SEEN Archives - American Sweepstakes

Grillin’ with Dad Sweepstakes helps celebrate Father’s Day

The calendar says it’s June 1 today and the summer season is officially here. It’s a month known in the marketing world as “Dads, Grads and Brides” when we will be celebrating Father’s Day, school graduations, weddings and also the flag. It’s the month where our backyards really come to life again. All the flowers and plants are in full bloom and we have our outdoor living space back again, at least those of us in the northern part of the country.

The month of June provides great opportunities for small businesses to reach out to customers with an incentive to visit their stores, restaurants or websites. According to a National Retail Federation survey, the average person will spend $117 on a gift for Dad which amounts to $12.7 billion in total spending. Wives, moms, children are all starting to think about gift giving and doing something special on June 19 for the fathers in their lives.

Taking dad out for lunch or dinner is a very popular way to celebrate. We’re working with this restaurant chain from Texas to assist them with their “Grillin’ with Dad” Sweepstakes. The Cotton Patch Cafe is inviting people from now till Father’s Day to visit one of their restaurants, located across Texas and in Oklahoma and New Mexico, with the father figure in their life. Once there, they need to take a photo of themselves with their dad and post it on Instagram or Twitter or upload to the CottonPatch Cafe Facebook page and use the hashtags #CottonPatch and #Grill4DadSweepstakes. They also have the option of including a comment explaining their dad’s/father figure’s best grilling tip.

One Grand Prize winner will receive a Weber Performer® 22” Grill valued at $400 and four First Prize winners will each receive a grilling essentials kit. We are again utilizing the SEEN hashtag campaign management platform for this sweepstakes since it has a hashtag only as a means of entry on Instagram and Twitter. The platform pulls in all the posts from Twitter and Instagram that use the promotion-specific hashtags and allows for those posts to be shown in the gallery page as you see here. This platform allows the sponsor the option to moderate the posts so that they may approve or disapprove them before they are posted to the gallery. Since the sweepstakes just started, we don’t see any posts on the gallery page as of yet. This ease of entry method is one of the biggest benefits of using a hashtag only entry and it also provides additional social sharing that can help increase the reach of the promotion.

This is just a good example of how a business can tie in their marketing to the current season with a promotion and social media as well. If you would like to share any promotions that you are doing related to the summer, I would be glad to feature them here as well.

So enjoy the summer and happy Father’s Day to all you dads.

Cranberry Marketing Committee kicks of the #YesYouCranSweepstakes to promote the SuperFood of the month

For those of us in the northeastern part of the country you wouldn’t know it’s now Spring. I came back this weekend from a vacation at the beach in Mexico and woke up to snow on Monday morning. The vacation was very great though and the reason I haven’t written here for a couple of weeks.

One of our new spring promotions is the Yes, You Cran! Sweepstakes sponsored by the Cranberry Marketing Committee. They have partnered with the Compass Group to feature cranberries as the super food of the month in April 2016. The Compass Group is one of the world’s largest foodservice management companies and will feature cranberries in many of its U.S. facilities, which include school and university dining centers, business cafés, healthcare facilities and more.

Accompanying the superfood promotion is the Yes, You Cran! Sweepstakes. During the month of April participating Compass Group foodservice locations will be displaying promotional signage and serving recipes within their facilities. People who visit one of these institutions are invited to enter the Sweepstakes by taking a photo of one of these cranberry promotions that may include cranberry posters, signs, recipe cards, sampling events, demonstrations or dishes, and then posting it on Twitter or Instagram. Participants must also include the promotion hashtag, #YesYouCranSweepstakes and must follow the Sponsor on Instagram @USCranberries or Twitter @USCranberries.

A total of 20 weekly prize winners will each receive a $100 gift card. One of the winners from week four will be randomly selected and win a prize for the facility that they took their photo from who will win a catered cranberry celebration.

“We love that Compass is able to shine a spotlight on cranberries during what some may consider the off season. Cranberries are a versatile fruit that can provide unique health benefits to consumers all year long,” said CMC Executive Director Michelle Hogan. “And we’re particularly eager to reinforce this message across school cafeterias, since cranberries count toward the school foodservice fruit servings required for the National School Lunch Program.”

We are utilizing the SEEN hashtag campaign management platform for these types of promotions that just use a hashtag as a means of entry. This ease of entry is one of the biggest benefits of using a hashtag only entry, plus it provides additional social sharing that can help increase the reach of the promotion. The platform pulls in all the posts from Twitter and Instagram that use the promotion-specific hashtag and allows for those posts to be shown in the gallery page as you see here. It allows you to moderate the posts so that you may approve or disapprove them before they are posted to the gallery. You can read more about the benefits and drawbacks on this entry method by reading the post Alex Ditty from Seen wrote on this blog here.

