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How to Use a Holiday Event for a Contest Opportunity

Julie Foley — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:09:38 +0000

February and March bring many contest opportunities for local media companies. It’s no secret that photo and sweepstakes contests are the most popular and highly trafficked types of contests, and the arrival of Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Mardi Gras bring parades, festivals, concerts, celebrations and retail spending in your local markets!

Holiday and seasonal contests are a fantastic way to engage your local audience and advertisers! There are several reasons why a seasonal contest may make sense for your organization. Not only are they fun and interactive for your audience but they can help obtain new customers, overcome seasonal sales slumps, help your sales team sell a higher percentage of retail, direct, or agency business. An integrated package can help you sell special inventory and increase the use and quality of sales presentations.

Some successful holiday contest ideas include:
- Cutest Couples Photo Contest
- Engagement Story Essay Contest
- Ultimate Valentine’s Day Giveaway (include dinner, flowers, chocolate, limo, giftcards to women’s and men’s retail stores, jewelry, movie/show)
- Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras or St. Patrick’s Day Trivia Contests
- Mardi Gras Photo Contest
- Mardi Gras or St. Patrick’s Day Sweepstakes (tickets to festivals, rides in parades, concerts and events that are hosted in your community)
- St. Patrick’s Day Photo Contest

Combining a Contest with Deals!
If you’re running a deals program, it would be ideal to package a holiday contest with a Seasonal Store. Imagine a Cutest Couple contest packaged with a Valentine’s Day store for your sponsors. Learn more about how Seasonal and Category Stores are a way to expand what you’re doing around a specific theme or season.

January 2012 Round-Up: Top Contests

Julie Foley — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:42:54 +0000

As you can see from the top contests of January, the pro football season and the “big game” taking place Sunday, February 6th, is on everyone’s mind. The ever popular “Cutest Kids” and “Cutest Pets” made quite a few appearances in this list. If you haven’t planned for running both of those contests, be sure to add them to your list now!

Top 10 Registrations
1. Journal Sentinel‘s Packers Fan Hall of Fame
2. KXLT-TV’s Cutest Baby Contest
3. WXMI-TV’s Win an iMac
4. WCVQ-FM’s Q Wedding Giveaway
5. WLUK-TV’s Bridgeport Waterfront Resort Giveaway
6. Rockford Register Star‘s Cutest Baby Contest
7. NBC San Diego’s Win Rise Against Tickets
8. The Daily Telegram‘s Cutest Baby Contest
9. Fire Engineering’s Battle of the Bands
10. KTSP-TV’s Cutest Baby Contest

Top 10 Submissions
1. Las Vegas Review Journal‘s Big Game TV Giveaway
2. WGN-TV’s Cutest Couple Contest
3. Queens Courier‘s Best of the Boro
4. Pioneer Press‘ Treasure Hunt Medallion Contest
5. CityTV’s Bachelor Canada Casting Call
6. WPXI-TV’s Pittsburgh’s Best Pizza
7. KTSP-TV’s Cutest Baby Contest
8. Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s Whisker Whirl’s Cutest Dog Contest
9. Journal Sentinel‘s G Force Packers Ticket Giveaway
10. KFMB-TV’s Live with Kelly in Hawaii

Top 10 Sweepstakes
1. Popular Woodworking‘s Workshop Makeover Giveaway
2. Creative Crafts Group‘s Fabric for Life
3. KSCW-TV’s Cash in with KSCW
4. Big Ten Network’s Men’s Basketball Tournament Promotion
5. ABC15′s iPad Giveaway
6. Chicago Sun-Times‘ Mega Money Mix Up
7. Scouting Magazine‘s The Cold Comfort Giveaway
8. ABC15′s Smart Shopper iPad Giveaway
9. Our State‘s Tourmaline Necklace from Wades Jewelers
10. WJBK-TV’s Gardner-White Dream Team Contest

Evolving Your Deals Program: The Mall

Matt Chaney — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:03:38 +0000

When thinking of the physical shopping world, it isn’t a stretch to see the opportunity to expand from a store to an entire shopping mall. Imagine the variety of stores you find in a typical mall – there’s something for everyone. It can work online as well.

