Category Archives: Viral

Boost Your CPG Brand: 4 Game-Changing Sweepstakes and Contest Ideas

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In the fiercely competitive world of consumer packaged goods (CPG), making a lasting impression is crucial. Sweepstakes and contests are powerful strategies to engage your audience, amplify brand awareness, and drive sales. Ready to create a buzz around your brand? Here are four innovative ideas designed to elevate your CPG promotions.

 🍳 1. Stir Up Creativity with Recipe Creation Contests

Engage your audience by putting your products in their hands—and on their plates.

What better way to showcase your food or beverage products than by inviting customers to create unique recipes? A recipe creation contest not only drives product usage but also generates rich user-generated content (UGC) that can be shared across your marketing channels.

Example: Host a contest asking participants to submit their best breakfast recipes featuring your cereal brand. The most creative and delicious entry wins a grand prize and gets featured on your website and social media. This approach not only highlights your product’s versatility but also taps into the community’s love for cooking.

Why It Works: Consumers love to experiment in the kitchen, especially when they can show off their creations. This contest encourages ongoing engagement and provides your brand with a treasure trove of shareable content.

 🎉 2. Create Instant Excitement with Instant-Win Sweepstakes

Immediate gratification leads to immediate engagement.

Instant-win sweepstakes are a surefire way to create excitement and drive rapid participation. The allure of instant prizes motivates customers to engage with your brand and spread the word, expanding your reach exponentially.

Example: Launch an instant-win promotion where customers can enter by purchasing your product and uploading their receipt online. Prizes can range from branded merchandise to larger rewards like kitchen gadgets or a year’s supply of your product.

Why It Works: The chance to win something instantly is a powerful motivator. This type of sweepstakes not only drives product sales but also creates a sense of urgency that encourages immediate participation.

 📲 3. Amplify Engagement with Social Media Hashtag Contests

Leverage social media to turn customers into brand ambassadors.

Hashtag contests are an effective way to harness the power of social media. Encourage participants to share their experiences with your product, generating a wave of organic, user-generated content that boosts your brand’s visibility on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Example: Create a contest where participants post a photo or video using your product with a specific branded hashtag. The most creative or popular posts win a prize, giving your brand valuable social proof and enhancing its social media presence.

Why It Works: Hashtag contests are easy to enter and highly shareable, making them perfect for driving engagement and increasing brand visibility. Plus, they provide an ongoing stream of authentic content that resonates with your audience.

 💎 4. Reward Loyalty with Exclusive Sweepstakes

Turn your most loyal customers into lifelong brand advocates.

Loyalty-based sweepstakes are a fantastic way to reward your repeat customers and deepen their connection to your brand. By offering exclusive sweepstakes entries based on purchase history or participation in a loyalty program, you incentivize continued engagement and drive sales.

Example: Offer loyalty program members a chance to win a grand prize for every certain amount they spend on your products. The more they purchase, the more entries they earn, creating a win-win scenario that boosts both sales and customer loyalty.

Why It Works: Loyalty programs foster a sense of belonging, encouraging customers to keep coming back for more. By linking loyalty with the excitement of a sweepstakes, you enhance the value of your program and strengthen customer relationships.

 Ready to Elevate Your CPG Brand?

These four contest ideas are more than just promotions—they’re strategic tools for creating unforgettable experiences that resonate with your customers. Whether you’re looking to run a photo contest, social media giveaway, or instant-win sweepstakes, Votigo has the expertise to ensure your campaign runs smoothly and achieves its goals.

Let’s bring your next sweepstakes or contest to life. Contact us today and let’s get started!

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New Viral Features & Apps: DIY Update

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More than a year after launching self-service tools for social marketing on Facebook and mobile, we’re proud of the work we’ve done to package our innovative promotions, engagement apps and other tools into a cost-effective, DIY platform.  These tools are being used by start-ups, international brands, small businesses and agencies alike.  If we’ve learned one thing from working with these businesses, it is that there is an unending demand for more viral features, flexible tools and apps that help brands target and activate their growing social audiences.

Here are some of the latest and greatest additions to the Votigo self-service platform:

  • iFrame App: A flexible HTML app with a simple WYSIWYG editor that allows brands to customize a dynamic Facebook tab with multiple elements include text, images, video and other embeddable objects- including Votigo-powered promotions
  • Referral Incentive Sweepstakes: a simple, measurable feature that reinvents the classic promotion, making the sweepstakes app more viral by rewarding entrants who share the promotion with additional entries for each social friend they successfully refer to the sweepstakes
  • Promotions Messenger: A valued-added feature for scheduling posts about promotions to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ audiences. The posts are optimized for mobile users and customized with images and text
  • Mandarin: The 10th language available to self-service customers, who can now choose to launch promotions in English, Spanish, German, French, Portugese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, or Indonesian

Don’t take our word for it:

“Votigo’s new features are important for us in engaging our brand’s growing audience,” said Alexander Hagard Gronwall, Co-Founder and Marketing Director of Pambox, a Thailand-based beauty sample subscription service that recently ran a giveaway promotion in Thai that also tied in the L’Occitane brand. “For a start-up, it is critical for us to be able to target our audience right down to their language preferences.  The viral features are a bonus.”

“In launching our new travel goods web retail brand GoInStyle.com, we needed a way to quickly boast the number of engaged fans in our Facebook audience,” says Kristi Daeda, Internet Marketing Manager of GoInStyle.com.  “We devised a weekly giveaway with all the elements- from great prizes to low barriers to entry. The referral feature was critical, though, in getting our new-but-growing audience to share the promotion with other friends and likely potential customers.”

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Viral Social Sweepstakes: Simple Fan Activation

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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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