brand’s next pizza, soon to be available in stores. The animation met with great interest from the teams, enabling Lidl to collect 21.6k votes throughout the campaign.

In addition to valuing the creativity and ideas of its employees, Lidl boosted their commitment through this competition by choosing attractive prizes. After a prize draw, participants could win kitchen appliances and accessories.

Similar workplace competitions can be set up to boost employee commitment. Customizers or gamified surveys can also be used to solicit feedback from teams and incorporate it into strategic decisions.

Within a company, organizing contests for groups can also encourage employees to work together. It’s a particularly good way of strengthening team cohesion and developing a spirit of camaraderie among colleagues.

Play is in fact a powerful lever for creating bonds, this can be a way for employees to get to know each other better, or to facilitate collaboration on joint projects. For example, the employer can encourage participants in an onboarding session to take part in a Personality Test. New recruits can break the ice by finding out which category of leader they belong to (via the famous 4-color test).

Sports competitions are also an excellent way of driving employee engagement. Employees can get together in teams and challenge each other in disciplines such as swimming, cycling or archery. A Prognostics challenge during a sporting event can also strengthen cohesion within the workforce by inviting employees to bet as a team.

The challenges of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are also particularly interesting for bonding staff and giving greater meaning to their mission. The competition can be used to raise funds (or items such as second-hand clothing) for needy people or charities. The teams that succeed in raising the funds will be rewarded with prizes that can be :

• material (gift, goodies, etc.)
• or symbolic (additional days off, promotion on the company website, etc.).

Adictiz took part in a QVT challenge. To find out more about the operation, read the dedicated article: Pimp Your Cup: Adictiz in-house game

Workplace competitions can also be used to build talent loyalty. As already mentioned, organizations face a real challenge in retaining their employees. In fact, the departure of an employee entails :

• additional recruitment costs,
• a vacancy for a shorter or longer period,
• loss of expertise,
• but also lower productivity.

To retain talent within their teams, employers can organize a competition aimed precisely at rewarding employee loyalty. This type of event can be reserved for senior profiles or, on the contrary, for new recruits whose first months with the company are crucial to their long-term integration.

But the company can also take advantage of special occasions to reward all its employees. DPD, for example, capitalizes on seasonal events such as its 25th anniversary to unite its teams around an internal competition. The organization relied on a simple mechanic (Match 3) to spoil their employees. Participants could win attractive prizes (travel boxes). The result: DPD recorded an average of 41 games per player.

Companies can also reinforce their employer brand by organizing internal competitions such as Instant 100% win. All participants can win prizes, demonstrating the company’s commitment to the well-being and satisfaction of its teams.

Conclusion

Organizing a corporate competition is an excellent way to attract, engage and retain employees. Start by defining the objective you want to achieve, so you can choose the most appropriate event idea. Discover all our customizable interactive mechanics and strengthen your employer brand!

Commitment has become a very important aspect of online marketing in recent years. With the rise of social networks, brands can no longer simply broadcast advertisements or post a publication and wait for it to generate sales. They now need to interact with their audience and find new ways of increasing engagement.

In this article, we share with you 10 formidable techniques for creating engaging marketing campaigns.

Engagement has become the key metric for marketers. For many, it replaces so-called vanity KPIs (such as the number of subscribers, for example) and provides a much better assessment of a brand’s reputation and appeal on social networks.

However, engagement also translates into very concrete KPIs, such as the number of comments, likes and shares of a publication. Some formulas also include the number of impressions or views, etc.

These community interactions with the content shared by a brand are good indicators of its relevance. But they don’t say much about the intention behind these actions… and even less about how they enable the company to achieve more concrete objectives, such as increasing sales, building customer loyalty, etc.

So before we look at the best levers for creating engaging marketing campaigns, it’s important to think about the objectives that the brand wants to achieve. In other words, what the engagement of its audience can bring to the brand in terms of commercial results.