We’ve already discussed adding a Category or Seasonal Store to your site, as well as Side Deals, to beef up your offerings. A Mall takes that same approach and creates a persistent shopping environment. Let’s look at some examples of sites running a Deals Malls.

JBDollar.com, which distributes a coupon magazine in markets throughout Ohio and Michigan, runs each deal for 45 days and gives its users hundreds of deals from a variety of categories to buy. To expedite the shopping experience, they’ve organized their deals into categories. Also, they keep users engaged and returning by featuring a different set of deals in their daily emails and optimizing the placement on the page to highlight the most popular deals.

A similar approach is being employed at Lake County Journal. They distinguish themselves by bringing together the best of both worlds: a weekly Featured Deal (aka “The Big Deal of the Week”) plus an ongoing Mall. In essence, they’ve created two tiers of deals. Their Big Deal of the Week is truly something unique and outstanding – from a promotional and offer standpoint. A recent example comes from Key Lime Cove, a nearby waterpark. They offered four entries to the park plus a night stay at a nearby hotel for $99. It was a high-value deal and was given a huge marketing push including rich media and online display ads, full-page print ads, email, social media and other bonus ads. It was a package that helped showcase the newspaper’s promotional power and aligned well with a deal that was one-of-a-kind. But that’s only part of the equation. In-between Big Deals, they have ongoing deals that run for one month. These deals enjoy ongoing promotion in print via group ads that display the merchants’ logo and a brief discussion of their offer. By marrying the Big Deal with the Mall, they’re able to give their users a robust marketplace to shop for savings, merchants flexibility to run a variety of offers, and for them, a more efficient product with deals aligning more closely with the level of promotional push behind them.

Group commerce is positioned to see continued growth in 2012. To be a part of this success, your deal site will need to expand and evolve to continue to give users more savings and ways to connect with local businesses. The key is to be the place they think of first when they’re looking for the best local savings in your market. Creating an ecommerce destination will help you ride this wave of success and growth.

Evolving Your Deals Program: Seasonal & Category Stores

Matt Chaney — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:02:23 +0000

We recently discussed reasons to run Side Deals, which leads us into another popular model for deals programs – Seasonal & Category Stores.

Seasonal and Category Stores are a way to expand what you started with Side Deals. Unlike Side Deals, these offers are organized around a specific theme or season. By curating deals with a theme in mind, you can elevate them to something more unique. Any holiday is ripe for creating a seasonal store including Valentine’s Day, Mother’s and Father’s Day, and Christmas. One of the key tenets of “Deal Appeal” is running a deal that is seasonally appropriate, and a Seasonal Store plays into this strength perfectly. Seasonal Stores open up opportunities by creating a new area for non-featured deals to live or deals with inventory limitations. This gives you the flexibility to approach merchants you may have passed over because of a restriction on their deal. You can approach a category store much in the same way.

Category store examples include geographically-focused deals, Summer Savings, Golf or Travel Deals, or even a sub-category like Pizza Deals with merchants from across your entire market. A best practice for Seasonal Stores is to plan them far in advance of the holiday. That way, you can be strategic about your promotions for the deal and get your sales team focused and roused up about getting the best offers possible. Finally, whatever theme or category you pick, make sure the deals fit with it, so that you can have a cohesive group of deals to present to your users.

Next, we discuss using a Deals Mall to add a little spice to your deals program.

Indianapolis Radio Station Slam Dunks Contest

Julie Foley — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:36:24 +0000

WFNI partners with Jim Beam for their UPICKEM College Basketball Contest

BACKGROUND:
WFNI and 1070thefan.com took part in the annual national college basketball contest from Second Street. WFNI is owned by Emmis Communications. Its Digital team understands the importance of integrated campaigns, using not only online ads to promote this contest, but also on-air talent across all three of its stations in the Indianapolis area.

CHALLENGE:
Indianapolis has several media companies that run their own version of the College Baskeball contest. WFNI needed to present an idea to their sponsors that helped them stand out from the rest.

SOLUTION:
WFNI’s Bracket Challenge combined their listeners’ passion for the station and its personalities with the excitement of the year’s biggest college sports event to leverage a powerful interactive marketing opportunity for their sponsors. WFNI took advantage of the Second Street national prize of $1,000,000 to the player with a perfect bracket. Players also competed for round by round national & local prizes. Rather than being tied to their original picks, players picked each round progressively which kept them “in the game”, thus increasing exposure to the sponsor’s message.

