How do I make my competition exciting?
In our ongoing series of posts, we have some interesting questions this week to pick out that may help you planning your next prize promotion campaign. If you have a question to ask, just get in touch [email protected]
In the mean time...
- Do you supply a report at the end of the promotion?
For our bespoke campaigns, we can supply a report at the end of the campaign however we also give you a dashboard to log into and see the data that has been collected. We have different tiers of admin that allow different teams to see different aspects of the report which includes the brands who don’t always want access to the consumer data as they don’t want to be responsible for it.
Of course one of the key elements of data collection is opt-in info which can be shared so brands only receive data from those that have allowed themselves to be contactable.
2. What is the process to run a successful promotional campaign
There are several key steps to running a promotional campaign. Firstly you need to decide what the objectives are for the campaign. Are you trying to increase sales? Brands Awareness? Give away left over stock? Encourage trial? These early decisions form the basis of a campaign, the type of entry mechanism that is best suited and the prize levels to give away. The competitions needs to have plenty of marketing communication around it. Whether it is store POS (Point of Sale) above the line or below the line advertising, TV, Radio, Social Media etc. The competition itself needs to be engaging and worthwhile for consumers to enter. ‘What’s in it for them’ is a key question to ask yourself. Budget needs to be set aside for the advertising, for the development of the campaign and the prize pool. If you offer low value prizes and low quantities (reducing the chances of winning) then all the marketing in the world won’t make a successful campaign. Plus consumers are quick to complain and start spreading and sharing negative communications about the brand on social media.
3. How do I make my competition exciting?
The term ‘lazy journalism’ is used when a journalist simply hasn’t investigated the story enough and puts out a sub-standard article. In a similar way, there’s too much ‘lazy promotional marketing’ out there. A price discount, for example, is an uninspiring quick fix for a non-ambitious brand. It’s a wasted opportunity to emotionally engage with the target audience. A Facebook campaign that simply says ‘Like X to win Y’ is quick and cheap to run and better than doing nothing. But to gain loyalty and engagement, you need to interact.
A more effective route would be running a prize draw or even better, a winning moment/instant win competition where brands collect data and then reveal whether consumers have won a prize on the spot. This is called ‘surprise and delight’ and helps a customer embrace a brand a lot quicker.
Taking this one step further, gamification increases brand memory structures by holding the attention of the consumer for longer. Consumers have so much data to consume that they rarely spend more than a few seconds looking at a single piece of content. However, some form of game such as a digital scratch card or a spin the wheel game creates excitement and engagement and can mean the consumer can interact with a brand for minutes rather than seconds. Through the excitement of ‘winning’, sharing on social media follows where happy customers become brand ambassadors.
4. For fulfilment, would you be able to work directly with Brand X and would you securely transfer the data?
We work in many ways to offer fulfilment services. We can take all prizes and send them directly from our fulfilment house. This is done by our software platform Promotix where we transfer the data directly into our secure fulfilment engine platform. Alternatively, we can export the data and through secure transfer methods, transfer the data directly to the supplier of the prize so they can download and send the prizes out directly.
5. Can you offer the receipt validation for our promotion?
At Epic Activation, our promotions engine Promotix caters for receipt or image uploads. This means that you can request a customer to upload an image or a receipt of a purchase. Based on the estimated numbers and what data needs to be reviewed, there are a number of options.
A. Our team goes through the receipts and manually validates the entries. Looking at the numbers, it may be that rather than validate every entry, we just validate those that have won a prize. Promotix allows for winners confirmation emails to be held back until validation has occurred.
B. Integrate OCR technology allows for a large number of receipts to be processed and is ideal when it is not practical for a human to review X many entries a day manually.
C. Image recognition. It may be that the brand only wants to know if a relevant product photo has been taken (Minimal requirements). It is then easier to manually validate as specific details that may be on a receipt are not required saving time for each validation. Or the brand is more relaxed about multiple images being uploaded. If they only want 1 unique photo per competition, then technology can instantly recognise if an image has been uploaded previously.
For further details on any question above or if you have any questions, please get in touch with [email protected]
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