The guide to contests and giveaways for your online reputation

Contests and giveaways for your online reputation? Today, brands have to offer their audiences content that is both interesting and engaging(1). Through games and contests, they have an excellent opportunity to grow their audience, identify and reward customer loyalty, boost their appeal and, of course, their sales. A successful contest, and the brand’s entire reputation is positively impacted. So how can you organize this type of operation and position it within your marketing strategy in order to strengthen your online reputation? Here are some of the games and contests that, used effectively, have the potential to help your brand image thrive.

1. Creative contest

Whether it involves writing a piece of text, creating a logo or a slogan, submitting a photo or a video, the creative contest calls on the creativity of internet users, who have to produce unique content in order to enter the contest. To be successful, this type of contest based on user-generated content often requires an already engaged community, and it has very strong viral potential, thanks to the originality that participants seek in order to stand out.

By organizing, for example, a huge international makeup contest(2), The Brush Contest, L’Oréal Paris benefits from viral exposure thanks to the mobilization of thousands of video bloggers and the viewing of hundreds of videos. In search of the best make-up designers in the world, the famous beauty brand invites anyone who wants to demonstrate their talent and makeup expertise to do so through 3-minute tutorials uploaded to YouTube.

L’Oréal’s The Brush Contest. Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/lorealparis/thebrushcontest

Participants’ creativity can also be put to use in writing texts, short or long and always tied to the brand’s world. A contest can thus invite them to complete a story, in “exquisite corpse” style, or to tell an entire one in “storytelling” mode, to add a humorous caption to a photo or to suggest a name for a brand’s latest product. Fisherman’s Friend, the confectionery brand, is inviting its fans on Facebook to create their own “best practices for authentic Friends” rules, from late January through the end of March. The best rules, chosen by a panel of well-known figures, will be adapted into video, and their author will receive a year’s worth of Fisherman’s Friend products, along with one of their friends, “friends” oblige.

The Fisherman’s Friend game

Creative contests, while they require a real production effort from participants, are widely followed, especially when they are organized by brands well known to their customers. They allow the audience of consumers to put themselves forward and to build a more intimate relationship, based on engagement, trust and recognition. The online reputation of the organizing brand ends up being significantly impacted among participants and well beyond, because each creation can serve as a communication relay on social networks, thanks to their viral potential.

In most cases, however, the participant does not produce content, but is instead invited to “consume” the brand’s content. This is the case for the types of games analyzed next.

2. Quiz games and personality tests

Personality tests do not claim to take the place of your psychoanalyst; they are above all games. The participant will have fun discovering, supposedly, new facets of their personality. Above all, this type of game helps increase a contest’s appeal thanks to the addition of editorial content that plays with the brand’s image(3). Thus M6 uses a personality test in the form of a quiz to promote Scorpion, one of its new series. Participants will discover which character they most resemble, but also the mood, humor and themes dear to this series, once they have completed their answers.

The Scorpion series offers a personality test. Source http://www.m6.fr/serie-scorpion/jeu-concours/test-de-personnalite-quel-genie-etes-vous-39941.html

In the same vein as personality tests, quizzes make it possible to introduce players to the brand’s world(4), by inviting them, for example, to look for answers on its website, its Facebook page, its Instagram account, and so on. The game mechanic is simple: internet users who answer the questions correctly are entered into a prize draw for a chance to win the prize. It is in this way, through a quiz, that HTC promotes its new HTC One (M8) UEFA limited-edition mobile phone. The mobile phone brand managed to leverage its partnership with L’Equipe in order to target its core audience directly.

Quiz offered by HTC. Source: http://publi-lequipe.fr/htc/

This highly playful mechanic, which sparks both the curiosity and the competitive spirit of its participants, immerses them, even if only for a few minutes, in the brand’s world, its vocabulary and its codes. This one-off engagement therefore helps reinforce the brand’s positive image, because it is associated with enjoyment.

While personality tests and quizzes are great classics among contests, there are others that are even more traditional.

3. The timeless prize draw

This is perhaps the most common type of contest: you simply sign up to take part and, in exchange for the participant’s contact details, a prize in keeping with the brand’s image is offered in a playful way. It is essential that this prize reflects the brand’s positioning and the interests of its target audience, in order to prevent “contest hunters” from entering in too great numbers and to ensure that participants are properly qualified. Sephora thus organized 15 prize draws on its Facebook page to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary in 2013. Each of the draws featured a luxurious and exotic grand prize, a prize perfectly targeted at its modern, fashion-conscious consumers.

Prize draw offered by Sephora. Source: http://blog.hootsuite.com/5-awesome-social-media-contests-plus-create/

The impact of prize draws on a brand’s online reputation hinges mainly on the accessibility and ease of filling out the entry form, the quality and number of prizes on offer, as well as on making good use of the participant’s data.

4. The instant win

Another variant of the prize draw often used by brands is the instant win. The participant fills out the entry form, answers a question, plays a scratch game, and then immediately discovers whether they have won or lost.

Canal Plus is currently relying on this game mechanic to promote House of Cards, one of its flagship series, ahead of the launch of its third season. An operation whose goal is to strengthen its image as the channel of choice for fans of quality series.

Game for the House of Cards series

Here, the brand’s image is positively impacted by the immediacy of the contest result, which reinforces the impression of dynamism and initiative.

5. Contests draw the crowds

In conclusion, combining one of the tactics described above can help a brand grow its online visibility and improve its reputation upstream. Contests offer many advantages, because their basic principles are well known to internet users, who are familiar with their visual codes and rules.

Another benefit is that the investment is sometimes minimal compared to the results they can generate, with contests often giving a positive image of the brand, since it offers something to its community through the giveaways, prizes and other rewards to be won(5).

But for a contest to be successful in terms of awareness and online reputation, the brand must not forget to set concrete objectives (loyalty, product launch, mobilizing a community of fans, etc.) and to precisely define its target audience. Only with these elements can the brand choose the form the contest will take, its theme, the associated reward, and the channels that will enable its distribution or organization. Remember that filing the rules, rolling it out, day-to-day management and analysis all take time and come at a cost if you want meaningful results for your reputation.

Sources:

1. http://www.tintup.com/blog/8-brands-effectively-leveraging-user-generated-content/

2. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/loreal-paris-unveils-the-brush-contest-the-brands-first-ever-global-online-makeup-artist-competition-300022828.html

3. http://www.agorapulse.com/fr/blog/test-de-personnalite-sur-facebook-8-choses-a-savoir

4. http://www.f-jeux-buzz.com/jeux.php

5. https://www.emarketinglicious.fr/webmarketing/jeux-concours-marketing-mix/