March 2015 - American Sweepstakes

Gain valuable customer insights by offering sweepstakes

Sweepstakes promotions help to build and grow your customer database, as well as to drive excitement around your brand, which are great reasons for running these types of promotions. However, sweepstakes can offer so many more marketing opportunities.

One important goal you can achieve with a sweepstakes promotion is to gather consumer insights. You can use this promotional tool as an opportunity to get to know your customers and prospective customers, their preferences and how they may interact with your products or brand. One of our clients, Kiss Nail Products, is doing this right now with their Dream Vacation Sweepstakes.

Kiss Nail Products recently launched this sweepstakes and are running it on their website and Facebook Page.They are running this promotion for the second time in which they are including a brief survey in the entry form. There are a total of five simple questions on the entry form. First they are asking what age group and ethnic background the participant is from. Then they ask product specific questions such as “Do you use at-home artificial nail products? and if so please select which types you use from the below choices”. If the answer is yes, then the participant proceeds to answer the next two questions.

This sweepstakes if running through June 30. Once it ends we will draw one Grand Prize Winner who will receive a $5,000 Delta Vacations Gift card that they can use to book their dream vacation anywhere that Delta Airlines flies to (which is worldwide). We have recommended using Delta Vacations gift cards in the past as an easy way to give the winner flexibility on where, when, and with whom they want to travel.

As with the Zaxby’s That’s A Fact Zax Sweepstakes that I wrote about here a couple of weeks ago, we are also hosting and managing the entry form for this Dream Vacation Sweepstakes. So again we are using my favorite app for this, Shortstack. The app allowed us to install the promotion to a tab on the Kiss Nail Products Facebook page and also allowed me to provide the client with a code to embed the form directly on their webiste. Shortstack offers both these along with hosting it online on a separate micro site that the sponsor can link to.

Kiss Nails has already over 3,000 entries into the sweepstakes and it appears that the majority are answering the optional survey questions. So it may be time to consider running a sweepstakes for more reasons then just to drive traffic. Explore ways that you could integrate a sweepstakes promotion into your other marketing initiatives and turn it into a valuable marketing tool. We would be glad to discuss your needs and ideas to help make this happen.

Wendy’s Chicago Bears Scratch & Win Game

Slam Dunk Sweepstakes

Welcome to spring and March Madness. Have you filled out your bracket yet?

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) men’s Division 1 basketball tournament, also known as March Madness, is again upon us. This three-week event is a sure sign that Spring is here. This is when fans are placing their bets and filling out brackets, all with the hope of winning some money.

I’ve never been a big college basketball fan, but I did get caught up in the excitement last year. I was a in a local bar on a Friday afternoon in March after attending a funeral service of a close friend who had recently passed from cancer. So of course all the TV’s in the bar where turned on to basketball. This is where we witnessed one of the biggest upsets pulled off by a Cinderella team in an NCAA tournament…. the No. 14 Mercer Bears achieved a 78-71 victory over the No. 3 Duke Blue Devils! I could tell by the excitement of my friends in the bar and what we saw on TV that this was really a big deal. It almost seemed like a sign from the almighty that day.

So this year I thought I should read up on the teams and get a little more involved. My daily morning email from #theSkimm gave me a pretty good overview of the tournament and invited me to join the #SkimMadness bracket, which is actually part of the Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick’em brackets promotion. I went ahead and did what most of our co-workers and friends are doing now and filled out my bracket which Yahoo named for me “Donna D’s Glorious Bracket”. Yahoo provides a quick overview of each match-up along with each team’s standings and a percentage of who picked which team. So I picked mostly the favorites, but tried to include a couple of upsets.

The Yahoo Sports “Big March Promotion” is giving away prizes at the conclusion of the 2015 tournament in two categories. The first is for the “Best Bracket” with a prize of $50,000 that will be awarded to the bracket that receives the highest score (using Yahoo’s Default Scoring formula). The second category is for the “Celebrity Brackets” that invite people to join various celebrity pools for a chance to win the prize associated with that pool. All brackets must be submitted before the published tip-off time of the first tournament game on Thursday, March 19 which I believe is noon ET.

