Contests Are King

In 2014 Contests Will Drive Social Media Marketing Campaigns — Heres Some Ways To Optimise

Working for a big advertising agency network allowed me to work with some huge clients, but before that I worked independently and had a pretty strong client base with global performing brands and businesses.

Contests are familiar to marketing directors and managers, from FMCG through to B2B, they understand them, “Do This Action To Win” is easy to get your head around and buy as a client. However, sometimes the mechanic is actually neglected around social media — share to win, like to win, create a HD video of yourself talking about how you love the brand to win, have been popular with brand pages to get initial growth.

January 2014 has seen a lot of blogs, reports and predictions into 2014 trends, digital predictions and such like. My predictions have been quite good — in 2011 I predicted usage for 16-24yr old facebook users to decline over the next five years, so i’m still on course for that! Anyway, I digress, back to contests — in 2014, I see the trend continuing (yes, one of my easier predictions to make) but there are some key components to remember when you are constructing your incentive initiatives.

The Prize.

The simplest piece of advice, but the most important. Give away something no other brand or business can offer. Think about it, you’re not the only business offering a prize, 100's or 1000's of brand pages are doing it every day. Offering X for Y (Y is usually data, or a social interaction — like sharing, or something that can be measured) is simple enough, but thats not really enough anymore. The thought that goes into the prize needs to be as thorough as the mechanic itself.

Occasionally this breaks — I remember back in 2009, Moonfruit did a competition on Twitter giving away Macbooks in return for a tweeting with #Moonfruit (you can see the Mashable case study here). But there are reasons why this got so much attention. 1) Twitter was new & shiny. 2) Macbooks were hot with the community, because Twitter was full of early adopters. 3) It felt like an easily achievable win as it was so early for the platform and the users.

There is not another Twitter out there, so we’re going to go ahead understanding that social is much more widely used now, with brand pages, branded content and people much more used to (over the past 3-4yrs) interacting with brands and businesses across social channels.

If you spend a week working out a user journey for consumers, getting into the specifics of the mechanics of your competition, thinking about how they’re going to engage with your brand, share with others, incentivise further activity and social actions — then you need to spend another few days thinking about what you can offer as a brand that nobody else can.

Think about: Whats the budget?, What real estate do we own (physical or digital)?, What does our community want?, What is right for them?, How can we reward them with the prize and continue the story? — What happens next?

So, getting to the actual prize itself — this will often come down to 3 core principles.

1. Fame. Can you make the winner (or winners) famous?
2. Put Them Somewhere Nobody Else can (including themselves). An example could be meeting a famous celebrity or designer behind the scenes at London Fashion Show.
3. Allow them to participate in part of the business. This could be a tour of a factory, a studio, something your business is involved with. Perhaps even creating a panel of influencers that can help with your future marketing efforts.

Each one of these areas has huge scope to develop, but its important to remember the principles behind each one. Unique experiences.

But lets go back to those 3 points above. When thinking about the prizes you have to first think about the audience. Your audience. The type of data you’re presented with every day can tell you something new about your customers. How long they spend on your website, how much they buy, their average order value, where they are referred from, return rate etc etc etc.

If you’re not taking all of the data into account how can you come up with the right kind of prize?

The barrier to entry has to be as low as possible based on your audience. To find out, ask questions! — Use your social media communities to ask the questions about the prizes they’d like to win. You might be surprised how easy it is to give them what they want!

Don’t be lazy. Analyse the data, find insights and reward the audience/community/customer base with something they will really cherish. Something they’ll genuinely want to talk about for weeks. Something they’ll share and something that will be memorable.

It’s just too easy to think about gift cards and money off vouchers — those work in the right context. Often good runner up prizes. Just don’t lose sight of why you’re doing a contest in the first place — X in exchange for Y — Y is the data and that can help you understand your audience even further so you can keep giving them memorable experiences.