Event Gamification for Businesses: Liven Up Your Live Streams in 2024

As technology continues to evolve, live streaming has emerged as a crucial way for businesses to connect with their audiences.

Think about it: with a virtual live event, you can enjoy the undivided attention of your ideal prospects and customers to announce a product launch, increase brand awareness, or grow sales of your products and services.

However, with more and more businesses running live streams now, simply broadcasting your content is no longer enough. In this post, we’re going to reveal five event gamification techniques that can help you turn passive viewers into active participants in your live events.

Table of Contents

• What is Event Gamification?
• 5 Event Gamification Examples
• Putting it All Together
• Make Maestro Your Event Gamification Hub

What is Event Gamification?

Event gamification is the process of adding interactive and game-like elements to an event to increase audience engagement. 

Obviously, live events are a great way to provide value to your prospects and customers, but there’s also a challenge: how do you keep virtual audiences engaged and tuned in? 

With an online video platform like Maestro, you can quickly create a branded experience for interactive live streams, featuring engaging options from chatrooms and polls to quizzes and interactive overlays!

Learn more about how Maestro supports your interactive live events.

The Importance of Gamification for Live Events

Why bother with event gamification for your streams, anyway? 

Well, gamification and interactivity help overcome one of the biggest limitations of virtual events, which is the fact that you and your audience aren’t physically in a room with each other. 

Think about it from the perspective of your viewers. If you hopped on a business’s live stream and only experienced one-way communication from the streamer broadcasting their message, you may find it hard to give it your full attention. It just doesn’t feel as relevant or tailored to you.

Now, in contrast to this, if the stream had frequent opportunities to chat or answer polls based on the content you’re watching, tied to some kind of prize or raffle or leaderboard, there’s a good chance you’d pay closer attention. This may be because you feel more included or because you want to win. Either way, it’s just human nature!

5 Event Gamification Examples

Are you ready to learn about event and conference gamification? Let’s look at five ways to bring this to life.

1. Real-Time Quizzes, Trivia, and Polls

Engage your audience with live quizzes, trivia, or polls during your event, with instant feedback that you can respond to in your presentation. Not only will viewers feel like a more active part of the event, but you also get real-time input on what people are responding to or ensure that they understand whatever you’re trying to teach.

Even mid-presentation, you have the opportunity to adjust what you’re talking about to better suit what your audience wants. To gamify polls, trivia, or quizzes, you can offer incentives based on participation, such as everyone who responds getting entered into a contest to win a prize.

2. Audience Leaderboards

Another fantastic way to gamify your live event is with audience leaderboards. If the goal is to encourage engagement, it’s hard to think of a better way than by rewarding points for active participation.

For example, you could assign points to viewers who ask an interesting question or share a personal story. You could also just give points based on the number of times someone comments. However you do it, the visual of a leaderboard gives people a strong incentive to be more involved in your event.

3. Challenge and Reward Systems

You can also reward viewer participation without making it public on a leaderboard. 

Set up challenges for your viewers that encourage them to do the activities you want them to do – for example, attending multiple sessions of your live event, completing quizzes or polls, or following a call-to-action like following your business on social media. You can reward them on a one-on-one basis for completing these challenges.

4. Interactive Overlays

Interactive overlays are broadcast over your video on a live channel and provide fun ways for your viewers to interact with content. Popular options include text-based messages, lower thirds, Shopify “Buy Now” CTAs, and poll results (from polls you already gave your audience during a broadcast, like the example below).

Overlays are built into Maestro, our popular online video platform that makes event gamification easy. These are incredibly flexible and also allow for CTAs that drive results, from asking for newsletter opt-ins to plugging a product for sale.  

5. Raffles and Giveaways

What event is complete without a raffle or giveaway to bring out some friendly competition among attendees? All you have to do is allow viewers to earn entries by engaging with your content, visiting virtual booths, or participating in live Q&A sessions.

This can be managed and drawn live using Maestro’s platform, which is another excellent way to drive participation and make your live events even more lively.

Putting it All Together

If you’ve read through our quick list of five ways to gamify your event, then you probably noticed a decent amount of overlap between these ideas. That’s not a surprise because they all complement each other nicely to make your events a lot more accessible for attendees. Fortunately, you don’t need to stop at just one of these gamification presentation ideas – why not combine some or all of them in a single event to maximize audience engagement?

A Fully Gamified Event 

Here’s a quick example of how a business could apply all five gamification ideas at once. Say you have a new product launch live stream coming up. You could plan to add real-time quizzes to the event that ask viewers about product features you’ve announced and reward correct answers with points on a leaderboard.

Then, throughout the live event, you could also introduce challenges related to other engagement goals for your company, like sharing your current live stream on social media in exchange for more points and trivia questions about the company’s history for additional points.

Lastly, a raffle for a lifetime subscription to your product (or the always-appreciated Amazon gift card) could be raffled for those who hit a certain points threshold. Now, viewers are aware of your new product and highly invested, thanks to the work you did in your event gamification app of choice!

Make Maestro Your Event Gamification Hub

In a world full of short attention spans, gamification is a game-changer. And if you want to gamify your live events quickly and easily, get to know Maestro.

If you’re new to Maestro, our platform offers an end-to-end video CMS for hosting, monetizing, and delivering these interactive live streaming experiences. Plus, with our drag-and-drop website builder, you can set up a professional-looking streaming website with a few clicks. Choose your branding, add monetization, and go live in just minutes.

It’s our mission to provide affordable, scalable online solutions for D2C e-commerce brands. We hope you give Maestro a try!

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