About Jeff

Jeff is a digital marketer and the Director of Marketing at Votigo. He recently organized Social Marketing for Startups during Boulder Startup Week.

5 Steps: Make Your Promotion A Social Campaign

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Jeff

If you’ve experienced success with social promotions-Facebook promotions, YouTube video contests, a photo-driven Twitter giveaway- its time to graduate to the next level of social marketing. Stop running promotions and start running social campaigns!

What’s the difference?

Promotions are a marketing event. Vehicles for generating brand buzz, making an announcement, introducing a product, extending an offer. They are the single best tool for converting social followers to customers, getting them to take action. Countless research efforts have shown that about two-thirds of your audience follows brands on social channels mostly to receive some kind of an offer. So promotions are the fundamental building block of your social strategy

And a promotion is part of a campaign. A campaign includes the components that ensure more people see your promotion, share it, come back to it, and more likely become customers. A campaign leaves you with a metrics-driven understanding of the promotion’s success, and definitive next steps to continue engaging and monetizing your audience.

We are laser focused on adding the features that help you turn your promotion into a complete campaign. Earlier this week, we released expanded Campaign Analytics into our Standard Apps editions. This is the latest capability we’ve adapted from Votigo’s complete Social Marketing Suite, enabling our DIY users to build a campaign around their promotion.

With that, here are 5 Steps for Turning Your Promotion Into A Social Campaign- plus which Votigo features you should count on at each step.

1) Pre-Cultivate Your Audience

It’s not ideal to START with a promotion. If you’re just getting into social marketing, or a new social channel (Pinterest for example), begin by inviting people to follow you there. Your email list, your in-store customers, your website visitors. Then, engage them for a while. Offer great content, free ideas, photos and more. Post, ask questions and respond. There’s no substitute for this fundamental, authentic work.

>Social Conversation Manager – available in Votigo’s suite- makes it easy for you to schedule, moderate and respond to posts and messages with your audience on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

2) Build a Great Promotion.

Think of the promotion as the core of your campaign. Come up with a compelling theme, a great prize, awesome design and crystal-clear calls to action. We continue to introduce innovative, viral features to make our promotions apps more effective (check out our Twitter Sweepstakes).

>Votigo Standard Promotions Apps include viral contests and sweepstakes for Facebook, Twitter, mobile and the web. Additionally, our Premium Apps integrate YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and virtually any digital destination where your audience congregates.

3) Seed The Message

Too often, we see social brands set-it-and-forget-it. They build a great promotion, publish it to Facebook and leave it at that. You want to get the message out in any forum you can. Facebook posts, tweets, emails, your homepage, word-of-mouth, in-store and more. Don’t be shy and don’t be afraid of letting current customers see it- if anything, they deserve a reward for being in your customer base already.

>Promotions Messenger is a dead-simple tool for scheduling mobile-optimized posts, with messaging and visuals of your choice, to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Find it under “New Posts” on the Publish tab. Power users: Ask our Premium Promotions team about integrating your ads services, from AdWords to Facebook Ads, into your promotion.

4) Follow Through

When your promotion is over, there’s still work to do. First, celebrate the winner. Announce them, interview them, get a testimonial. If the promotion included photos or videos, post those in a gallery, on a blog post, or on your webpage. More importantly- send an email to all participants. Offer them a reward just for engaging- a discount code, a sneak preview, a coupon, an invitation.

>Standard Promotions Apps already include several key features that help you follow through. Customize the confirmation page for sweeps and contest entrants- sharing a coupon code or sending them directly to a special landing page. Engagement Apps include several useful tools for follow-through. Post top submissions in a Photo or Video Gallery. Or build an iFrame app to announce your winner, thank your participants, and share an offer for all entrants. Also, right from the Manage tab of your Votigo-powered promotion, you can download data and email addresses from all entrants and plug them into your email software (ConstactContact, MailChimp, MadMimi), inbound marketing software (Marketo, Hubspot), and your CRM database (Salesforce, Nimble), too. Do it from day one of your campaign, and treat these new social contacts as the potential customers they are.

5) Measure & Repeat

Wrap up your campaign by studying the metrics of your promotion. How many people entered and voted? Who engaged the most new participants by sharing their entry or your sweeps? What are the basic demos and geos of your participating audience? Knowing more about your customers is as valuable as the direct benefits of the promotion.