It appears that they’re off to a good start with participation on the page. One additional benefit of using the hashtag management tool that I almost forgot to mention is that it provides a place to post the official rules that you need for any sweepstakes or contest. That should not be overlooked.

Sweepstakes & Contests: Social Media Hashtags or Entry Forms?

Today’s post was written by Alex Ditty, Client Operations Manager at SEEN. You can read more posts written by Alex on their blog.

Contests and sweepstakes are smart and effective ways to engage your community and promote your brand. At SEEN, there have been hundreds of brands across a wide variety of industries who have used our campaign management platform for these types of promotions.

Because of this experience, we’re commonly asked whether it’s better to have participants enter simply by sharing with a hashtag or if the brand should also include an entry form for participants to complete. In short, our answer is always, “it depends”. It depends on the goals of the contest and what you’re hoping to gain. This is a topic that has been written about on this blog before, and we’ll go into more detail on the differences and benefits of running a contest or sweepstakes with hashtag sharing versus requiring completion of an entry form to help you plan your next social media campaign.

Entry Form Benefits
Requiring completion of an entry form gives you the ability to gain more information from the participants. This benefits you in three important ways. The first is simply the ability to get in touch with the participants in order to send the winners their prizes. When you’re unable to collect contact information you’re limited to social messaging to try and get in touch with the winners, which may not yield positive results.

Along with contacting the winners, the second benefit is that you can also gain the ability to contact all of the participants in future marketing campaigns. When they provide you with contact information and opt into your email marketing, then you’re able to use the promotion as a lead generation tool. Additionally, this process can help unify your customer’s identities by creating a link between their email address and social profiles.

The third and often the most overlooked benefit is the opportunity to gain important learning. With an entry form you can have your participants share important data with you such as location and demographic information. This new touch point can help impact other marketing initiatives by gaining a better understanding of who your customers are and how you can connect with them.

With the Registration Tool in the SEEN Campaign Manager, participants verify their social accounts and enter their contact information to confirm their participation in the campaign and to link their social and email identities to your marketing.

Entry Form Drawbacks
Though you’re gaining more useful information with an entry form, you’re also slightly complicating the entry process for your participants. By adding in this additional step for participation, you may limit the involvement from your community. It is possible for this to act as a filtering mechanism to determine who is really interested in your brand, however it may also restrict the overall number of people that participate. Before implementing a mandatory entry form, consider the potential barrier that this can create and how it may affect participation.

Hashtag Sharing Benefits
When you’re launching a social media sweepstakes or contest, an easy way that you can get people involved is simply by encouraging them to share with a promotion-specific hashtag. This will most often result in higher participation numbers than those that require an entry form. This ease of entry is one of the biggest benefits, and the additional social sharing that the hashtag provides can also help you increase the reach of the promotion. Participation is likely to be the most important success metric in your campaign and hashtag entries can give you confidence that you’ll have a high participation rate with its simplicity to enter.

Hashtag Sharing Drawbacks
Hashtag entry will gain you a lot more campaign entries and likely lead to higher participation rates, however ir misses out on the vital learning and marketing benefits that entry forms provide. When you simplify the entry process, you take away opportunities for the participants to also share vital information with you that can strengthen your relationship with them. When planning a contest or sweepstakes based solely on hashtag sharing, ask yourself if participation or data collection is the more important success metric for your goals.

So, which of these entry types is best for you next promotion? Well, that depends on your marketing goals. The first step is to determine your goals are and with those in mind, you can properly implement either of these participation options. Some brands don’t have the luxury of building entry forms for each of their contests, which makes hashtag entry the only option. Fortunately, there are tools like the SEEN Campaign Manager where you can easily implement either or both of these options with no development work.

Understanding the benefits and drawbacks of each participation option, we’ve designed our campaigns to simplify the process for both the social media managers and the participants. For the manager, launching a hashtag based promotion and turning on custom entry forms are very easily done with a click of a button. And when registration forms are implemented, participants are still converting at over 40% in the average SEEN-powered contest. These kinds of results help you take advantage of both worlds to maximize the ROI of your social media campaigns.

NOTE: You can read Donna’s blog post that will be posted later today here on the SEEN blog. Feel free to contact us if you’d like more information on utilizing the SEEN Campaign Manager.