Contests drive marketing campaigns, because who doesn't love to win something? No matter what your organization's or business's budget, you can pull off creative marketing contests that garner consumer attention, boost product awareness, and generate sales. By changing your contests up and taking advantage of the seasons, you can run effective and fun contests all year round.
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Keep the contest clear and visible, and make it a low barrier to entry. You might try a photo contest, where users submit photos of themselves using your product, or a story contest asking for vignettes around a specific theme. Place the photos, stories, or other contest media on your website. You could even incentivize more page views by offering a prize to the best submission, as determined by user votes. More votes equal more page views, which could lead to increased revenue and will garner brand, product, and service awareness. Using seasonal elements, such as the holidays, as a theme for your contest helps you keep the focus narrow and gives your users a prompt.
Types of contests
The contest that will work best for you depends on who your users and and what they enjoy. Be creative in determining the contest type you want to try. If you commit to running regular contests, you'll have a chance to sample major contests types and track which types garner the most audience response--and page views. Contests to consider include:
Photo contests
Name-generating contests
Trivia
Video contests
Raffles
Story contests
People's choice contests, for photo, video, or story submission
Social media contests that involve Twitter, Foursquare, or other social media platforms
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Be inspired naturally by holidays, seasons, and events. Some occasions may lend themselves naturally to your business, while others may require more of a stretch to fit your products. That's to be expected. If you sell clothes, tethering your marketing campaign to an upcoming holiday, be it Easter or New Year's Eve, is a natural tie-in. If you sell electronics equipment, it's more of a stretch. Seasonal ideas that you can incorporate into your marketing include:
New Years
Valentine's Day
Mardi Gras
Spring
St. Patrick's Day
Passover
Easter
Tax Time
Earth Day
Memorial Day
July 4
...And the like. When running a religious holiday contest, be aware of your user community. Running a contest that speaks only to one faith may alienate users that don't share that faith. However, it may be appropriate to your user community.
Seasonal holidays aren't your only chance for contests. Take advantage of major national events, such as election campaigns, sports events--from the Super Bowl to March Madness--or other events that are important in your community or to your users.
Tips
Mix and match contest types with holidays to continually engage users. For example, have a Super Bowl party photo or video contests where participants have to combine your product into their game day party. Or ask for short story submissions about the worst Valentine's Day ever, then award the winner a gift of your food products or a percentage off at your boutique, hair salon, or other small business.
To monitor contest effectiveness, you've got to track the number of participants, the page views generated, and the return on your investment via click-throughs, revenue earned, and other purchases. The right contest will garner attention to your page, extend to social media, and demonstrate real worth to you, whether through page views or income. For example, a photo contest requiring users to vote on the cutest baby will likely spill over onto Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and other social networks as people urge friends to vote for their child. Tracking which types of contests and which seasonal contests receive the most traffic can help you decide how to manage your marketing time. You can't capture every holiday in a contest, so decide where to invest your time wisely.
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John Zwissler from AddMe - AddMe traffic program is structured to deliver controlled bursts of quality visitors and traffic to your website. AddMe traffic will increase sales, signups and overall branding for your site, for more information about this exciting service Click Here!
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