>Campaign Analytics are our brand-new, expanded metrics offerings. They are included in every Votigo-powered promotion, including our Standard Apps. Power users: Premium Promotions offer the capability to integrate with virtual any third-party data source, from your social ads provider to Analytics to other leading data services to your CRM system.

Now you’ve run a successful Social Campaign, anchored by an audience-engaging, participant-rewarding, customer-generating promotion, but supported by a host of useful tools and features that give you a more comprehensive result. Better knowledge of your audience. More clarity about what works best for your social brand. Please let us know how it’s working for you.

Twitter Sweepstakes Are Here

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Jeff

We’ve always been proud to power cross-channel promotions on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, mobile. Wherever your social customers are, we have a solution for reaching them. To date, cross-channel Votigo-powered promotions beyond Facebook and mobile have required a Premium App or a custom project. Today we’re proud to release a new Twitter Sweepstakes into our Standard Apps editions. (Twitter Apps, and much more, are of course still available in our Premium Apps with additional power and features). Log-in (or create a free account) and get started.

Why run a promotion for your brand on Twitter? It is an incredibly engaging, hyper-attentive vehicle for sharing updates, links, messages, and offers. 200M active active users post, read and share over 340M tweets per day- often on mobile. Twitter is a powerful social network, and a one-of-a-kind channel for generating instant action among your followers.

Odds are, if your brand is on Twitter, there are plenty of unique potential customers that you haven’t been able to engage yet. Now it’s easy and cost-effective- as low as $30/week.

Create your Twitter Sweeps just like you create any other Votigo-powered contest or sweepstakes. If you have a theme, a prize, rules and a graphic, it should take less than 20 minutes. Build a viral sweeps and specifiy a #hashtag and a @TwitterHandle that entrants must include in their tweet to enter- ensuring additional mentions of your brand on Twitter.

Optionally you may choose to:

Go Across: Publish Twitter Sweeps app to your Facebook page: Entrants can enter via Facebook, allowing engagement across the two largest social channels

Gain Followers: Use Follow-gate to require entrants to follow you on Twitter (available at $65/week option.

Inspire Content: Require entrants to include a photo or video using any standard photo or video sharing tool as usual on Twitter (Flickr, TwitPic, Yfrog for photos; links from YouTube, Vimeo, TwitVid and more for video). Photos will be displayed in the Twitter Stream in your app- a tremendous visual effect for showing your audience’s visual engagement in real-time. (Yes, you can moderate photo entries and the Stream.)

Votigo-powered Twitter Sweeps also include:

Responsive Design for a great user experience on any screen- with only one CSS to edit
7 Design Templates, plus an option to edit the CSS for further design customization
10 Languages available for each single-language sweepstakes
Promotions Messenger: Schedule and customize posts to seed your campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn
Campaign Analytics: enhanced Engagement and Traffic metrics now available

Votigo Offers Google+ Integration

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Jeff

We believe in cross channel social marketing.

Why? Because your brand’s audience is uniquely spread across, and engaged with, an assortment of social networks. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Spotify, LinkedIn and more.

Launched late last year, Google+ has come on strong with a highly engaged audience, unique modes of communication, and carefully-designed integration with other Google offerings- from Gmail to YouTube to, of course, search.

Votigo is proud to be among the first social marketing platforms to integrate with Google+. Starting today, you can:

Connect your Google+ brand page to your Votigo account
Publish posts, targets posts to your circles, moderate comments and measure engagement for your Google+ audience using Social Conversation Manager
Or post messages to help launch a Votigo-powered Promotion App using Promotions Messenger

Google+ is already integrated into your Votigo account if you are a SaaS customer, and in Promotions Messenger for self-service users. To request an overview on using Votigo’s Google+ tools, click here.

Or just log-in here (or create a free account) and get started!

Holiday Social Media Marketing: 5 Trends For Retail Brands

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Jeff

Black Friday is in 4 days, kicking off the massive holiday season that makes the year for many retail brands. Odds are, social marketing is a bigger part of your Q4 strategy this year than ever before. Here are 5 big themes that will dominate holiday social media marketing campaigns for retailers in the remaining holiday weeks of 2012:

Social Launches: New product introductions and sales events are a staple of Q4. They’re a great way to create buzz and generate customer interest through social marketing. Watch for (and plan) product debuts or events on Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube.

