Ten tips for creating successful contests
Here are Ten Tips for creating great contests, courtesy of Jason Erdahl, the contest expert from the Minneapolis Star Tribune's startribune.com which runs a continual schedule of contests year round.
1.Follow the traffic not the money. Don't let an advertiser convince
you to create a contest that may not generate enough traffic. Look for contests that inspire women to enter and vote; women are by far the largest group of contest participants.
2. Cutest Baby and Cutest Pet are surefire winners, so those are a
good place to start. The StarTribune.coms Baby contest racked in 2 million and 5 million page views respectively, about four times as many as a typical "successful contest". Most other media report similar results, so start with these and build on success.
3. Choose a sufficient platform. For sizeable contests, Upickem from
Secondstreet is best of class, but there are many other options.
4. Make the rules specific, lawyer-vetted and ironclad. Typically in a
contest of about 1000 participants, ten will complain that they did
not win and two of these complaints will be serious enough to reach
the publisher level. It sounds silly ("my fish was bigger than his fish", literally, in the case of one contest), but it is important to be able to answer calls consistently. If you "borrow"
rules from this site, make sure to vet them with a local attorney, as
each state has different contest laws.
5.Narrow the winners in stages. Allowing more votes for
semi-finalists, then finalists, or in daily "heats" builds excitement
and keeps visitors engaged.
6.Make share tools easy, and proselytize. Much of the traffic to the
contests is driven by participants through social networks, so remind
them to get out the vote!
7. Have significant prizes. $1000 in gift certificates from a related
tie-in sponsor is a well-established level.
8. Look for close sponsor tie-ins to the contest, the closer the better. Cutest Pet contests generally tie'in a pet store, but what about a regional carpet cleaner like Coits, who is having trouble finding great
marketing?
9. Add a structured post-contest e-blast to voters and participants. Thank them and giving them a coupon from a sponsor. This allows the sponsor to collect their own database while preserving voter privacy from spam.
10. Promote constantly. Yes, that means year-round. A schedule of
contests that resides on a Contest Page, and has a button on the
navigation bar, and/or standing front screen promotions build interest
over the year. Use legacy media to support the voting period and
recognize winners.
Finally, since entrants are organizing the vote (and you want them to) decide how to weight popular votes against the editors picks. Most contests should allow the popular vote to "inform" the editors decision or allow for two picks, in case the top vote getter is clearly not the most deserving.
The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecsTech, developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine, to showcases perspectives from around the world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.