The promotion for their College Basketball Contest included on-air ads, online banner ads and email reminders before each round. The presenting sponsor was Jim Beam Whiskey. The online component, beyond ROS ads, included additional online banner and radio spots promoting the contest. A larger display at the top of the contest page featured the sponsor’s logo and video commercial.

RESULTS:
UPICKEM College Basketball Bracket Contest brought WFNI $7,000 in revenue from three sponsors and had over 1,000 player participants coming back each week for 5 weeks to play.

Why the WFNI Auto Racing contest was successful:
Integrated station support. The Bracket Challenge was promoted heavily with all WFNI products including on-air talent mentions, on-air promos, online ads, VIP pickers from the station and an email campaign. Plus, all ads were sold for the full 5-week campaign.

Evolving Your Deals Program: Side Deals

Matt Chaney — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:21:49 +0000

The group commerce space continues on a dynamic and exciting path of growth and expansion. More and more, we are seeing deal sites take cues from traditional ecommerce sites and create shopping environments – more deals, deals organized around a theme or season, and deals running beyond a single day. Ultimately, high deal quality and solid promotions will continue to drive the most revenue, but by enhancing your current site with a new approach, you can maximize your revenue and growth potential in 2012.

While certainly not a new phenomenon, Side Deals now have a more distinct role than ever. The original motivator for having Side Deals was simply to give users more variety of deals than a deal-a-day could offer. The thought was more deals meant more revenue with side deals being an area to post deals that you knew weren’t Featured Deal quality but still wanted to run. Many sites that have tested Side Deals have come to the conclusion that Side Deals as their own category aren’t huge sellers. Rather, by using Side Deals as a way to extend the life of Featured Deals, they’re seeing much better results.

This also highlights a greater trend that 24 hours isn’t always enough time to maximize sales. For example, The Miami Herald had a recent successful deal in which 65% of deals were sold after the first day. They run their deals for a total of seven days – one day as a Featured Deal and six days as a Side Deal. This approach allows you to have more deals per day and populate the site with the same high-quality deals you approve as your Featured Deals. Moreover, this begins to lay the groundwork for another trend – the emergence of Seasonal and Category Stores.

The Nominations are In: Capitalizing on Awards Season

Julie Foley — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:54:53 +0000

Who will come home with the little golden man (or men) on February 26, 2012? Now that the nominations are in, it’s time to capitalize on the excitement of Hollywood’s biggest night! The 2011 awards had 37.5 million viewers. How are you going to interact with these viewers this year?

Finding ways to engage your audience before and after the awards ceremony is key. A fantastic way to keep your audience engaged is to run a contest – have them predict who they believe will take away the award for each category. UPICKEM’s Red Carpet Movie Awards allows you to do just that. We create, manage and pick the winners for you. Your contest can be branded with one overall sponsor or several; sponsors can receive mentions in all promotions, both online and off. Your awards contest can be added to your sponsor’s Facebook page with a like-gate, email opt-ins for key user data and access to new clients, and “VIPs” that players compete against (company owners, for example).

With a variety of ad spaces on every page, your sales force can attract a number of contest-related advertisers. A few great advertisers to target are movie theaters, salons, spas and women’s retailers. You keep 100% of the sponsorship revenue. The contest has online, Facebook, mobile and tablet version that you can include in your sales package as well!

The 84th Academy Awards will be broadcast on ABC Sunday February 26, 2012. See you on the red carpet!

Looking Forward: Deals Resolutions for 2012

Matt Chaney — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:52:13 +0000

Second Street works with over 400 local media sites to power their deals programs, and we asked some of our partners to share their most effective promotions, favorite deals of 2011 and share their resolutions for the new year.

What are your “deals resolutions” for 2012?

“We plan to survey our merchants to better understand their experience with our program and their wants/needs of a local daily deal program, then make enhancements based on the feedback and hopefully get some testimonials. Also, we need to better understand our audience in order to help our sales team bring in deals that are fitting and desired by our users. Also, as we increase our email subscribers, we want to turn those people into buyers. We know that buyers are even more valuable than subscribers, in part, because of how often they share the deal and refer friends/family in addition to making purchases. Currently, we have an average of 8% referral rate.”

