UPICKEM Promotion Center | Share. Brainstorm. Profit.

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.

9 Tips to Secure Great Deals for Your Valentine’s Store

Seasonal Deal Stores can be a strategic enhancement to any group commerce site, so with Valentine’s Day a little over a month away, now is the time to start planning your store by getting your deals lined up, scheduling your promotions, and prepping your site for success. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of your Valentine Day’s Store.

---

1. Use your store as a way to push into new and interesting categories that you may not normally pursue. Don’t limit yourself to the obvious candy-and-flowers routine.
2. Your store can also be the perfect place to allow deals with limited inventory to run and get those strong merchants on-board that you may have passed over for a Featured Deal slot. Merchants with only a set number of deals to sell can still be great offers!

A few category ideas:
- Shared Adventure – hot air balloon, skydiving, horseback riding
- Wine or Wine Clubs
- Jewelry and Gift Shops
- Mobile Detailing
- Clothing Boutiques
- Spa Treatments
- Massage
- Movie or Theater Tickets
- Photography Session for Two
- Photo-on-Canvas

3. Identifying key categories and key accounts ahead of time and rewarding those reps that bring in the top deals or the most deals from a targeted category is a great motivator to find those Grade A deal opportunities.
4. Including your merchants’ logos and offer in the ads is a great selling point for securing the best deals.
5. These stores also give your marketing department a theme to promote around. The success of your store depends, in large part, on how well you promote it. Getting the word out early and consistently is key to drumming up excitement among your users as well as merchants.
6. For Valentine’s Day Store in particular, consider creating two promotional campaigns – one targeting men and one for women – and feature the appropriate deals for that gender.
7. Valentine’s Day lands on a Tuesday this year, so there will likely be a lot of couples celebrating the weekend before. So, to make sure you’re covered, you should launch your store around the first of the month and let it run through the 14th. This will allow you to reach those shoppers who prefer to buy early as well as accommodate those who might need a last-minute gift.
8. Refreshing your sites’ look and feel with the colors and images of the season is always a best practice. Whatever you use online – colors, copy, graphics – be sure to also use in your offline promotions to keep your branding consistent.
9. Certainly don’t forget to leverage one of your most powerful assets – your Featured Deal email. Include promotions and top deals from your store here to make sure your most loyal users are aware of the special event!

Whether your deals are gifts or are a way for couples to enjoy the holiday, a Valentine’s Day Store can give you a first quarter boost and bring a little love to your deals site.

Here’s a great contest idea to keep in your back pocket for next Halloween. Star-Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) gives readers a few basic items (this week: flannel shirt & jeans) and asks them to dream up their most creative costume idea with those pieces for a chance to win a cash card. Simple, clever and fun (plus a sponsorship from Goodwill) – all the ingredients to an awesome contest.

We recently hosted one of our partner’s favorite webinars (okay, it’s one of our favorites, too) – 30 Contest Ideas in 30 Minutes. During this webinar, Julie Foley, our Director of Affiliate Success & Matt Coen, our President, reveals the top 30 contest categories run on UPICKEM in the past year. Each category comes complete with several examples for you to get your contest-building creative juices flowing to help build out your year-long contest calendar.

If you weren’t able to attend the live session, watch a recording in our resource center.

Be sure to check out all the contests mentioned in our webinar.

Catch up with Second Street by checking out our October 2011 newsletter. Inside, you will find updates on:

- Sign up for our “Deals for the Holidays” webinar
- Recording of our “30 Contest Ideas in 30 Minutes” webinar
- Top Contests of September
- Matt Coen’s (our President) guest article on Street Fight Magazine: “Why Local Media Can Dominate Daily Deals”

Keeping your deals programs fun and relevant will keep your subscribers engaged. An easy way to do this? Change the look and feel of your site to match the current time of year or holiday season. Take a look at this “Half Off Halloween” from program from WSBT-AM – it looks great! They are running deals for haunted houses, pumpkin patches and the like. Another great touch? Memorial Children’s Hospital is running an ad on the site with a link to trick or treating safety tips – how clever!

More Theme Ideas:
- A Father’s Day store:
- A Mother’s Day store
- A summer store
- A winter store

Have you run a themed deals program? Share your ideas in the comments.