In a perfect world for marketers, your business would be full of potential leads, your website would get thousands of views, and your social channels would be full of engaged followers!
Boy, that sounds great but... can that actually exist?
What if we told you, there actually is a path that could achieve all that… but you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and get to work?
Believe it or not, all of this can be accomplished with a gamified or viral contest. Let's take a look at the steps to get this created.
Just like any other campaign, you’re going to have to start with an objective. What are you trying to get out of this? To help illustrate this process, we'll share some of what we focused on:
Once you figure out what you want to get out of this, the objective will align the remainder of your process.
Note: as you get the process setup, it’s normal for your objective to change.
The greatest benefit of running a contest is the gamification factor and the ability for it to go viral. We’ll explain more a little later, but in essence, to gain more "points" toward winning, participants complete more actions such as tweeting, posting on Facebook, etc.
However, before that factor even comes into play, we have to make sure the contest gets an initial set of eyeballs.
If there’s one element of the contest that’s the most important, it might have to be the kickoff and driving the initial traffic flow. With an eye toward this process, focus on things like:
For more ideas on generating awareness to your contest, the folks at Vyper spell it out with this guide.
Based on your assessment of the points above, you can project the volume of views and traffic your contest could get. In terms of conversion rates, let's assume that for every 100 views to the contest page, you would get 10 leads.
Note: this is a very modest conversion rate. Some contests have seen conversions from 45% to upwards of 70%. It all comes down to getting in front of your target audience and providing the right incentive for them to participate.
Quid pro quo; let this be the motto for picking prizes and partners. Basically what this means is, “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.”
What you’ll be telling these partners is, I’ll promote you to a highly engaged target audience in return for you providing a good or service. This is why it’s important to understand your distribution and projected awareness before proceeding.
So how do you find these partners?
At this point, you need to get your creative marketing hat on. Think for a second, if someone approached you for an exclusive opportunity, would you reply to that email or ignore it.
Here’s the email template we used:
As you saw in the email, we noted we’re going to email every entrant with an offer from that company. This could benefit your contest in a couple ways:
At this point, you may think you have a solid plan for implementing a contest... and you might. However, here are some problems we ran into.
The first time we ran a contest, we had a mock contest laid out to get a "fuller understanding" of the process. The trial we were hoping to run was on a side project we're working on. It's a sports page in which we actively discuss... well, sports. (Feel free to check us out on Instagram: @startbenchcutsports).
The mistake we made: we created an active link to the contest page.
When you're creating a contest, the user who's logged in is able to see the page; the link itself is not active. Our rookie mistake was to activate the link thinking no one will see it, since we weren't actively marketing it. We were wrong! It was seen, people started joining and it made us pause on all our planning and take the ball and run with it. (How's that for a sports pun?)
What had happened was, something or someone (we're heavily leaning on a bot catching the contest page), found the active link and promoted on Reddit.
Thankfully, we had some basic planning. We had:
Now we were left a shaky distribution plan and needed to get eyeballs on our prize. Since social was our most engaged audience, we decided to promote heavily on those channels; more specifically Instagram and Twitter.
While we didn't hit the benchmarks we set out, we were actually pleased with our results given our first contest was a modified mock-up, with no real marketing plan!
Now we can talk in great detail about the specific results the contest generated for us, but we'll give you a brief run down of what we saw. The first thing we took a look at was the source of our traffic.
Secondly, we examined the platform contestants were using. In this day and age, we expected mobile to lead all platforms used.
All in all - 500+ leads in less than 7 days with no established marketing plan at a cost of $0 - isn't too bad! If you decided you wanted to run a contest, you should be able to:
There's still a lot of things we over looked in our contest; and since mistakes are made to be learned from, we'll continue to share insight as to how you can generate hundreds if not thousands of leads at low costs. We dig into future details to help you drive results. This will include:
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