Category Archives: Votigo Platform

Instant-Win Games: 

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Engage, Excite, and Reward Your Audience Instantly

Looking to add a thrill to your promotions? Our Instant-Win Games are the perfect way to gamify your marketing campaigns and keep your audience coming back for more. Whether it’s a Spin-the-Wheel, a Scratch-off game, or a quick win with instant prizes, our solutions ensure every interaction is fun and rewarding.

Why Choose Instant-Win Games?

1. Spin-the-Wheel:  Give your audience the excitement of a chance to win with our customizable Spin-the-Wheel games. Easy to set up and play, it’s a fun way to engage customers and offer instant rewards.

2. Scratch-off Games:  Bring the thrill of winning to life with digital scratch-off cards. Whether it’s a small discount or a big prize, every scratch reveals a chance to win, keeping participants engaged and eager to play.

3. Instant Prizes:  Instantly reward your customers with prizes, discounts, or exclusive offers. Create a sense of urgency and excitement by allowing them to win something on the spot.

4. Gamify Your Promotions:  Turn your marketing campaigns into interactive experiences. Gamification not only entertains your audience but also increases engagement and boosts customer loyalty. Whether it’s an online store, social media campaign, or in-app promotion, our Instant-Win Games make your brand stand out.

How It Works:

1. Customize Your Game: We work with you to design and create a branded game that matches your campaign’s objectives.

2. Engage Your Audience: Launch your Instant-Win Game across your digital platforms and watch the excitement unfold.

3. Reward Your Winners: Automatically award prizes to winners, driving immediate gratification and encouraging repeat participation.

Examples:

– Retail Brands: Boost customer engagement with a holiday-themed Spin-the-Wheel game.

– Restaurants: Increase foot traffic with a Scratch-off promotion offering instant meal discounts.

– Media Companies: Drive higher viewer participation with a series of Instant-Win trivia games during a live event.

Ready to Get Started?

Transform your next campaign with the power of Instant-Win Games. Contact us today to learn how we can help you engage your audience, drive conversions, and create unforgettable brand experiences.

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Safeguarding Your Sweepstakes and Contests

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Safeguarding Your Sweepstakes: How the Votigo Engineering Team Combats Bots, Fraud, and Bad Actors

In the dynamic landscape of online promotions, ensuring the integrity and fairness of sweepstakes is paramount. At Votigo, we understand the critical importance of protecting our clients’ promotions from malicious activities. That’s why our dedicated software engineering team is taking proactive measures to ensure that bots, fraud, and bad actors are kept at bay. Here’s a closer look at how we’re fortifying our defenses:

Implementing Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) and One-Time Passwords (OTP)

Two of the most effective tools in our arsenal are Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) and One-Time Passwords (OTP). By adding an additional layer of security, these methods significantly reduce the risk of unauthorized access and fraudulent activities. They ensure that only genuine participants can enter and engage with your sweepstakes.

Reach out to Learn More about Votigo

Utilizing Amazon Web Application Firewall (WAF) Features

Our team leverages the powerful features of Amazon Web Application Firewall (WAF) to bolster security:

– Flagging VPNs, Proxies, and Hosting Provider IPs: We actively flag IP addresses associated with VPNs, proxies, and hosting providers, ensuring they are scrutinized more closely.

– Rate Limiting: We have implemented a rate limit of 200 requests per IP every five minutes. This helps to prevent automated systems from bombarding our servers.

– Geo-Restriction: Upon request, we can restrict access based on geographical locations, further refining the scope of allowed participants.

– Captcha Implementation: For IPs identified as potential threats, we deploy Amazon’s human captcha to filter out automated submissions.

Advanced IP Monitoring and Custom Scripts

Our security measures extend beyond standard protocols:

– IP Subnet Abuse Detection: We utilize custom scripts to monitor specific IP subnets, identifying patterns of abuse. For instance, we recently detected multiple ranges being used by a suspicious entity known as Server Destroyers LLC.

