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Want to Create An Addictive Product That Hooks People Like World of Warcraft?
Create competition between your users – More than likely, you’ve made some purchases on Ebay or through some other online auction site. Maybe you’ve bought some chickens at a livestock auction or you spent a few hundred thousand dollars at an art auction on a precious painting. However you’ve done it, you certainly remember the thrill and the rush of things when it got down to the last second and it was all on the line. You’re on Ebay and you keep hitting the refresh button, you’re down to thirty seconds and you really want that autographed Elvis Presley pill bottle. It’s down to fifteen seconds and you get nervous and raise your bid until you’re the top bidder. You’ve bid so high that there’s no way you’ll be outbid. You bid to high. You won. You feel good.
There’s something to be said for that winning feeling. It really boils down to human nature and the desire to win a competition. We are competitive beings in virtually every aspect of our lives. Nobody wants to lose. With Ebay, it’s interesting because sometimes the actual of value of things goes completely out of the window in those final moments before an auction closes and you start punching in numbers, meanwhile somebody across the country is doing the same thing. Next thing you know, you just paid five-hundred dollars for Madonna’s band-aid and you didn’t even notice that the shipping charge is another fifty bucks. Who cares? You won.
Well, take this idea of people competing over products and having their own little price war and consider the possibilities of implementing some sort of viable competition into your marketing techniques and the products you’re offering. Is there a way to do it? Is there some kind of way to create this social mentality into your presence on a social networking site? Can you create some kind of competitive enigma where you are always the winner because you’re always selling?
Motivating this kind of environment to occur is going to increase the participation of your audience and increase their interaction with each other, ideally. Think of something like a leader board format. Consider a major sports website which rates their users on multiple levels with multiple factors. They have really capitalized on this aspect and taken it to peak of performance with their fantasy sports market. You earn trophies and medals and awards for your accomplishments in your fantasy sports leagues. You also earn points for your participation.
The more blogs you post, the more friends you have, the more games you play, the higher your ranking. They even go so far as to give you monikers that have to do with sports, like Minor League Baseball MVP and Hall of Fame Quarterback. Think about it, these are grown, adult men, and they are participating by the millions and loving it. This simple thing keeps them interested and keeps their attention. It’s the kind of thing that keeps repeat business. Now, they might not always pay attention to these rankings, and that’s okay. However, at first they will pay attention because it’s exciting. Eventually that excitement wears off but their interest in the services doesn’t. Through those initial tactics, their business has been retained. Genius and simple.
It’s this idea of creating a place for competition that has people coming back. Even if the competition is totally pointless and all the participant gets is a little logo on their profile page, as mundane as that may sound to you, for some reason, people enjoy that kind of thing. They want to win. There are lots of ways that you can invoke this strategy and it’s already everywhere but you just don’t realize it. It’s all over message boards and forums, where the number of posts is counted and totaled and you reach certain levels the more you post messages. People create an identity for themselves online and whether they hide behind it or not doesn’t really matter, or shouldn’t really matter to you, it’s the fact that they’ll do it, and they’ll keep on coming back to do more.
This isn’t going to work for everybody, and really, most people won’t go for it. Most people aren’t going to care about it at all, but they are just casual users. But, what those casual users will notice is that it exists, and what’s more important is that they’ll take notice of everybody else. The fact that these casual users will notice all these other people interacting is going to tell them that there is something special going on here. It’s the one percent of addicted users that present a statement to the new people, the casual people. They might not want to participate, but they’ll want to at least see what all the buzz is about. That is really something to consider.
You might not have the technical knowledge to create this kind of environment yourself, but if you’ve already established your presence and you have a pretty good following then it might be worth your while to find some freelance coders and programmers to help you create this atmosphere. Your users should already be interacting on some level. You can create events and create competitions between individuals. Have some kind of tournament related to your product. Think creatively as to all of your options. These techniques aren’t just limited to the internet. They’ve been around since marketing has been around, where consumers are pitted against each other. There are all sorts of contests and competitions out there already. Think of logo design contests, contests where people create jingles, ads.
Basically, the idea is pretty simple and pretty common. People have this natural desire to compete and be number one. People love to be ranked above other people no matter what it is. So, keep in mind the objectives of your business and what you’re business is all about and get to work. You’ll create an audience that feels more connected to you on a number of different levels while creating a community of connected people that are like minded.
