We know you love to see live examples of campaigns that are using Votigo’s technology, since they are the easiest way to understand how our platform works. They’re also great for inspiration as you start planning YOUR next campaign!

And speaking of inspiration, we thought you’d enjoy these two campaigns from Country Financial and Conair in particular because they represent the variety of ways you can leverage Votigo’s different application types to engage and activate your audience.

Country Financial’s Fantasy Football Personality Quiz

The insurance company is leveraging Votigo’s Personality Quiz application in order to provide an additional engagement opportunity for their customers. Participants are invited to answer a series of questions about how they interact with Fantasy Football in order to learn what kind of fan they are. At the end of they quiz. they are rewarded with a fun icon that they can share across their social networks, which creates a great viral word-of-mouth marketing effect for the brand. This campaign was built using Votigo’s self-serve platform and features mobile responsive design and social share functionality.

Conair’s #DoItYourSelfie Holiday Photo SweepstakesIn this promo, Conair fans are invited to share a photo of how they used a Conair product to achieve their holiday look by using the branded hashtag #ConairDoItYourSelfie. Hashtag campaigns let your fans enter a promotion through their Instagram and Twitter accounts as well as directly from a Facebook page or Website. This way, people can participate from the platform they are most comfortable with, which is a great way to ensure high levels of campaign engagement for your brand. Also built using Votigo’s self-serve platform, this campaign features mobile responsive design, content moderation and social sharing.

Ready to start planning your next campaign and kick off the New Year right? Click here to schedule a live demo with an Account Representative.

In December, if you snooze you lose. While some might be filling up on cookies and chugging down the eggnog, others are preparing for the year ahead. Smart marketers and entrepreneurs use this time for business planning. They lay out their entire year; or at the very least, the first quarter. They settle on initiatives and brainstorm content. If this is sounding familiar, you’re probably looking for ways to make the most out of the rest of the year.

Let me help you maximize your 2017 with these 8 easy to use tools.

QUICKLY CREATE THUMBNAILS, COVER PHOTOS, BLOG FEATURED IMAGES AND MORE WITH SNAPPA.IO

In my opinion, Canva doesn’t even hold a candle to this tool. First of all, Snappa is much more user friendly. It’s easy to navigate and understand. Second, Snappa can help you create everything from ebook covers to YouTube thumbnails.

Beginner’s Tip:  Keep your social media covers cohesive. Open up several different tabs in your browser, and make your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn covers all at once.

Works best for social media marketers and bloggers.

GET 700+ TITLE AND TOPIC IDEAS WITH TITLE-GENERATOR.COM

Honestly, I’m usually not looking for a genius headline generator. More often than not, I just need to bounce around some ideas. I love this website. It’s a bare bones title generator. You plug in a word, and get 700+ titles and topics to work with. Keep in mind, these are not all relevant or grammatically correct. Use your best judgement, and at the very least, this tool will assist in the content brainstorming process. Out of every tool, this is probably my favorite.

Beginner’s Tip: Pages two and three usually have the more obscure titles. Page one will showcase a lot of headlines you could’ve come up with on your own.

Works best for copywriters and bloggers.

DECREASE PAGE LOAD TIME WITH COMPRESSJPEG.COM

To go back and compress all your blog images might take a bit of time; maybe more than you want to spend. That’s totally acceptable. Instead, use this tool for images in the future. It will help you greatly decrease page load time, as your images are now compressed down to the lowest possible size. This is an easy to use tool that will greatly reward your site performance in the long run.

Beginner’s Tip: To save time, upload a handful of images at once, then download all after compression.

Works best for bloggers.

USE BITEABLE.COM TO CREATE VIRAL VIDEO CAMPAIGNS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA 

Before finding this tool, I didn’t even touch video. Seriously, the idea of pairing homegrown footage, audio, music, and text together was completely overwhelming. I figured I’d leave it to the professionals, which more often than not, turned into me avoiding video all together. This tool has changed the way I view video marketing.

Beginner’s Tip: Develop a storyline before jumping right in to video creation. If you have a storyboard, your video will smoothly come together. 

Works best for social media marketers and content managers.