- Joe Matar and Stacey Stefani
The Gazette and KCRG, Cedar Rapids, IA

“To become the #1 deal site in our market – we have climbed from #3 to #2 in just six months. We beat out Living Social and now we have our sights set on surpassing Groupon in 2012. In order to do that, we need our salesperson to have more time selling, so we are investing in our to program and getting a full-time assistant to help with deal calendar management and customer service. ”

- Conan Gallaty
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Little Rock, AR

“We began by running the deals for three days, but now we try to run most a full week. That’s because many of our deals sell at least as well on the final day or two as they do on the first two. We’ve found that keeping the deals around longer gives more people a chance to buy. They may be checking the current day’s deal and realize they overlooked a previous one. For 2012, we’ll be sticking to the basics – restaurants and other high-impact deals – plus grouping deals thematically around holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.”

- Dan Day
The Modesto Bee, Modesto, CA

Looking Back: Favorite Deals of 2011

Matt Chaney — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:09:15 +0000

With 2012 upon us, there is a lot to be hopeful for in terms of the continued growth of group commerce and daily deals. Second Street works with over 400 local media sites to power their deals programs, and we asked some of our partners to share their favorite promotions and highlights from 2011.

What was your favorite deal that your site ran in 2011 and why?

“In April, we ran a deal for a Horse Camp. We didn’t know what to expect. The maximum available was 60, which is less than what we would normally take, but with a high price point of $160 a piece, we knew we would still make our revenue goals by selling out. Well, we sold out! The deal was for a 4 day horse camp in the summer (a $320 value). We learned that our audience is looking for things to do and want a good deal for a family/kids activity. And to top it off, this deal was not available anywhere else and was a unique opportunity that only we offered.”

- Joe Matar and Stacey Stefani
The Gazette and KCRG, Cedar Rapids, IA

“My favorite was David’s Burgers who sold 1,462 vouchers and, in the middle of his sale, wanted to pull the plug because too many people were coming into the business and not reading the restrictions correctly. But once Keith (the salesperson) worked with him to help show the owner how to convert these first-time visitors into loyal customers (even if they didn’t read the fine print), he was so pleased with the program that he did a testimonial for us.”

- Conan Gallaty
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Little Rock, AR

“Late in the year, we had a series of golf deals from a group of five commonly owned and managed courses. The last two sold well not only in our market but in the neighboring markets of Merced and Fresno. It was great to see a regional deal catch fire and extend our reach outside our market.”

- Dan Day
The Modesto Bee, Modesto, CA

What was your favorite deal of 2011? Share it with us in the comments section.

Looking Back: Best Deals Promotions of 2011

Matt Chaney — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:42:55 +0000

With 2012 upon us, there is a lot to be hopeful for in terms of the continued growth of group commerce and daily deals. Many sites experienced recording-breaking Decembers because of successful seasonal stores and promotions around the holidays. More broadly, ecommerce continues to see increased usage and tremendous year-over-year gains. Second Street works with over 400 local media sites to power their deals programs, and we asked some of our partners to share highlights from 2011.

What was your most effective promotion in 2011 for growing your email list?

“We did an enter-to-win sweepstakes in the fall of 2011 for two Iowa Hawkeye Football Tickets. It was a two-week contest with 1,360 entries. We included a pre-checked box to sign-up to receive the email for our *here’s the deal program, and we acquired 894 NEW subscribers for *here’s the deal.”

- Joe Matar and Stacey Stefani
The Gazette and KCRG, Cedar Rapids, IA

“Our best single email growth effort was a mobile sign-up at a local 4th of July event. We were on stage at a concert before the fireworks and held out an iPad2. We asked everyone in the audience (about a thousand) to text a message to a specific code to win. Then, when they got the text back, it asked them to enter in their email address to get great deals from ArkansasDailyDeal.com. We had 600+ people sign up in five minutes!”

- Conan Gallaty
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Little Rock, AR

“No matter what we do, we can’t top the results we get when we roll out a hot deal that everyone seems to want. The biggest boost our list got was shortly after we launched our Dealsaver program and featured a grocery store ad. We sold out our allotment of 1,000 vouchers within several hours; there was a frenzied reaction to the deal.”

- Dan Day
The Modesto Bee, Modesto, CA