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Archive
Archive for the ‘Promoting Contests’ Category
Thinking Ahead: Summer Contest Ideas
Now is the perfect time for you to start planning your summer contests. This is a great opportunity for you to secure seasonal sponsors around contests that will help them reach their target audience. Summer is a time for vacationing, outdoor concerts and fairs, celebrating Father’s and Independence Day. Play off these ideas and come up with original contests that your sponsors will love and your players will want to enter.
June
Contest Ideas:
- Father’s Day: Photo contests, sweepstakes (giveaways) and coloring contests
- Vacation Sweepstakes
- Golf Package Giveaway
- Backyard BBQ Sweepstakes: Ugliest grill photo contest
- Wedding Giveaway Sweepstakes
- Music Festival Giveaways (Bonarroo, Coachella, Burning Man and Lollapalooza)
Potential Sponsors:
hardware stores, golf courses, travel agency, resorts/hotels, airlines, wedding venues, photographer/videographer, bridal shops
July
Contest Ideas:
- 4th of July: Oh Say Can you Sing Video contest and photo contest
- Summer Vacation Photo Contest
- London Summer Games Contest
- It’s So Hot Contest
Potential Sponsors:
firework stands, camera shops, athletic stores, hardware stores, heating/cooling services
August
Contest Ideas:
- Beach Baby Photo Contest
- Cutest Preschooler Photo Contest
- Back to School Coloring Contest
- Back to School Makeover Contest
Potential Sponsors:
outdoor fairs or events, beauty salons, schools, camera shops, children’s clothing shops, toy stores
Do you have a great summer contest lined up? Tell us about it below.
A checklist to ensure you are making the most of your contests
In the world of promotions, there are endless types of contests you can run. Cutest Baby Photo Contest, Battle of the Bands Video Contest, Best Music Album Bracket, Enter to Win Sweepstakes, and many more. No matter the contest type, certain tasks must be completed in order to ensure a successful outcome. Below you’ll find a checklist to complete before running an online contest.
- 1. Determine contest theme, name and dates. This step might seem like a no-brainer, but try to put thought into it and get creative. Go outside the box and run an original-themed contest for your players. Whether your contest is meant to attract a large or niche audience, make sure you choose a topic that will appeal to your audience.
2. Identify sponsorship packages and tiers. Before approaching potential sponsors, know exactly what you will offer and form different levels of sponsorship opportunities. Creating different sponsorship tiers allows you to build relationships with several advertisers and gives them options to choose from.
3. Brand your contest. Designing your contest is a critical part of your success. Design your contest and your promotional elements, including print, on-air, web and email ads to incorporate the sponsor’s logo and messaging. Your sponsors will love the additional exposure.
4. Add opt-ins on your registration page. Be sure to add an email opt-in to your registration page for your sponsor, as well as your deals program or newsletter initiatives.
5. Keep registration simple. Only ask information you absolutely need on your registration page. If you don’t need their birthdate and address, for example, leave it off. If there are too many barriers to enter, your players may lose interest.
6. Enable Social Settings. Consider adding your contest to your Facebook page and enable Like-Gating. Enable features like Facebook Connect, which increases the social nature of your contest as a player’s actions will publish to their wall. Enable the Social Boost referral feature on sweepstakes contests, which awards users for sharing the contest with their friends.
7. Promote through multiple channels. To spread the word about your contest, leverage every vehicle you have access to. While you certainly should promote the contest through your traditional media, whether on-air or in print, do keep in mind the power of online and social media sites. Promoting on your website and social media channels means that players are only a click away from entering your contest.
8. Test your contests. Register as a player to make sure everything is working correctly and looks good from the user perspective. Don’t forget this step. Registering as a user allows you to see exactly what the player will see and it is easy to spot glitches or typos from this viewpoint.
9. Experiment throughout your contest. After the first day of the contest, check the number of registered users to see where marketing adjustments are needed. Everything might not be perfect the day your contest launches so don’t leave your marketing efforts static if you are not seeing the responses you want. Test different promotional tactics and record what works to give you a head start on your next contest.
