Viral Competition: The Website 
Now that you have hopefully defined your goals and audience for your online competition it’s time to talk about a website strategy. What you should do with your website’s design to motivate users to participate, easy share functionality for your website to allow users to share your competition and the website copy.
Your website and its design play a vital role in your online viral competition. Your website should talk to the participants of your competition so it would be a good idea to have a website that has been created specifically for the competition. This unique design should be easy to understand and should be relevant to what your competition is about. Say for instance you are giving away an iPad, a picture of an iPad should be incorporated in your design to help motivate users to take part in your competition.
For your website to have any viral effect at all you need real user interaction on the competition website and users must be able to easily share it with friends via email or on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Luckily Facebook and Twitter makes this possible with their API’s which enables you to write code so that users can login to your website with their Facebook or Twitter account which allows you to share information regarding the competition on their wall or feed if their privacy allows you to do so. The user’s friends will see their status update and might visit your website to take part in the competition themselves and they will again share it with their friends which is then the viral effect.
The copy of your website should be easy to understand and shouldn’t be too long. People don’t like reading a vast amount of information when it comes to competitions they just want to take part to win the prize. Having said that, the competition should be explained thoroughly!
Keep your competition website simple, unique and interesting to make it appealing!
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A Case Study on a Social Media Competition
After reading this week’s blog posts, you will have a better idea on what to do when planning a viral competition however planning a competition on social media platforms is different When planning a competition on social platforms it is very important to first decide what the demographic will be for the competition. This will make it much easier to choose which social platform will work best for your competition. If you want to run your competition on Facebook you need to keep in mind that 61% of Facebook users are aged 35 or older and 64% of Twitter’s users are 35 or older.
I’m going to do a case study on Facebook where a company is running a competition and are giving away a 32 GB iPAD with WI-FI + 3G every week. The homepage of their website contains information about the competition that is running on Facebook. Users can enter the competition from the homepage which links directly to their facebook fan page. If you entered the competition you can share it with friends. (This is the viral infection which Chris mentioned in his blog). This company chose the right social platform for their competition because the highest percentage of users who are interested in iPad’s are also aged 35. If the social platform and the demographic of your viral competition are chosen correctly, you will see how your fans increase in just a few hours. This company is constantly interacting with their Facebook fans and updating information about the competition. On the fan page where companies generally display information about their company, they instead posted all the winners names and also created a photo album to contain photos of the winners. After a month of running this competition where they giving away the iPad’s they are starting a new competition where they give one of their own products away. This is a brilliant way to get fans and build your brand.
Okay, now you know that a viral competition will be successful on social media platforms, but I know most of you are wondering how to start a competition on these platforms. It’s important to have a strategy which you follow consistently throughout the competition.
The first thing you need to do is to set your goals for the competition. Ask yourself the following question: “what would I like to achieve with this competition?” After setting your goals you need to decide on your target market and if the winning prize is suitable for your target market. As in the case study, if your target market is not interested in the prize you are going to waste time and money. After defining your target market, decide on which social media platform you would like to use. Make sure you know exactly how to manage the social platform. Decide on a dedicated team who are experts on the specific social platform and interact with the fans or the people who entered the competition.
WOW, that was a mouthful of information. I’m hoping that you will keep this information in mind when you decide to start a competition of your own. In a nutshell, plan your viral competition in advance, set your goals and stick to the strategy that you have devised for your competition!
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Using PPC To Help Promote A Competition
Welcome Back!
If you sell a seasonal product or are promoting a competition, then utilising PPC you can create a tactical campaign for that period. In my blog article today I am going to discuss how to use the Pay Per Click method of advertising to promote your competition.
PPC has many advantages and benefits, I find three of them particularly appealing when it comes to seasonal marketing.
