Join Mike and Alan as they discuss the creative and branding implications of interactive contest campaigns. 

 Alan on Interactive contests: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As we’ve recently discussed in our blog and the LeapCast, interactive contests can be a great way to promote your brand online. However, it’s important that you provide your interactive agency with adequate background data to properly plan and execute the promotion to hit your target goals. Answering these questions at the outset ensures a great result in th end.

What are your specific goals for the promotion? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you simply trying to promote your brand into a deeper penetration of your target market? Are you rebranding your business to an entirely new demographic? Are you pushing a new product line? Is building an email database the primary goal? Your agency needs this information to develop a powerful promotion that will work for you.

We also need to look at the overall existing online brand presence for the company. If your organization doesn’t have an established brand presence already, that makes the branding impact of the promotion that much more important.

A promotion can be a great way to motivate users to interact with your brand, so it’s particularly helpful when you are repositioning your brand in the market. In this regard, the more demographic and interest information you can provide to your agency regarding your target audience, the more focused and effective the promotion can be in reaching that audience.

Having clear goals in place prior to beginning an online contest promotion ensures that those goals are met and exceeded by the campaign. Providing your agency with comprehensive information about goals, target audience and your brand’s current position gets things off on the right foot.

Join Mike and Katina as they discuss the critical decisions that can make or break a successful interactive contest campaign.  

 Smart Planning and Promotion for Online Contests: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Online contests have become a great way to drive traffic to your website, increase consumer databases and most importantly create connection for people with your brand. However, there are several things that must be taken into account when planning and implementing a contest for those reasons:

First: An online contest can oftentimes be the first introduction of a brand to a consumer. Ensuring that the brand persona is kept intact with any promotional contest is a top priority. What we want is an emotional connection with the brand. Having a mismatch in tone, imagery, content, usability, etc. creates an instant disconnect when the user ultimately lands on the main website only to find their introduction was merely a traffic generating farce. Consumers are bombarded daily with special offers and the last thing we can afford is to disappoint a consumer who then turns a blind eye to our brand - that’s if we’re lucky - the alternative is the consumer uses their online power to tell everyone in their network that the promotion is not worth the time!

Second: One of the easily forgotten aspects of any online venture is usability. As creative minds work together, focusing on flow, speed, functionality, browsers, etc. becomes a paramount concern when the ultimate goal is pleasing the user. A great offer is not enough to keep attention when pages are slow to load, navigation makes no sense and paths are not clearly defined. Online, your brand has split seconds to grab the user’s attention and motivate them to continue on your designated conversion path – any break in that rhythm creates a roadblock. Just like in highway traffic, a certain percentage of drivers will simply turn around and take another path.

Third: As we begin to look for places to promote the online contest, it is important to target sites and media that foster the emotional connection with the brand. Placing your contest on a contest aggregator site leads to high amounts of traffic but little connection to the brand and ultimately results in a consumer database not interested in my brand offer but the next sweepstakes I happen to announce. The creative we place on the targeted sites, from text to image, must find a way to marry both the tone of the publisher’s site and the persona of the brand. We must be careful not to “blend in” with the existing creative too much, but failing to create a brand connection to the user already creates a roadblock for the online contest.

As an interactive marketer, I believe online contests are a powerful way to brand online, generate buzz and ultimately build databases. I also believe, if done poorly, they can be one of the most dangerous online brand activities imaginable.

If nothing else, this past year has been a year where buzzwords evolved faster than Cro-Magnons in a Geiko commercial.

In the beginning of 2007, the buzzword was: viral, “Web 2.0″
By the end of 2007, it was replaced by: social media

Why? Because marketers began to understand that in the maturing new media landscape, there’s more value in creating and sustaining relationships and conversations than in getting a video of your slightly dorky executive playing guitar maximum traction on YouTube.

In the beginning of 2007, the buzzword was: mobile marketing OR online video OR widgets
By the end of 2007, it was replaced by: cross-platform, integrated campaigns

Why? Because once we got over the cool factor of these shiny new channel toys, we realized that for now, they’re pretty much only ready to augment existing channels, rather than replace them.

In the beginning of 2007, the buzzword was: Digg
By the end of 2007, it was replaced by: StumbleUpon

Why? Digg started out the year strong, but towards the end of 2007, scandals regarding Digg’s treatment of their most valuable asset–the community of power users–had seriously tarnished the social media site’s reputation. Meanwhile, StumbleUpon brought back a sense of wonder, exploration and surprise to jaded web surfers.

In the beginning of 2007, the buzzword was: Myspace
By the end of 2007, it was replaced by: Facebook

Why? Mike thinks it was Virginia Tech. I think it was massive eyestrain from annoying banner ads and exceptionally poor user experience. Either way, while Myspace still has the numbers, by the end of the year, Facebook owned the buzz. Even their missteps (**cough**Beacon**cough**) were more newsworthy than what Myspace was finally getting right.

In the beginning of 2007, the buzzword was: Second Life
By the end of 2007, it was replaced by: MyBlogLog / Twitter

Why? Hmmm… spend hours and cash creating an animated virtual self, and hope you run into someone you’d want to network with while running around Second Life, or spend a half hour creating a profile and start building avatar recognition where the best and brightest minds in the blogosphere are converging and conversing? What sounds like a worthwhile use of your time, in retrospect?

So that’s our recap of how the biggest buzzwords of 2007 evolved over the course of the year. What’s the big picture in all this? That marketers are beginning to both adopt the new tools that the web (and Web 2.0) offer and understand how they fit in a long-term, sustainable interactive marketing and digital advertising plan.

That’s a huge jump to make in only a year, and obviously, not everyone has made it. However, overall these trends are great news for those who work in marketing and advertising on the web, and the brands and companies they represent.

The more we all get on the same page in terms of strategy, goals and value, the better we can all be in effectively contributing our part of the effort.