Category Archives: Clients

5 Key Findings from the Most Successful Promotions

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hanes2We’ve put together a short list of key findings we’ve found from some the most successful promotions powered by Votigo. If you’re looking for more ideas and inspiration, check out our case studies to see what the top brands and companies are doing to drive engagement.

1) Events drive engagement. Some of our most successful customers run frequent, event-driven social media promotions around holidays, business events, and other date milestones. For example, Halloween is just around the corner. Would your brand benefit from running a Facebook photo contest around Halloween to engage your fans?

2) Local marketers – businesses with destinations or physical locations – thrive on promotions that contain a call-to-action to visit the location. Give your audience a reason to visit your location by creating a tie-in with your contest or sweepstakes. You could ask fans to take a photo at your store and upload it to your Facebook contest app.

3) The most engaging and successful promotions are the ones that promote to an existing audience in at least one other channel– emails, blogs, tweets, ads, and more. Reach out to your fans throughout the duration of your promotion.

4) You’ve got to have a great prize! $25 gift cards don’t cut it. Swag doesn’t cut it. Giveaway something valuable, cash, product or something unique! Sometimes the coolest prizes don’t cost the most money – they are just limited or exclusive products or opportunities.

5) You need to allow time. Make sure you are giving your fans enough time to enter your contest – it can take fans several weeks to put together a video entry or pic the right photo. Make sure you give them that opportunity.

What other keys to success have you found when running promotions?

 

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Firestone Tires: Destination America Sweepstakes

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Firestone Tires and their agency Razorfish worked with Votigo to create a fun way to engage Firestone Tires fans with a summer promotion.  Votigo created a Facebook sweepstakes app that allowed users to submit photos for a chance to win eight weeks of great prizes.  To spice things up a bit, Firestone Tires decided to make each of the eight weeks a different summer challenge.  The weekly Facebook contests varied from submitting a photo of a vacation spot one week to a photo of a backyard BBQ another week. Potential prizes included a trip for two to the World Series, a trip for two to a U.S. National Park, and a set of sponsor-specified destination tires.

Firestone Tires did a great job choosing prizes that fit in with the theme of their Facebook contest, as well as representing their brand by giving away tires to a lucky winner.   The promotion was designed to create a fun way for people to become involved with Firestone Tires and to continue to stay involved for all eight weeks of the promotion.  They did this by formatting the promotion to encourage people to upload photos and enter to win for all eight weekly challenges.  Customers received one entry for simply submitting their email address, five entries for uploading a photograph that fits the weekly challenge, and ten additional entries for uploading photographs for all eight challenges.

Running this type of focused promotion that gives people the incentive to stay involved with the brand throughout the duration of the promotion is a great way to increase customer awareness and loyalty.

If you are looking for a simple and fun way to keep your customers engaged contact Votigo to learn more about sweepstakes.

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Customer Q & A – Successful Photo Contest

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Here at Votigo, we love to chat one-on-one with our customers to get their feedback and insight on the benefits they received from utilizing promotions in their social media marketing strategy. While each brand might have different goals and approaches, they all recognize the benefits from running social promotions.

Steve Oberman at Flavorus is a Votigo customer who designed a UGC Photo Contest on our platform and received phenomenal user engagement and submission. Their philosophy is the belief that life is better when you go out and experience new things and take chances. Running with that philosophy, he created a “Get Out There” Photo Contest that engaged his fans by encouraging them to upload a photo of them going out and enjoying life in every sense! The photo that received the most votes from other Flavorus Facebook users received a pair of 3-day passes to Electric Daisy Carnival 2012 in Las Vegas. His promotion is considered a true success and not just because it received over 800 entries. We wanted to pick Steve’s brain on what his goals, metrics, and overall process was so that we could share it with you all. Thankfully he was kind enough to oblige.

Votigo: Did you have goals going into the campaign?

Steve: Yes.  This contest is a part of a broader plan to revamp the tone and purpose of our social media strategy, to make it more conversational and engaging.  My main goal for the contest was to increase our number of “likes” on our Facebook page.  To accomplish that, I could have just done a like-gate contest and run it as a sweepstakes, but since the prize is 4 three day passes to a huge music festival (a $2000 dollar value) I thought that people should have to work a little harder than just liking a page!  That’s when it turned into a photo contest.  My secondary goal was to incorporate our company’s core value: Life is better when you go out and experience new things,” so that’s how the theme for the contest evolved.  Other goals included encouraging our followers to be more interactive with our social media and to get people talking about the contest and our page.

Votigo:   How do you measure success- including the Facebook metrics and whatever else you look at?

Steve: If we can significantly increase our “likes” and get our customers talking about our client’s events, then I would consider the promotion a success.

Votigo:   How has the response been?

Steve: The response has been awesome.  I set the contest for an 8 week run and by the beginning of the third week we have over 500 photos submitted and 4500 votes.  Our “likes” have doubled from about 50 a day to over 100 per day, and social interactions and engagement on our page have increased dramatically.  People are starting to campaign for votes on their own Facebook pages which of course send their friends to us as well.

Votigo:    How did you start integrating social media and how successful have you been to date?

Steve: We’re a tech company at heart, so when I joined the team late last year, the social media assets were pretty well developed.  It’s been an incredibly useful tool for us to talk directly to our users and answer customer questions.

Votigo:    Favorite tools & keys to success?