Recognizing Great Customers: Even for brands with millions of customers- and definitely for boutiques and local businesses- there is a movement to recognize your best customers. Loyalty programs, membership clubs, even a Customer of the Day promotion. All are simple ways to earn repeat business. Social channels are a natural distribution channel for these programs.

Rewarding Social Engagement: All evidence continues to show that consumers follow brands on social channels to earn an exclusive, an offer, a discount, a preview. Retail brands are in prime position to capitalize. Even for social followers who haven’t converted to customers yet, it is worth the effort to offer a unique opportunity through Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and where ever you have followers.

In-Store Activation: In retail, it’s all about the cash register. Even as holiday spending shifts online, there is still no substitute to brick-and-mortar retailers for motivating the in-store experience. A social promotion that results in a coupon, invitation or other store-driven event doesn’t need to be complex. But it will help convert social fans to visitors who can see your store environment, touch your products, experience your service and convert to new customers.

Mobile Enables Lasting Brand Engagement: Most consumers will be using their smartphones gratuitously in the next 6 weeks. They’ll share wish lists, compare prices, pass along gift ideas and more, using photo, video, text and social updates. Savvy brands will find unique ways to encourage and even facilitate those interactions. Even though the holiday season ends in a mere 6 weeks, try to find clever ways to weave impressions of happy customers into your ongoing brand storytelling.

For specific ideas and strategies to tackle each of these trends, click here.

Viral Social Sweepstakes: Simple Fan Activation

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Jeff

Votigo’s basic sweeps app now has a viral referral feature that makes this simple promotion app even more useful in reaching your social marketing goals.

So…what are the goals of your social marketing? Most likely they go something like:

Engage your fans on all social channels: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and where ever they are
Find new fans- especially through viral influence from your current ones
Reward your fans for their attention
Improve their awareness of your brand, your products and offerings
And ultimately, convert social fans into customers!

That’s a tall order, and it takes a consistent, always-on effort to achieve it. There are no shortcuts.

But if you want to take action today toward these goals, the single most-effective thing you can do is to run a Facebook Sweepstakes, and ask your fans to share it on Facebook, Twitter, email and all relevant channels.

With low barriers to entry, an incentive to share and spread the word, and simple set up, social giveaways are still one of the most effective ways to engage and grow your audience and collect email addresses for future marketing.

Even though we’ve expanded the capabilities of our social marketing platform, we continue to focus on our promotions apps, adding features and flexibility that make them more viral and better for engaging your audience. We believe promotions are the core for engaging your audience.

A sweeps might be the simplest type of promotion to launch. Here are a few other reasons to consider a Sweeps:

Easy For You: If you have a prize, simple rules, and a header graphic, you can set up a sweeps in minutes

Easy For Them: Sweeps have the lowest barriers to entry. You’re asking very little of your audience…although you should take advantage of the opportunity to ask them Custom Registration questions to gain feedback or further demographic data

Great Ice Breaker: Not really engaging your fans, or struggling to find things to Post or Tweet about? A sweeps gives you a natural hook and something to post about

Viral: Sweepstakes aren’t naturally viral, but with Referral Incentive feature like the one we just added to our basic sweeps, participants now have a reason to share your branded sweeps with their friends: every entry they refer automatically gains them an additional entry

Cross Channel: It’s really easy to create a Facebook Sweepstakes that is also mobile-optimized, embedded onto your website or blog, and shared from Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and your other key channels. From some premium work, you can easily integrate Instagram and other social channels, too

Like-Gated: Votigo’s basic sweeps include this Facebook sweeps option; we still see it as the simplest way to expand your Facebook audience

A Gateway to Activation: As an ice breaker, it’s natural to follow a short giveaway with more elaborate social promotions, like a user-generated photo contest. Meanwhile, you can directly activate anyone who enters your sweeps by sending them a coupon, sneak preview, invitation or whatever else will help you convert social fans as customers

Sweepstakes have been a marketing staple for decades. It’s no surprise they’re equally effective on social media. So as you expand your always-on social marketing strategy, plan more elaborate campaigns and increase your analysis of social marketing ROI, don’t forget this staple of social activation.

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