Online Contest Advice

This month in the "Making the Most of Digital" feature, DMNews promised that they'd tell us how to Navigate the Online Contest Trend. Trend? Sweepstakes and contests online have been around for a years. Granted, they've generally become more truly interactive with time, but 'trend' is a stretch. Okay, okay, the trade mags need to pump up the article...

The article was interesting enough, but didn't really provide much help with 'how to', so I'll provide some guidelines based on implementing six or eight over the past four years.

Things you should know:

1. Contests take much much more time and resources than you would imagine. You'll need a program manager, creative staff, site builders, legal advisors, an online 'prize' agency, and maybe a fulfillment house. Oh, and prizes too. You'll need to start 4 - 6 months before launch, and then you'll be fulfilling for months afterward.

2. You need a specialty agency because they have built fool-proof algorithms to ensure that the prizes are being awarded correctly according to the rules. And they also have researched the rules to make sure they're fully legit in all states. They'll also indemnify your organization against any issues, which your legal staff will appreciate. All of this does not come cheap.

3. Make sure to involve your counsel / legal department the very first week you begin discussing a sweepstakes or contest. There are an incredible number of legalities to these things, and this being a litigious society... well let's just say that if you don't get them in really early it could be very unpleasant.

4. Generally a 'sweepstakes' is much easier to get through legal as they're based on random luck and chance, while a 'contest' implies that you are somehow selecting the 'best' something. That selection process can be the subject of litigation.

5. When you total up all the costs and explain that to the CMO and she explains it to the CFO, you'll want to have a very firm determination of the expected return. Realistically, you can see a good number of new emails for your house file, your current customers will probably 'tell a friend', and you may be able to get more visibility for a new product or offering. (CPG manufacturers always sell more product at retail when the packaging mentions a sweepstakes. I do not know why.) That said, I've had clients spend up to $15 per new-to-file address, which seemed steep. Keep in mind that there are numerous sites online that will pass your program around and there are people who participate in endless sweepstakes, so many of your new addresses aren't all that valuable.

6. Unless there is an amazing brand linkage to complicated or expensive grand prizes, you'll probably get just as much action from free product or gift cards. And your ROI becomes much more viable.

Hope this helps. Please tell me if you have more tips, or radically disagree!

Setting an online marketing budget

(Originally published in late 2009, still true...)

It’s that time of year… everyone’s planning their budgets for 2010. We all hope and pray that the recession will be over by then, but in the meantime most organizations are lean and mean. Just today eMarketer reported that in order to improve overall marketing effectiveness, 70% of marketers are moving budget from traditional to digital media.

So is it time for you to create a high impact online marketing program? You know that your targets are online, but where do I start?

Two primary ways come to mind – targeted media buys and search marketing.

Online Advertising

A broad host of media models have been developed to assist virtually any organization in reaching online targets. Demographic, psychographic and re-messaging platforms are all very common. If your target is online, they can be found.

In a recent panel study, comScore also found that visits to an advertiser’s site increased by an average of 46% over the four weeks following first exposure to a campaign. And this interest in the advertiser is valuable – they’ve documented a 27% increase in online sales and 17% increase offline by comparing test and control consumer behaviors.

Studies dating back to the earliest days of the Internet have noted lifts in brand awareness and perceptions based on online advertising. And a few progressive organizations have largely reinvented themselves through online campaigns.

Search Marketing

But let’s not put all our eggs in one online basket! While we can hunt and find many consumers, some make it really easy by typing in our ‘buying terms’ in a search engine. A well-crafted SEM campaign can and should produce a very good return for any marketer.

Further, comScore has just released a report quantifying the lift resulting from a combination of display advertising and search running concurrently. This lift – 155% with the two combined over search alone – is seen on both paid and organic searches and clicks. It appears that it’s not just the search copy that gets a user to act, but the brand message the user has recently seen.

There are proven techniques to improve response

Many advertisers understand that traditional static online ads are hardly seen and have taken steps to break through the limits of traditional static graphical online advertising. Larger placements, rich media, highly tailored message, and video are all becoming a part of the typical online advertising tool kit.

The ad serving powerhouse DoubleClick has consistently shown that larger standard units (300×250pxl) receive more user attention and clicks. Even larger ads, when available, are even more powerful. This may be because users notice the larger placements much more readily than smaller ones which tend to blend together.

Rich media ads – those with significant motion – also generate more responses and awareness metrics than static graphical ads. Pointroll, a major rich media provider, generates a 116% lift rate over standard banners, and average 10.6 seconds of engagement with its ad units that expand or change as users interact with them. Even as the novelty of the placements has waned, the positive lift remains.

This past summer Forrester found that marketers believe they are segmenting and targeting with a high degree of exactness. Unfortunately, their targets do not agree. Of 800 respondents to a broad based survey, 58% said that very few of the ads and offers they’ve seen match their interest, and another 29% said none do. Yet 39% will occasionally respond to online advertising in general, suggesting that is if the offer or message is compelling they’ll participate.

DoubleClick has reported that online video ads see interaction rates twice to four times higher than graphical ads – typically ranging from .4 to .74%. Although more expensive to produce and traffic, this lift is further enhanced by both the ability to measure the length of the brand engagement and the average amount of time spent with the ad unit – 19.1 seconds for 30 second placements.