Have a strategy

‘Build and they will come’ doesn’t work for photo contests and if you don’t have a planned out strategy then it’s likely the outcome of your contest results will suffer. You need to ask questions like how am I going to start the viral loop? Why would leads want to enter the contest? How am I going to share the contest?

Market the actual Contest

It’s important to think about how you will get the viral loop started and how you’re going to get those initial entries. Some examples:

• Use your existing database and customers
• Promote it on your website
• Promote it thought social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
• Don’t be afraid to use PPC (Google AdWords & Facebook Ads) , it can give your contest that extra little boost it needs. Facebook and Google Ads allow for great geo-targeting which is especially good for local business’s

Encourage Social Sharing

It’s important to setup your contest so that users are highly encouraged to share and virally send the contest over their social networks. There’s two main methods to do this 1) Have the contests workflow encourage the user and make it very easy 2) Have a sweetener for sharing eg offer them a second chance draw for every friend that signs up.

Give prizes

Sometimes people need a little extra to get them over the line, prizes are great little sweeteners. Sponsors are a good idea because they can help cover some costs by offering prizes.

It’s about the Email/Lead Database

It’s all about the database, the idea is to capture as many email addresses and contact details in your contest, as this allows you to implement either Email Marketing or direct mail if you’ve got their address’s.

Email Marketing and Direct Mail are still some of the most successful marketing strategies of today.

Have a ‘Call To Action’/End Goal

In the end you’re here to build your business and it’s important to set out your end goals and have an action plan on how you’re going to convert those lead into paying customers.

Lead Nurturing/Content Marketing

The world has changed people are tired of being interrupted and nobody is responding to it anymore. Now it’s about building trust and credibility. Business’s have to change the way they do business. The future of marketing is about about earned media and not paid media, it’s about inbound marketing.

Lead Nurturing while it’s not exactly directly connected to running a photo contest it’s still an amazing form of marketing.

There’s two basic types of Lead Nurturing

a) The primary function of lead nurturing is to slowly educate your customers and build a trusted relationship with your customer, so your slowly warming your lead into a sales ready lead.

b) It’s about touching leads in a very light manner( eg through good content) so you leave an imprint on them and you’re the first in mind when they come to buy

If you enjoyed reading this please share with your network, we would appreciate it.

Thanks Michael

Over the past few days I’ve been looking into Facebook for developers and the options available for competition runner, I’ve been immensely impressed with the power of the facebook integration. You can get an idea into the api by taking a look at the graph API documentation and website integration documentation, in addition to the API the integration has rich Javascript libraries and pre built UI forms.

I haven’t locked down exactly how the facebook integration will work but I have some ideas.

1) When a voter comes to a landing page, on photographers domain, we’ll allow them to submit a vote via their facebook account(eg facebook login), then once a vote is submitted and we’ve already captured the details of the voter. Competition Runner will then encourage the voter to invite their friends, post the competition on their wall and/or make a recommendation.

2) The original campaign that ran with competition runner was a complete landing page located on Stylistics website/domain, this is how I originally pictured competition runner would work. But I’ve been prototyping having a competition run from a Facebook page tab and it’s possible to have a competition run directly from a Facebook tab and it’s also possible to publish from Competition Runner directly to a Facebook tab.

This opens a few options:

a) Competition Runner would function the same as the original campaign, in that there would be a single competition page on your website. (if this was the case, it would still be possible to have Competition Runner put a reveal  tab landing page on your Facebook page)

b) The competition could run in both Facebook and on your own website

c) Competitions could run purely on Facebook

Where would you want to run your competitions, on your own domain or in your Facebook page?

The idea behind Competition Runner is to enable you to run successful photo competition marketing campaigns. The keyword being successful, as anyone can run a photo competition but running a successful one you need to do it the smart way.

How does it work?

The simple process:

1. Create a new competition, sets time period for competition and uploads their contestants

2. You can then contact each contestant (usually previous customers) and ask for permission to include their photo’s on the competition page.

3. It’s recommend to offer both the contestants and voters a valuable prize. Having a valuable prize for contestants will encourage them to share the competition with their friends, and having a valuable prize for voters encourages them to enter the competition.

4. Once a competition is running, a seed email will be send out to the contestants which they can then vote on themselves and send it on to friends to encourage their friend to vote.

5. The Competition Runner system will take care of capturing the contestants details and encouraging viral social sharing.

6. Announcing the winners and email/direct mail/call your database of new potential clientele.

Why is it different? How it helps my campaigns be more successful?

Competition Runner is based around a system that’s designed to maximum the success of your marketing. You might have tried to run marketing campaigns before but they weren’t so successful, it’s likely they were missing one or more key components.

Viral Social Sharing – Competition Runner is setup so that users are highly encouraged to share and virally send the competition over their social networks.

Social Network Integration- Competition Runner is setup so that it’s integrated with Facebook. It encourages shares and likes of your website and facebook page.

Customer Marketing Database – One of the biggest mistakes people make when marketing is they don’t capture enough customer details and keep records of those details. Competition runner keeps contestant details permanently and allows you to continually market your products and services to your database.

Email Marketing System – Email Marketing is one of the most successful marketing techniques around today. Competition Runner allows you to take your database and send out marketing emails directly from our systems.

Search Engine Optimization – Everyone wants to rank highly in Google, but it’s excessively hard and competitive. The competition runner system is setup to help your Google rankings.