There are so many different bracket challenges that invite people to participate, not just this one. There’s this “Official NCAA Bracket Challenge” presented by Dove’s Men +Care. The participate of this challenge that has the highest score will win four trips for winner and guest to four sporting events of the winner’s choice that includes airfare, hotel and tickets to the events. There is also this “Official NCAA Bracket Challenge” present by Capital One that let’s you join many groups that they list or create your own group. I also found the Allstate Mayhem Bracket Predictor. I just read this article that states that the chances of picking a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion!

With all these bracket challenges it just proves that the NCAA’s March Madness is big money. According to this report in eMarketer, 2014 ad spending was $1,134 million. They claim that TV ad spending has leveled out and more and more of the corporate sponsors are putting their dollars into digital, with heavy emphasis on social media. A recent study by Catalyst states that 72% of US sports fans engaged with college basketball-related content last year on Facebook, and Twitter and Google+ were each used by around four in 10. While Snapchat wasn’t included in this study, they will play a part this year with branded sponsorships on its “Our Story” feature during the Final Four round of the championship.

There are 64 teams in the tournament which you can watch the games on TV, online or get the app. These teams compete to make the Sweet 16, the Elite 8, the Final Four and ultimately the Championship game that will be played on April 6 in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. You can watch the game on CBS and Turner Sports. At this point if you want tickets to the game, expect to pay top dollar and good luck finding a hotel room or airfare close to the city.

One of our clients, Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt, has teamed up with Hershey’s, who is a NCAA corporate sponsor, offering a chance to win tickets to the 2016 Final Four games which will be held in Houston, TX, on April 2 and 4, 2016. The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Slam Dunk Sweepstakes is open to the end of March and is promoting the new flavor made with real Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups offered only at Menchie’s. We’ll be coordinating the trip with the winner, so enter now.

Unfortunately we won’t be seeing our Syracuse Orange team in the tournament this year. However, we will be seeing the Buffalo Bulls in for the first time ever. Go Bulls. Could they be this year’s Cinderella team?

BlogPaws 2015 Nose-to-Nose Pet Blogging and Social Media Awards Finalists Announced

In our profession we’ve all attended a few conferences, some good, some just okay. But have you ever been to one where there are dogs and cats (and a few ferrets) attending with you? That’s my favorite part of the BlogPaws Pet Blogging and Social Media Conference. I have written about BlogPaws several times here and the BlogPaws 2015 Conference is now just a little over two months away!

This year it’s heading south to Nashville, Tennessee, for the first time. The conference is scheduled for May 28-30 at the Sheraton Music City Hotel. This will be my fifth time speaking at the conference. I’ve only missed one, which was last year’s conference in Lake Las Vegas. My friends and fellow blogging colleagues, Yvonne DiVita and her partner, Tom Collins, introduced BlogPaws at the start of 2010 and held the first conference in Columbus, OH. Since then they’ve been very busy turning it into the premier online pet community and a leading go-to-resource.

Attendees are usually comprised of a large group of pet bloggers, online pet enthusiasts and marketers of pet brands. The conference sessions range from tips on creating great content, to SEO and WordPress web advice, to the business of blogging, to managing fund raising events such as “Twitter-pawties,” to running contest apps on Facebook and other social media platforms including Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and more. My session will cover the Key Legal Developments Affecting Sweepstakes, Contests and Social Media. While a majority of the attendees publish about — or in some cases AS their pets — the topics apply broadly to anyone who wants to learn more about effective use of social media.

The BlogPaws team just revealed their finalists for their 2015 Nose-to-Nose Pet Blogging and Social Media Awards. They received over 1,000 nominations this year in 12 different categories. I had the honor of being one of the judges this year in which I reviewed the entries in the Cause Category. It was such a hard category to judge. Each of of the websites nominated is doing a great service to help these animals find “forever homes” and to bring awareness to issues, such as how to raise a deaf dog in your home, Deaf Dogs Rock, and the life of some “Big Cats” at the Conservation Club.

The winners will be awarded at the BlogPaws 2015 Conference at a Red Carpet, media-covered ceremony that will take place on Saturday evening, May 30th. You can check out all the finalists here. You can also take a look at this video below shot at the 2014 Red Carpet awards. There is still plenty of time to register. If you’re interested in attending please contact me and I can offer you a special speaker discount. Would love to see you all in Nashville!