– Manual Checks and Script-Based Analysis: Our team continuously develops and refines scripts based on our learnings. This includes identifying unusual patterns in First Name-Last Name-Date of Birth (FN-LN-DOB) combinations, detecting variations of similar addresses (e.g., Ave, Avenue, St, Street), and flagging rapid submissions from a single IP within a short time frame.

ReCaptcha: An Additional Layer

While traditional ReCaptcha might be less effective against sophisticated threats, it still serves as a valuable additional layer of security, deterring less advanced automated attacks.

Commitment to Ongoing Security Enhancements

At Votigo, our commitment to safeguarding your sweepstakes is unwavering. We continuously monitor, analyze, and adapt our strategies to stay ahead of emerging threats. Our engineering team works tirelessly to ensure that your promotions remain fair, secure, and enjoyable for all genuine participants.

By implementing these robust security measures, we aim to provide our clients with peace of mind, knowing that their sweepstakes are protected against bots, fraud, and bad actors. As the digital landscape evolves, so do our defenses, ensuring that your promotions remain a safe and rewarding experience for your audience.

For more information on how we can help secure your sweepstakes, feel free to reach out to us. Let’s work together to create a secure and engaging promotional experience!

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Votigo Growth and Product Enhancements

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Press Release:  September 9th, 2014

Votigo Sees Exponential Growth with its SaaS Subscription Business and Continues its Product Expansion in first half of 2014

Company nearly triples its Subscription Customer Base and continues to enhance its social marketing and promotions platform with new features. 

Votigo, the complete social media marketing and promotions company, announced today that it grew its Software-as-a-Service subscription customer base by over 280% in the first half of 2014 compared to the same period in 2013.  That number is up significantly compared to the over 100% year-over-year growth from 2012 to 2013 the company reported earlier in the year.  Several strategic partnerships, changes in the Social Media Marketing vendor landscape, and an increase in demand from Middle-market companies have helped with the growth in subscriber base.  In addition to the SaaS subscription growth the company has continued to serve new and existing clients with full-service and custom promotions and social apps.

At the same time its ever-expanding Social Media Marketing & Promotions Platform continues to be enhanced with new features including Social Campaign Calendar, Social Content Hub, Multi-format UGC Contest templates and increased Mobile capabilities.

“The growth of our subscription customer base and the mass adoption of our always-on self-service promotions platform is very exciting for us!  When we first launched in 2007 we knew marketers needed this kind of easy-to-use tool to create promotions to grow their brand and customer databases.” says co-CEO and Founder, Jim Risner, “Now that marketers fully buy into social, mobile, and web promotions we are seeing the increase in demand of our products and services.”

Q1 and Q2 2014 Highlights:

  • Over 280% growth in SaaS subscription customer base
  • Successful traction with several strategic reseller partnerships
  • Launched new Multi-format UGC Contest template
  • Launched new Social Marketing Calendar
  • Launched new Social Content Aggregator / Galleries

Helping our Customers Achieve their Goals:

  • 45,000 new Facebook Likes per day during a Votigo campaign
  • 10,000 contest / sweepstakes registrations per day
  • 1,000 photos and videos submitted per day
  • 1,000 votes cast per day

Numbers based on aggregate averages across all Votigo campaigns from January 1 through June 30, 2014.

With Votigo’s Social Media Marketing & Promotions Platform, businesses have an unmatched tool for acquiring and engaging customers across social channels, the Web, and Tablet / Mobile devices.  Brands can run promotions, user-generated content contests, sweepstakes, and other marketing engagement apps that activate customers; measure the impact and ROI of a brand’s social marketing efforts; and use Conversation Manager and Social Contacts for handling communications and Social Customer Relationship Management (Social CRM) across multiple users, social networks and geographies.  Votigo also continues to provide custom promotions that integrate with any mobile, web, and social channel, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, and new platforms as they emerge.

