Peek & Poke Yuletide Joyride

1,700 total players

11,209 games played

798 unique scores submitted

Summary

In the lead-up to Christmas 2023 – and to mark the launch of a new ready-to-go game – we decided to run a competition with great prizes and a charity donation based on the number of unique scores submitted to the leaderboard.

Learn about how we set everything up, shared the game far and wide, and placed our Christmas campaign on top of the festive podium! 🥇

A fun race to fundraise!

2023 saw us release a clutch of new ready-to-go games, with The Fast and the Festive quickly racing towards the top of the Peek & Poke charts. To celebrate this new Christmas number, we decided that a fun competition would be in order.

The plan was to pair the game with a digital advent calendar that would allow us to run a 10-day campaign and give away 10 daily prizes, which included £50 vouchers for the likes of John Lewis, Currys, Waterstones, and National Book Tokens.

As an additional incentive to play and share the game around, we pledged to donate £1 to Macmillan Cancer Support for each unique score submitted to the leaderboard (up to a maximum total of £500). This would encourage players to spread the joy and give us a target to aim for as we went about promoting the competition!

Yuletide Joyride Competition Page Prize Image

Yuletide Joyride Competition Page Charitable Image

Yuletide Joyride Branded Game Character Select Screen

Yuletide Joyride Game Competition Digital Advent Calendar Page

Promoting the game

Once everything was ready and we’d set up the calendar page, we launched our game and got to work on the promotion side of things.

At first we saw many familiar names on the leaderboard, including friends, family, and our regular competition participants. However, after a week of sharing the game around and shouting about the charity donation, we dared to dream of reaching our ambitious £500 target through 500 unique scores on the leaderboard!

Here’s how we went about it… 👇

Email

We kicked things off with a launch email to our mailing list. The daily prize format then provided the momentum and rhythm for our organic promotional activity, with daily winner announcements sent out to those who had submitted their scores and opted in to receive updates.

Throughout the duration of the two-week competition, every single one of our general marketing emails also included a link to play the game and help us raise money for Macmillan. Q4 is a busy time of year for our marketers and so it’s safe to say we managed to drum up a fair bit of interest!

Social media

The images we created for our daily emails were also used for posts on social media, namely LinkedIn and Facebook. We shared these prize winner posts every day and encouraged followers to re-share and challenge others to create a bit of a buzz around the competition.

We also set aside a small amount of budget to boost posts on Facebook, which helped us reach thousands of potential players during the two-week campaign.

It’s worth noting that we consistently used hashtags in posts relating to the competition, which led to it being picked up by a few online forums and competition sites that then drove extra traffic to the game.

Word of mouth

In addition to our digital marketing, there was good ol’ word of mouth to help spread the word about the competition and charity donation. We’re talking Whatsapp groups, emails to the other businesses at our home in Sum Studios, and conversations where Peek & Poke staff shared the game with friends and family.

Website

On our website, we included links to the game from our homepage and a few other locations that we knew would be getting traffic at that time of year. We also added a promo banner that would drop down from the top of the screen and be seen by visitors on any page on the site.

Physical events

During the competition period, we were due to attend the B2B Marketing Expo in London – a major event in the B2B marketing calendar. In addition to the games we were showcasing on our branded arcade machines, we also took the opportunity to promote Yuletide Joyride at the event.

We did this through ‘scan and play’ QR codes on posters at our stand, which visitors could use to access the game on their own device while waiting to talk to us or play on the arcade cabs (we’re in demand at these things, don’t cha know 💃🏽).

Results

By the end of our Yuletide Joyride competition, we’d managed to reach 1,700 players with almost 800 scores submitted to the leaderboard! We also saw an average player engagement time of 6m 27s, as well as a 28% marketing opt-in rate.

We couldn’t be happier with how the game performed, with the added bonus of donating the full £500 to Macmillan Cancer Support. Eddie Blizzard, Fawn Bean, and Alexmas Turner may have since retired from professional racing but their spirit will live on forever! 🏎️🎄

Use The Fast and the Festive in your own campaign or get in touch to find out more!

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