1. The ability to quickly advertise promotions and competitions by writing tailored ad copies that grab the attention
2. PPC enables you to track and measure the success of your marketing campaign.
3. The ability to utilise geographical location targeting
Writing Tailored Ad Copy
Once you have defined the goals for your competition as discussed in our previous blog articles, you should keep them in mind when writing ad copies for your campaign focusing on what you would like to achieve. It is important to write eye catching ads that will spark an interest amongst the user while ensuring that it contains important information about the competition and some unique selling points. It would be a good idea to include the prize that is on offer and a brief description of what the competition entails. Be creative but not vague.
Measurability
Traditional marketing is great but it does not allow you to accurately measure the success of the campaign whereas PPC affords you complete measurability by making use of Google Adwords. Adwords is a Google advertising platform for pay per click advertising. It allows you to ascertain how many users have viewed your ad, how many users have clicked on your PPC ad, how many conversions you have received and many more useful features. Another useful tool is Google Analytics, here you will be able to view user interaction with your website, how many users have visited your website, the number of page views and the average time spent on your website just to name a few features at your disposal. Google Analytics will be able to show you what you are doing right or in the case of an unsuccessful campaign, it will be able to show you where you went wrong.
Geographical Targeting
PPC allows to target specific location and also allows you to exclude specific locations, for instance if you were running a global competition then you would set your campaign to show ads globally and this is done in the Campaign Settings tab on Adwords, however if you were only running a competition in South Africa then you would set your location to South Africa, with the geographical targeting option you can even exclude cities, provinces and regions within a specified country. This will enable you to receive relevant traffic.
There are many benefits of using PPC to market your competition as it is instantaneous and you have complete control on how long your ads run and how much you pay, with all this in mind, I do hope you would consider trying PPC to advertise your next competition.
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Defining and targeting your audience for Viral Competition
Well if you are reading this then you probably know what a viral competition is but just in case you don’t, a viral competition is a competition spread by the participants. It got its name from the fact that it spreads like a viral infection. Now all of us want our competitions to spread like a viral infection cause then more people will be exposed to it and you come closer to reaching the goals you defined.
Planning
This however is not something you can dream up and create in an evening and hope it will spread virally. You need to plan it carefully. Renier discussed defining goals and strategy for you viral competition in our previous blog post. I would like to delve a bit deeper and help you plan how you will reach those goals.
Defining your audience
Now that you have decided on your goals and the strategy you will be following. To reach these you will need to define your audience. You need to define who you will need to reach so your competition will fulfil your goals? Who are the market leaders and evangelists of your audience? It’s important that you know exactly what the profile of your audience will be to enable you to target them in the best manner you can.
How to reach your audience
Now that you have defined your audience you need to investigate what channels you will use to reach them. If you where looking at targeting business owners and professionals the channels you use would be completely different from targeting a young professional. Knowing your audience you need to determine which channels online will work the best to target these users. Quite frequently email has been used as the first point of departure with campaigns like these but because of excessive use it has also started losing some of it’s effectiveness. Targeting users on social mediums have become quite a big channel because of the ease of sharing this with their friends.
Tailoring the competition
Your competition will also need to be tailored for your audience. If you are targeting web savvy users then you can add more complex steps to the competition. If your audience however were not power users then it would be beneficial for you if you keep your competition as simple as possible. This isn’t the only factor you should look at though; you will need to look at everything from the design to the language you use to ensure your audience associate with it.
Keeping it alive
Now initially your competition might get a lot of traffic because of all the other marketing initiatives you are running to promote the competition but after that it’s up to you to keep it alive. You will need to plan exactly what steps you need to take to make sure users keep sharing and spreading the word. This could include emailing them reminders, offering another price for the top sharer whatever will appeal to your users and keep it going. You also need to monitor the campaign closely and ensure you can adapt approaches if you see that another approach you didn’t think is having a viral effect.
A viral competition is a very sensitive environment and you really need to plan all your steps carefully otherwise your competition might never take flight and your goals won’t be met. If you have your planning well defined and thought through and you are able to adapt your approach, you should find that your competition should prove to be a very good marketing tool.
Please leave your comments or questions below.
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