WEBINARNINJA.COM IS A VIDEO CONFERENCING SERVICE THAT DOESN’T OVERWHELM

Current webinar software has its limits. In fact, even the most experienced webinar hosts struggle with current webinar platforms. I stumbled across Webinar Ninja a month ago. It took me less than five minutes to figure out how to navigate my account. I had my first webinar set up and running in less than 30. Save time with the new webinar platform to beat.

Beginner’s Tip: Run a test webinar before going live. Remember, make sure each webinar has a clear purpose. This isn’t like Facebook Live, where it’s ok to rant and talk without an outlined topic.

Works best for online personalities, content managers, and industry influencers.

SLICKTEXT.COM HELPS YOU EMBRACE THE NEW MAILING LIST.

You can probably agree; email is becoming a bit archaic. Will we ever terminate email lists all together? Probably not. But, the time has come to embrace a new communication tool: text marketing. Slick Text has dozens of easy to use features, such as text to win contests, drip campaigns, and picture messaging. On top of that, they offer message scheduling and drip marketing campaigns

Works best for marketers currently relying heavily on email and small business owners.

2017 IS ALL ABOUT CLICKFUNNELS.COM

If you would’ve asked me six months ago, the word “funnel” made me gag. It just seemed so cheesy and unprofessional. The only company doing a decent job was Infusionsoft, and their software was out of my price range and equally difficult to navigate. Enter Click Funnels. The back end takes some time to get used to, but once you understand the navigation, it’s a piece of cake.

Beginner’s Tip: Don’t create a funnel on the fly. Write down each step before even setting “foot” inside Infusionsoft.

Works best for anyone selling anything online.

GET THE HELP YOU NEED WITH UPWORK.COM

I resisted hiring for a long time. I tried to design my own websites, set up my own Facebook ads, manage my own schedule, etc. Let me tell you what; that gets old real quick. You get burnt out, and the quality of your work suffers. It’s not worth it. Especially when there are affordable experts out there, ready and willing to help. Get all the things that overwhelm you and hinder your business growth off your plate.

Beginner’s Tip: Look for the rising star freelancers. They are usually the most affordable, but still offer premium quality. Also, when looking to hire, get as granular as possible about what it is you actually need. For example, if you want to build a new website, map out some ideas and share examples of what you like. The clearer you are, the better. 

Works best for product managers, team leaders, and department heads.

Don’t just cruise through the rest of the year with these work enhancing tools. Instead, kickstart 2017 with a better sense of how to rule the digital world. I will be taking every single one of these tools with me into the new year. They’ve helped me exponentially grow my online presence.

As an early Christmas present to you, we’re excited to announce that Votigo promotions now integrate with your email marketing platforms! You can now synchronise your contest or sweepstakes data with your Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Mad Mimi, Aweber or Infusionsoft accounts! This means that all the of email addresses that you collect during your promotions will automatically import to your chosen email marketing lists, so that all of your marketing communications efforts are synchronized!

This feature is available to all of our Platform customers, and will work across most of Votigo’s campaign application types.

And as an added bonus, we’ve made sure that it’s super easy for you to set up! Check out this helpful step-by-step guide to get started!

Want to learn more about this exciting new feature or brainstorm with a member of our team on your next promotion? Click here to connect with a member of our Account Management team!

Whether you’re starting a new business or you want to expand the one you’re already running, there’s no better way to do that than having a good representation on social media channels.

Image by Esther Vargas via Flickr

However, having a good and noticeable presence isn’t as easy as it was some years ago, and there’s a lot to know if you want to be good at social media advertising. Today we’ll talk about basics and what you need to know to launch a perspective marketing campaign on social media.

Choose Your Channels Based on What Makes the Most Sense for Your Brand and Your Audience

The policy “the more, the merrier” doesn’t always work on social media. Instead, it’s wise to begin with one account on a network that is one-size-fits-all, like Facebook. It is the largest social network on the planet with 1.5 billion users, so you’re sure to find your audience there.

