100 days of games for growth

We built Plinq on the foundation that games are a unique, under-exploited medium that can be used by businesses to deliver their messages in more emotionally-provocative ways. Games can be used to boost sales, increase loyalty, and raise brand awareness. In short, games can be used to grow your business. To underscore their effectiveness, we’ll be using games to grow Plinq itself!

As a template for our growth plan, we will use the book 100 Days of Growth by Sujan Patel and Rob Wormley. This wonderful book gives 100 ideas for growing your business, ranging from simple things like making a killer email signature, to organizing a glamorous VIP event. 

One blemish of the book is that it focuses on “plain media”, that is, media that are not games.  Therefore, we will add our own playful twist to the growth tips. In some way or another, we will make each one about games. We don’t want to spoil the surprise of how this will work in each case, but here is one example to make the idea tangible: our VIP event will be a theatrical gaming night where we will astound executives with the emotional punch of our favorite games.

From next week onward, we will more or less implement one tip each work-day (for practical reasons we will deviate slightly from the order of the book). We will post what we are doing on social media, but we also plan to explain the principles behind some of the tips on our blog. Some of the topics we will cover include:

• A/B testing in games
• Non-digital advergames  
• Call-to-Actions in games
• Personal games: a game made for one person
• Game influencers

Of course, we will also make a bunch of games for this experiment, many of which will not resemble typical advergames. To give you an idea, we’re planning a:

• Team spotlight game
• Elevator pitch game
• The personal game

You will have to wait to see exactly what form these games take (in some cases, we don’t even know yet ourselves!). 

The end of the campaign is scheduled for lucky Friday the 13th of December, when we will publish a detailed case study of our campaign.

To see how we’re doing, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

We will also update the list below with related blog posts and items:

Week 1

• Non-Digital Advergames which includes our take on Tip #1, The Free Company T-shirt
• Top 10 Posts Digest (April 2019 to July 2019) Tip #29, The Top Posts Digest
• Ad-venture, a game to welcome new blog subscribers Tip #2, The Welcome Email.
• Tip #4 The Visible Phone Number Hack (our phone number is already everywhere, so we did nothing new to implement this tip)
• Using games to educate your customers Tip #5, The Education-based Email Series. 

Week 2

• How games explain brand promises Tip #6, The Promise, Not Feature Headline. 
• How to use A/B testing in advergames Tip #7, The Lean Landing page A/B Test.
• Tip #8, The Quick Feedback Request. (We implemented a feedback dialog box in Spin & Win, and got more than 15,000 responses, and counting.)
•  Call-To-Action in games Tip #9 The Personalized Call to Action.
• Tip #10, The Handwritten Thank You Letter. (Instead of letters, we made a custom game for each person we wanted to thank).

Week 3

• Tip #11, The Get Right to the Point Landing Page. (We implemented this landing page, and set up an A/B test to test it against our current home page).
• Tip #79, The Better Email Signature Hack. We designed new signatures and started to use them.
• A magical version of your brand Tip #12, Our social media is already branded.
• Avoid these 50 mistakes when you make an advergame Tip #14, The Promotion-Driven Godzilla Blog Post. 

Week 4

• Tip #16. The Editorial and Social Calender Strategy. (We scheduled our 50 tips in addition to the calendar we already use.)
• Tip #84. The Conversion Driven About Page, we updated our About page. 
• Tip #92. The Industry Report. We updated Mobile Demographics, which contains stats about mobile game players.
• Tip #27. The free ebook / resource. We updated The Power of Advergames.
• Tip #18. The trigger-based customer email series. We already had a triggered email series, so we updated this.

Week 5

• 20 Tip Roundup: 20 Days, 20 tips. The first month of Games for Growth roundup.
• Tip #21. Progress Bar. How points, leaderboards, and badges change the way players play.
• Tip #19. The Industry Influencer Blog Post. Advergames and gamification in the news.
• Tip #23. The Live Chat. We implemented live chat on our web site. 
• Tip #24. The Tell Your Story, Sell More Products Method. We made a video (coming soon!)