The different objectives

The aim of an engaging marketing campaign can be multiple. Interactive content can enable companies to :

• Capture the attention of your prospects and expand your target audience to generate new leads.
• Collect data (feedback, opinions, survey responses) to adapt your offer or marketing to the needs of your community.
• Reactivate existing customers to stay ‘top of mind’ when they need to buy a product/service (particularly before a major marketing event such as Christmas or the launch of a new collection).
• Convert your audience from their social network accounts or newsletters to your online shop (or in-store).

Build audience loyalty by creating a more solid relationship that is not just transactional.

Companies wishing to launch marketing campaigns to better engage their audiences can use a number of levers, depending on the objectives they wish to achieve. Here are the most effective.

1. Listen and respond to your subscribers

The first simple thing to do to increase audience engagement and strengthen the user experience is simply to interact with them. Brands that make a point of replying to their subscribers’ comments, reposting their publications (of the UGC type) or simply asking for opinions (in the form of surveys) are those that forge the strongest links with their community.

Beyond the consideration they show their customers and prospectsthese brands also take advantage of these interactions to better understand their needs and expectations. Comments or responses to a survey are all first-party data that shed light on consumer trends within their audience. The information collected can then be used to better segment customers or adapt communications, offers, etc.

2. Create exciting competitions

Create an engaging marketing competition is also an excellent way of achieving your sales objectives. Interactive animations such as the quizzes, photo contests or instant wins are highly effective to :

• Expand your audience (thanks to the buzz around the prizes to be won, for example).
• Raise community awareness of the launch of a new product or service.
• Reactivate customers by offering them rewards.

3. Launch a viral campaign with a content creator

Partnerships with influencers are also an excellent way of generating more engagement with your community. Content creators have a closeness with their community that can benefit brands, whose communication will appear more authentic.

But account takeovers, for example, can bring a bit of freshness and novelty to the content shared by companies, and so engage their audiences.

4. Capitalise on interactive advertising content

Interactive marketing is, in essence, a powerful generator of engagement. In fact, its purpose is to Invite a community to interact with the content, for example by integrating gamification mechanisms (in the case of competitions or Playable Ads).

5. Encourage the creation of UGCs

UGC campaigns (whether in the form of a competition or a simple branded hashtag) are particularly effective in increasing audience engagement. They enable brands to encourage their customers to share content about their products or services.

UGC will be an excellent way of boosting their visibility, reinforcing their sense of belonging to the brand’s community and converting new customers more effectively than photos from a professional shoot.

6. Organising events

Events (whether virtual or physical) are an integral part of brand community strategies. They allow brands to create much stronger links with its customers and therefore build loyalty. But they are also good conversion drivers (when they are organised to launch a new collection, for example) and engagement drivers (by inviting participants to share content around the event).

7. Doing live shopping

Live shopping is a highly effective form of interactive content for generating engagement and boosting conversion rates. Brands will present their products in a more immersive wayand answer their customers’ questions live. Customers benefit from a personalised shopping experience without having to visit the shop.

It is also possible to integrate interactive experiences such as surveys or games into live shopping. These gamified formats will boost community engagement even further.

8. Use co-creation to engage your audiences

Co-creation is another ultra-powerful form of interactive marketing. It allows customers to participate in the development of a new product or service, usually by taking part in a survey and then voting (to select the best idea).

Not only does this strategy generate engagement. But it’s also an excellent way of activating the data collected from its community to create products for which companies are sure to have demand.

9. Share relevant content

Content is engaging when it is authentic and does not give its audience the impression that its sole aim is to encourage them to buy a brand’s products.

By sharing content with high added value(such as free guides, webinars, tutorials, etc.), companies can respond effectively to the expectations and needs of their audience. It also generates engagement by encouraging their prospects to delve deeper into the subject, ask questions, etc.

10. Share behind the scenes of your brand

Consumers are generally curious to discover what goes on behind the scenes at their favourite brands. Social networks are excellent platforms to share his backstage, give a voice to its employees, etc. Many brands, particularly in the fashion industry, take advantage of these channels to reveal the secrets of their workshops or catwalk shows. An ideal technique for increasing audience engagement while highlighting the company’s expertise.

Create a more engaging marketing campaign using gamification. Adictiz offers you a a wide choice of formats for interacting with your audience, depending on the objectives you want to achieve!