About Votigo 

Votigo is a leading social media marketing and promotions company with a Software-as-a-Service platform that supports premium, full-service solutions and easy-to-use self-service tools for brands and their agencies including Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, MasterCard, Live Nation, Sharpie, DreamWorks, Breitling, and GoPro.  Votigo’s technology platform allows brands, agencies and enterprises to acquire, engage, and manage their customers across major Social Networks, the Web, and Mobile.  Votigo’s social marketing suite includes Cross-Channel Promotions, Social Apps, Social Marketing Calendar, Conversation Manager, Contacts, and Analytics. Founded in 2006, Votigo has offices located in Boulder, Colorado; San Francisco Bay Area, and Hyderabad, India.  Votigo made the Inc. 500||5000 list of fastest growing private companies in America in 2013 and 2012.

 

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Facebook Sends a Message on the Importance of Promotions

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Yesterday Facebook announced that it has removed some restrictions about how businesses can run promotions (Contests and Sweepstakes) on Facebook.  Previously, the Facebook Promotion Guidelines prohibited any promotion from using any native Facebook functionality like “posting on the Brand Page wall”, “commenting on posts”, “liking posts”, etc.  And they required that businesses use a third party application provider like Votigo.

With the change promotions can now be administered on Page Timelines. For example, entries may be collected by posting to a page or commenting or liking a Page post.

By making these changes Facebook is affirming what we’ve always known. Promotions are an extremely important component of marketing for businesses of all sizes.  Promotions offer a business the best way to acquire and engage new and existing customers.  Facebook also recognized that a lot of small brands were ignoring their earlier guidelines anyway and hosting quick and dirty promotions on their Page Timelines anyway.  Instead of having all of these pages be in violation of the earlier policy, which must have created an administrative nightmare for Facebook, they’ve acquiesced.   However, businesses should still be aware of legal regulations from state to state and country to country.

We believe Facebook’s change to their policy will be good for those previously violating the Facebook Promotion Guidelines. They can sleep better at night, but the change will not replace promotion applications and the benefits they deliver.  

What a Facebook Promotion Application can provide that running a promotion on your Page Timeline can’t:

– Like-gate (users must Like your page before they can enter)

– Branded solution

– Collection of custom user data and email address

– Easier to select and contact winners

– Email newsletter opt-in

– Multiple contest and sweepstakes formats:  Photo contests, Video contests, Referral / Viral sweepstakes, Trivia sweepstakes and more.

– Exportable user data and voter reports

– Moderation and pre-screening entries

– Campaign Analytics

Let us know what you think about the new policy and/or if you have any questions about it.

We’re here to help!

– Team Votigo

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Great Ways to Customize your Marketing Campaigns

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Customizing your campaigns allows you to connect with your customers on a deeper level. It is a good idea to tailor your campaign to your own company, products, and creativity.  One great way to customize your marketing campaigns and excite your fans is to offer prizes that are targeted to what your fans like, want, and need.  These prizes should also be congruent with your company and your marketing goals.

Another way to customize your marketing campaigns is to leverage social applications to further engage users.  These social apps can include:

  • Galleries for fan photos and videos, which allow users to look through other fan entries and see how other people are using your brand and products and engaging with your company.  This is a great way to create a community among your fans and incorporate user-generated content into your marketing efforts.
  • Signup forms, which allow you to gather contact information from everyone who engages with your campaign.  This is a great way to generate leads and new customers.
  • Surveys, which are a great way to find out more information about your fans and how they interact with your company, brand, or products.
  • Facebook apps, which allows you to customize your Facebook page with Facebook apps that encourage interaction or serve a marketing purpose and speak to your audience.
  • Marketing Pages, which allow you to display marketing messages or promotional graphics in a Facebook app. You can add a hyperlink to the images to direct users to your website.

It is important to customize the conversation you are having with your fans on social media and with the social conversation manager app it is simple to stay connected and to schedule posts and updates to your social media channels.  Scheduled posts are a great way to customize your campaign and create a specific timetable for your content.  You can also tailor your content by targeting your messages to specific locations and managing your global presence with language targeting.

These applications are a great way to individualize your promotions and marketing efforts. For more information on how to customize your campaigns contact us today!

 

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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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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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