READ PART 2
People love to receive free things and contests are a fantastic way to offer free prizes in exchange for valuable consumer insight. They are a great way for brands and agencies to interact with consumers across digital and live channels. Since we all know contests can yield fantastic results how can organizations create successful contests in a live environment to ensure they are meeting their desired objectives? In this 1st installment in a two-part series, you will learn how to increase contest entries and engagements during your next contesting activation.
1. Focus on perceived value over sticker price
Higher value prizes can be a large draw for contesting offers but consumers tend to regard perceived value, based on individual interests, as a more important measure of contest value. If the perceived value is high, the increase contest entries is also high. In addition, cost and perceived value are not closely related.
Creating a high perceived value and providing a once in a lifetime experience that maps to your demographic is an effective way to increase the success of the contest without spending much in the way of dollars.
2. Socially amplify registration & prizes
The more social amplification is built into a contest, the higher your increase contest entries. Using social media, consumers can passively enter the contest through secondary channels. Contests that embed the ability to share the contest into each and every entry point, whether staff entries, kiosks, consumer mobile or follow up—performed better than those with no social amplification. Stats have shown an average increase in entries to sponsorship activations of 19%, solely through twitter sharing, over similar activations which chose not to make their invitations socially shareable.
One great example of a contest with social amplification built in was done by Honda Motor Company over Twitter and Instagram:
During a recent promotion of the newly redesigned Civic, Honda encouraged consumers to become “Fantographers” by taking photos of the Civic on display and posting to social media with the hashtag #CivicReborn for the chance to win great prizes. This improved the performance of Honda’s contest by enticing consumers to become brand advocates with the simple addition of social sharing.
3. Personalize follow-up communication
The key is to avoid one-to-many communications and instead, use personalized follow-up communications. Personalized based on the way a consumer answered questions, the language they replied in, their demographics, psychographics and where the interaction took place. This is also a great opportunity for brands to embed targeted content based on these preferences. By using video/photo overlays and conditional triggers it is possible to target specific consumer profiles with relevant material. This in turn increases engagement dramatically and improves the success of successive marketing campaigns as consumers have a stronger bond with your brand and content. Furthermore, use personalized calls to actions to increase engagement and up-sell services or products. These tactics boosted interaction rates on follow-up communication by 300%-500% on aggregate. This method will drastically increase contest entries.
Conclusion
Contesting is a fantastic way to increase engagements and grow your marketing database with valuable offers for existing customers as well as general consumers. Based on the indicators from a host of Fortune 500 companies we have found that improving contesting performance relies on perceived value, social sharing, personal follow-up communication with relevant and original content embedded.
For many of these key insights live marketing automation can give marketers the tools to easily improve the effectiveness of their experiential and live contests with many of the above features productized into the software. At a time when engaging consumers and cutting through the clutter/noise is becoming more important the ability to stay ahead of the curve is ever more crucial.