10. Celebrate your success! Contests are fun and running them should be fun too. Recognize your team members who went above and beyond to make the contest a success. Remember, you will want to track what methods excelled so you can start your next contest off on the right foot.
Reasons to Run a Mother’s Day Contest
In the United States alone, there are more than 85.4 million mothers. Each year, 68 percent of people plan to call their mom on Mother’s Day – a total of 122.5 million phone calls. Fifty percent of households send Mother’s Day cards- totaling to some 152 million cards sent each year.
There are 18,509 florist establishments nationwide and more than 14,000 cosmetics, beauty supplies and perfume stores. Plus, there are about 26,683 jewelry shops in the United States alone.
Running a Mother’s Day photo contest is a great way to tap into the love people hold for their mothers and tap into sponsorship dollars by securing the perfect sponsor for your contest.
Out of more than 40,000 contests run on UPICKEM, Mother’s Day contests are the sixth most popular. Mother’s Day is two months away and now is the perfect time to start planning a Mother’s Day photo contest. This year, UPICKEM is offering a turnkey contest that will be ready for you to run, sell and offer prizes for your audience. The contest will be created for you and will be complete with a design template – including flexible ad spots, a sales kit with web and print ads and materials for your sales team.
Source: Survey of Income and Program Participation, 2008 Panel Wave 2, unpublished tabulations.
Source: County Business Patterns: 2008
Tips for Selling the Perfect College Basketball Tournament
 The Men’s 2012 College Basketball Tournament starts March 13. This popular tournament is the perfect opportunity to engage your players in an exciting bracket contest. Running a basketball bracket drives sponsorship and ad revenue, grows audience, builds user database for email marketing and powers your social and mobile strategy.
I recently hosted a webinar on how local media companies can successfully sell the college basketball bracket. After reviewing several case studies, I gathered the best tips to help you make the most of this year’s bracket contest.
- Have multiple sponsors. Having multiple sponsors will generate revenue and create a successful contest. Also, encourage your sponsors to offer weekly prizes for winners of each round.
- Sell integrated promotions. Offer sponsors the option of buying traditional and non-traditional media. Running both online and offline advertising helps spread the word about the contest and gives the sponsor more exposure to your audience.
- Send eblasts throughout the tournament. Eblasts should include special offers from the sponsors. If the sponsor is offering a weekly prize, send an eblast to all the players about the weekly winner and include the sponsors logo in the email.
- Have station personalities participate. Let station personalities talk about the contest on-air. This is a more organic promotion and increases excitement in players to participate.
-Let sponsors be VIPs. After each round ends, include your sponsors’ pictures and bracket results in print and online. This will generate hype around the contest and please your sponsors.
-Identify promotional partners. Talk with other local media outlets to see if the are willing to partner up to promote the contest.
-Extend bracket mania. Benefit from the passion of the college basketball tournament by creating a fun, unique bracket contest. You could do a bracket contest that pits local restaurants or bars against each other. Browse our resource center for bracket contest ideas.
Don’t miss out on the college basketball tournament madness – run a contest for your audience! For more helpful tips, watch the full webinar, “How to Sell College Basketball.”
Sun-Times Takes Home a Winner with their Red Carpet Movie Awards Contest
The Chicago Sun-Times is in its 27th year of running Outguess Ebert – a challenge for its readers to pick the Red Carpet Movie Awards winners more accurately than the well-known and well-respected movie critic Roger Ebert.
In the past, the Chicago Sun-Times has run the contest exclusively in print. In recent years, they decided to run the contest online using UPICKEM which allowed for more integrated promotional opportunities, as well as took a lot of the manual work out of the contest.
To make the contest a success, the Sun-Times promoted the contest by running print and online ads, using social media and leveraging Roger Ebert’s blog – which has appeared as a column in the paper since 1967 and is now a featured blog on their site. Also, Universal Studios sponsored their Outguess Ebert contest and gave a trip to L.A. to the premiere of “The Bourne Legacy” and also gave away DVD packs of Oscar-nominated films to the first 10 prize winners.
Great contest, Sun-Times! Learn how to capitalize on awards season so you can prepare for all of next year’s red carpet awards.
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