Steve: World class customer service and intuitive ticketing software that doesn’t crash is the key to our success.

Votigo:    What is your most successful social marketing project / campaign / effort to date?

Steve: We are lucky enough to sell tickets to some amazing, world class events, so we have access to great tickets as prizes which make our contest and giveaways extremely effective.  We also just launched our Facebook ticketing app which allows people to buy and sell tickets directly from Facebook, which takes advantage of the social aspect of events.

So there you have it folks! Fresh insight and words of wisdom from an experienced social media marketer who utilized a Facebook contest to engage his fans and drive brand exposure. If you are looking to integrate promotions or social engagement apps into your social media marketing strategy then please visit our website at www.votigo.com to get the details or try out our DIY tools for creating your own photo contest. It’s free to design and preview!




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Announcing Votigo’s Social Marketing Suite

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Today is an exciting day for Votigo. We’ve officially announced our full Social Marketing Suite, expanding the scope of our software and services beyond social promotions. This is a milestone day for us: as we celebrate our 6th anniversary as a company, it allows us to meet the needs of our existing customers while targeting new ones with an always-on subscription product for managing their customers and social conversation across all social channels.

We are very proud of what our team has developed in recent weeks and really since we launched Votigo in 2006. Major advances like this are a true team effort and we appreciate everyone’s hard work, from our California office to our Colorado to our Hyderabad office.

Our Software-as-a-Service platform enables marketers to run cross-channel promotions, manage conversations and social contacts and analyze metrics across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Web, and Mobile. Fortune 500 enterprises, mid-market companies, and growing small businesses alike are already using our flexible, proven software to manage social marketing at any scale, for single brands and users to complex international enterprises. Some of Votigo’s current SaaS customers include Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Sony Online Entertainment, Kaiser-Permanente, NCM Fathom Events, Energizer, and GoPro.

Votigo is used to manage brand-consistent promotions across 1,000 unique Facebook Pages for Starwood Hotel & Resorts Worldwide; to allow growing businesses of all sizes to run promotions and marketing apps for as low as $15 per month; and to execute international cross-channel promotions on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Web and Mobile for category-leading brands like Ford, Fox, JBL, Random House and many more. With the launch of our Social Marketing & CRM Suite, we now offer a full set of tools that our customers- the market’s leading social businesses- demand.

At the Enterprise level, Votigo’s platform allows for multiple administrators, user hierarchies and workflow management. Abbey Reider, Global Search & Social Media Strategy, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, said, “With over 1,000 hotel Facebook pages Votigo’s Platform provides a scalable solution that satisfies our corporate and legal team needs, while allowing our individual hotels the autonomy to create unique and engaging promotions.”

“This is a very natural evolution for us,” says Jim Risner, CEO and Co-Founder. “For nearly six years we’ve been fortunate to work with world-class brands and agencies, and fulfill their social promotions needs with innovative campaigns for any channel and in any country. We’ve always been known for our strong technology platform and excellent service. We’ve listened to our clients who were looking for an always-on approach to promotions and the ability to manage the conversation and track and target social contacts. We’re very excited to be expanding our platform to be a single, comprehensive software solution that handles all their social marketing needs.”

Votigo’s Social Marketing & CRM Suite includes:

• Promotions Manager – A full-featured platform for publishing the cross-platform promotions that Votigo has been known for since 2007. Marketers can launch photo and video contests, sweepstakes, and other promotional apps to engage their audiences in multiple languages across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks on mobile and the web. Promotions Manager powers the full promotion cycle, from creating the apps, to sharing and publicizing them to social audiences, to moderating submissions and fan commentary, making it simple and cost-effective to run promotional campaigns throughout the year. Promotions remain one of the most effective marketing tactics for engaging and activating social audiences and Promotions Manager makes it simpler than ever to run promotions of any scope.

• Conversation Manager – A powerful new interface for managing two-way conversations with fans on Facebook, Twitter and beyond. Marketers can use Votigo’s Conversation Manager to simultaneously schedule and publish posts, links, photos and video and promotional campaigns to multiple social channels and accounts, plus manage responses, user-generated content, comments and interactions with fans. By consolidating all social conversations and accounts into a single interface, Conversation Manager saves marketers time and provides actionable insight to effectively measure post engagement.

• Social CRM – A seamlessly-integrated Social CRM system for managing Social Contacts, tracking engagement and influence, and targeting special offers and communications. Votigo’s Social CRM makes it easy to cultivate and maintain a growing audience across social networks – from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn and beyond – within a single platform

• Engagement Apps – A set of rich engagement applications including photo and video galleries, fan exclusives, polls, coupons, and more, each with a clear marketing purpose designed to engage your customers on an ongoing basis.

• Analytics – Votigo analytics let social marketers quickly measure and assess social marketing efforts to understand how their audiences interact with their businesses, focus on what resonates and activates customers, and optimize social marketing resources.

We are still planning continuous updates to the Social Marketing & CRM Suite throughout the remainder of 2012. And we couldn’t be more excited about the expansion of our product offering and the continued growth of Votigo. We’ve had 1,400% revenue growth from 2008-2011 and 15% quarter-over-quarter revenue growth for the past year without having to raise more capital. Most importantly we’ve added 300 new customers in the last twelve months. We’re amazed at what our small team of talented people has been able to accomplish.”

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