Twitter and Instagram are more demanding because you have to post more regularly. Twitter is an excellent channel for keeping in touch with your customers and connecting quickly with them via hashtags and tagging. Instagram is used for posting pictures and telling a story through them, but you have to be very active to be noticed. The same goes for Pinterest, another highly visual media that won’t really help you unless you’ve got some amazing photos or pins to share. And, if you want to share your business successes and opportunities with other big company names, then LinkedIn is a good network to focus on.

Each of these networks should be handled differently, so you’ll have to do some research in order to decide which social media channels make the most sense for your brand.

Paying for Ads is Becoming a Necessity

Image by MKHmarketing via Flickr

Advertising on social media is becoming more complex with each year, and not paying for ads won’t get you far. The biggest social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have made sure that in order for your updates and posts to appear in the newsfeed of your followers, you need to pay to boost them. In fact, when posting on Facebook without paying, about 10% of your followers will actually see it, and when it comes to Twitter, you have some fifteen minutes before you’re forever lost in the newsfeed.

When it comes to paying for ads, even though it’s not very expensive, you should know where every penny goes. Think about who you want to target with your ads – you can narrow down your targeted audience and then work your way toward the wider public. Also, it is quintessential for your ads to be eye-catching and compelling, so choose both your pictures and your words wisely.

Track Your Links to Know Your Course of Action

You need to know what posts and links generate the most traffic. Link tracking is the best way to accomplish this. Once you understand what your audience likes and clicks on the most, you’ll be able to adapt your content accordingly. There are some useful tools that you can use to track links like Google Analytics, Octopost and Clickmeter that provide each of the links you share with a tracking code, so that you’ll know exactly how well a certain link performs with your audience.

Don’t Shy Away From Influencers

Influencers are people across different social media channels that have a strong follower base thanks to their strategic use of social media and quality content. Once you make an agreement with influencers, they will promote your product/service to their followers, often for a fee. Determine the standards that partner influencers have to fulfill (don’t just pick them based on the number of followers they have) and make sure you have clear goals of what you want of them before you contact them. Their view of your product will make it more appealing to their followers that can quickly become your followers as well.

As you can see, everything starts with your goals when it comes to social media advertising and how imaginative you are in obtaining them. There are different strategies you can employ, but in the end, it all comes down to the quality of your content and knowledge of how to use it wisely.

This article was originally written by Adam Ferraresi for the Heyo blog.

You might remember that a few weeks ago, we shared some tips and tricks for your brand to stand out in the crowd during the busy Holiday season. One of the easiest and most reliable ways to engage your audience during this timeframe is to run an online promotion like a contest or sweepstakes.

And while it might seem like Christmas is right around the corner, it’s not too late to launch a promotion that really engages your audience and gives your brand some great exposure! To help inspire you, here are two current examples from Biscoff and Melissa & Doug, who are both running Holiday campaigns to drive engagement leading up to Christmas.

25 Days of Biscoff Scratch and Win Sweepstakes 

Advent calendars are a great way to create a ton of buzz and excitement in the weeks leading up to Christmas Day. For their Holiday promotion, Biscoff has taken a fun twist on the traditional advent calendar and introduced a digital Scratch-And-Instant Win sweepstakes for their audience to engage with. Participants are invited to return to the promo each day for a chance to win a prize, which is great for repeat engagement on behalf of the brand! Built by Votigo’s talented full-service development team, this sweepstakes features custom Scratch-And-Win Instant Win logic, daily content & creative updates and mobile responsive design.

Melissa & Doug’s Gifts of Wonder Giveaway

Children’s toy company Melissa & Doug is celebrating the Holiday season by running a Giveaway Sweepstakes in which a prize is awarded every day for 20 days. This strategy is a great way to keep their audience engaged throughout the length of the campaign. And because the barrier to entry is so low (all people have to do in order to enter is complete a simple registration form), it’s a great opportunity for Melissa & Doug to grow their marketing list! This campaign was built using Votigo’s Self-Serve Platform and features mobile responsive design and email newsletter opt-in.

Even though the Holidays are right around the corner, we promise it’s not too late to add a Holiday contest or sweepstakes to your Marketing plan! Votigo has all the tools you need to plan, create, launch and manage a successful promotion in no time. If you’re ready to get started, click here to schedule a live demo with an Account Representative.