By Lucky Balaraman, Executive Director, The Magnum Group (TMG)

Mobile marketing contests are an exciting way to enhance the popularity of your brand or product with the possible fringe benefit of more followers on Twitter and Instagram. Setting up such a contest is simple, a caveat being that promoting the mobile contest will call for a certain amount of online and offline effort.

Here’s an overview of how the program works:

1. Ask users to take photographs related to your specified subject using their smartphones
2. Ask them to upload the photographs to Instagram or Twitter using a hashtag (such as “#AcmeContest1”)
3. Award a prize for the best photograph or photographs

But before you get started, there are a few things you’ll have to do:

• Constitute a panel of judges expert in your above subject
• Decide on the beginning and end dates of the contest
• Decide on the categories for which you will award prizes as well as the prizes for each category
• Widely publish rules of the contest based on the above decisions. Remember to mention any shipping costs, taxes or duties prize recipients may be subject to
• Prepopulate your Instagram account with photographs similar to the ones you expect contestants to take (and clearly state that they are your sample photographs)
• Get a results spreadsheet ready with a row for each entry, and a column each for date of entry, Twitter or Instagram ID of the contestant, the photograph itself and the marks assigned by each judge
• Run a teaser “Coming soon” promotional campaign starting a week before the contest. Use all channels available to you, paid or unpaid. Think banner ads, search ads, video ads, solo mailings and social media ads. Post several times a day to your social media accounts using automated tools such as SocialOomph or Hootsuite
• Video interview mobile marketing experts for their views on the contest and upload the videos to multiple video sharing sites (outsource the multiple uploading to a provider on Fiverr.com. In return ask them to interview you and upload to multiple sites
• Offer to do the multiple uploads for them in return for them blogging about the interviews with links to the interviews or your website
• Send out a press release on the upcoming contest. Again, resort to Fiverr.com for uploading to multiple press release distribution sites
• Try and get interviewed on as many local radio stations as possible

Here’s your checklist for your tasks during the contest:

1. Promote the contest using the methods and channels mentioned above for the teaser campaign
2. Post entry statistics on your blog and have your above interviewees post the stats on their blogs
3. Upload a video every day of the contest with comment on how the contest is progressing. Include new interviews with the earlier interviewees as well as fresh ones. What you are trying to achieve is continual news similar to TV coverage of an election campaign
4. Collect results on a regular basis and update the results spreadsheet with them. The frequency of updating depends on the rate at which entries come in and your capacity to update

The bottom line: Proof that this method works is evidenced by the fact that large companies have recently started using this technique. UK carrier O2, for instance, has launched a campaign for its roaming tariff based on a holiday photograph contest.

The good news that even with very limited resources you can make a sizeable splash: all you have to do is choose promotional methods to suit your budget.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012, 9:04 pm   |   Instagram, Twitter  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback