Each year there are dozens of opportunities to create a promotion, whether it be holidays, seasons or annual events.  Having an annual promotions calendar allows you to effectively strategize and market each promotion while keeping your community continually engaged.

Let’s review 4 tips to help you begin planning your 2016 calendar.

1. Determine the number of promotions you would like to run.  You’ll want to ensure that your company has the resources to manage each promotion.  Large organizations with a full social media team may have the capacity for weekly promotions while a small business would benefit from running bi-monthly campaigns.  As a rule of thumb, we believe that one promotion per month is a good place to start.
2. Start with holidays.   Build your promotions around holidays such as Independence Day, Black Friday, Halloween, etc.   Focus on national holidays first and then incorporate others that appeal to your business such as retail holidays.
3. Complement your current marketing schedule.  Take a step back to review your other objectives this year and plan promotions to complement those activities.  If your company has existing promotions on the schedule, adding in a contest or sweepstakes is a great way boost their performance.
4. Don’t forget about the seasons.  Back to school campaigns at the start of fall, cold weather themed winter promotions, starting new in the spring and beating the heat of summer are all opportunities to engage with your community.

Design trends are timeless – they span several years to a decade depending on how well they’re received by the audience. However, in recent years, with the rapid development in technology, design trends are quickly changing with users’ interest. Businesses give top priority to the look of their website in order to gain a competitive advantage and attract more users.

Thanks to the increasing number of online graphic tools, last year we saw at least a dozen designs dominate the web world. From card-style layouts to video headers to tiny animations, web designs grew in popularity. This year, we could see some of them continue their domination and a few new ones as well. Let’s take a look at 10 website designs that could steal the show in 2016.

1. Vertical Scrolling

With most people accessing websites on the go, it is estimated that mobile traffic could equal (or even surpass) desktop traffic in the coming years. Taking this into consideration, a lot of website owners are betting on vertical scrolling patterns. The thing about this type of design is, it makes web surfing a lot easier and leads to better user experience.

2. Card-like Interfaces

Card-inspired templates are finding their way in websites, apps, and printed forms. The thing with card-type layouts is, they are easy to browse through, more engaging, and they present content in an engaging manner for users. There is no limit to creativity here – you can come up with your own design, shapes, and colors and mesmerize your visitors with your interface.

3. Video Headers

High speed Internet connections and people’s fondness to media-rich content have lead to the rise of movie-style videos in website headers. What better way to explain your business than use a short 2-minute video enriched with sharp images, captivating graphics, and nice background music?

4. Small Animations

Animations are getting smaller, but their popularity is getting bigger by the year. From subtle motion to data animation to guiding animation, there are lots of concepts to choose from. Most websites use tiny animations to provide an element of surprise to visitors once the page has completed loading. Brilliant animations are all about creating special effects to entice users to explore your content. Apple, Fleet Fleet, and Pixate are some of the popular sites that have used tiny animations to a great effect. You could check their sites for an idea!

5. Better Typography

Bigger, bolder fonts are being preferred by a lot of websites because they work well with the other visual elements in the homepage and ultimately increase the readability of the content. Websites that use typography believe that combining readable typefaces with stunning graphics is a better way to deliver their brand message to the audience.

6. Illustration and sketches

There is something with the idea of pairing digital designs with hand-crafted arts that never seems to bore visitors. Even a lifeless website comes alive with the use of eye-catching sketchings and drawings. From icons to clickable buttons to the other interface elements, using illustrations and sketches lets you give your users an enjoyable browsing experience.

7. Bold and bright colors

Using bright colors and bolder fonts on your homepage is a smart way to make the key area of your content stand out and be read by your audience. Desert Chill, Apigee, and Rainbow Nursery are some notable sites that have used the ‘magic of colors’ to their advantage. Please do check them out.

8. Own photos, not stock photos

Stock photos are outdated and boring. A few sites have already started using their own photography for the sake of uniqueness and credibility. Take a look at Netflix, which delivers its brand message with its own photography in the background. Original images are more natural and authentic and we could see a lot of websites use them in 2016.

9. Collaboration Tools

It’s quite common that not all designers work at the same office – some work from home, some work at the office and clients are usually from different countries. This is where using real-time collaboration tools can make a difference. They make the web design process a lot quicker and easier. Even feedback can be received and applied in a professional manner. From our research, we found that Trello, Yammer, Red Pen, Invision, and GoVisually are some top collaboration tools for web designers.

10. Full-screen Forms

With a huge amount of web traffic coming from mobile users, using full-screen forms in the homepage has become a regular practice in the industry. We saw a lot of websites use this approach effectively in 2015 and the trend is most likely to continue into 2016.

From searching an item to subscribing to newsletters to signing up, full-screen forms can come in handy. When used correctly, they enable users to focus more on their tasks.

Conclusion

So, which of these designs do you think will dominate in 2016? Which design will you prefer for your site? Please let us know in the comments. Thanks!

This post was originally written by Joyce Mason for the Heyo blog.

One of the most important aspects to running successful promotions on Twitter and Instagram is the selection of your hashtag.  Let’s take a look at the first 3 questions to answer when choosing your campaign hashtag.

#PACK4PARADISESWEEPSTAKES

1. Am I running a contest or sweepstakes?  The FTC updated their guidelines for running contests and sweepstakes on social media requiring brands to include “contest” or “sweepstakes” either within the promotion hashtag or as a it’s own hashtag.  For example, if we wanted to run a sweepstakes called #VotigoTrip we would also need to include #Sweepstakes in order for entries to be eligible.  Another option would be to use the single hashtag #VotigoTripSweepstakes.  Your brand can use either option with our multiple hashtag promotion builder
2. Is my hashtag easy to remember?  When promoting your hashtag you’ll likely only have the attention of your potential entrant for a brief moment.  Having a long or complex hashtag could result on misspellings or the user forgetting it all together.  If you are giving away a big trip, it can be tempting to use #BrandHonoluluHawaiiTripOfALifetimeContest but you’ll be much better off simplifying that to #BrandHawaiiContest
3. Has someone already used my hashtag? There’s nothing worse than launching a social promotion only to find out that another brand already used your hashtag.  If you’re using a simplified hashtag, we suggest including your brand’s name to ensure a competitor hasn’t used it previously.

While promotion-oriented campaigns such as contests and sweepstakes are a great way to grow your audience, Votigo engagement apps are a great way to bring your audience deeper into your larger brand conversation. Today’s blog post looks at 3 promotion ideas guaranteed to boost customer engagement.

1.  Voting App

Through our Voting App, you can feature new products or gauge the popularity of an item in your product line in order to increase customer engagement.  Gordmans recently launched a Voting app in partnership with Earl Jean that encouraged fans to vote for their favorite jeans and win prizes!

2.  Quiz App

Trivia and personality quizzes are a fun way to learn more about your users, engage them in your brand conversation, drive traffic to your website or create product awareness.  Mission Imagination is a new trivia quiz promotion from the minds of NASA and Texas Instruments created to inspire the next generation of innovators, inventors and explorers by engaging them in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

3.  Social Content Hub

Looking to regularly aggregate content while also boosting customer engagement?  Votigo’s Social Content Hub is a great always-on solution where users can submit photos, videos or essays into your gallery at any time.  Content can be submitted directly on the app or by pulling in content from social media.  Realtor.com is using #SockSwag to pull entries from Twitter and Instagram into their app on Facebook.

When brainstorming for their next big promotion, our clients often ask if we suggest running a photo, video or essay contest.  While each entry method has it’s own unique benefits, our Multi-Format UGC Contests empower the user to decide.

First, let’s take a look at some pros and cons for each entry type –

Photo Entries

• Pro:  Nearly everyone has a camera phone in their pocket and are ready to take a photo at any moment
• Con:  Given the ease at which someone can snap a quick photo, the quality of submissions may not be as high as video entries
  

Video Entries

• Pro:  Video entries are often the most dynamic and engaging entries
• Con:  Some users may lack time, the know-how or tools to create a video.  This could potentially reduce the number of submissions.  The good news is that with the proliferation of smartphones with video cameras the barrier is lower than ever.
  

• Essay / Text Entries

  • Pro:  By not requiring a media type, essays generally offer the lowest barrier to entry of any contest format
  • Con:  An essay contest will not include any user submitted visual content that can be aggregated or repurposed by your brand and they are not as engaging

As you can see, all three forms of user-generated content entry can play a crucial role in meeting the objectives of your next promotion.  With Votigo’s Multi-Format UGC Contests, you can ensure that your users can choose how they would like to participate and ultimately maximize the engagement of your audience.

“Use high-quality, engaging images to make your brand stand out.” You may have read something like that before, and it’s the truth. But what exactly does that mean? What exactly is it that makes an image high-quality and engaging? Well, if you’re asking those same questions, you’re in the right place. Read on to find out the secret to stunning visual content.

Continue reading →

Curating content is a great way to position you and your business as the go-to expert in a certain industry by sharing the best-of-the-best content with your readers.

If you’re just using Google right now and struggling to find top content, never fear! There are plenty of tools out there to help you collect relevant and interesting content to share.

Without further ado, here are The Top 10 Content Curation Tools You Should Be Using:

Pocket: Pocket is a great tool to start getting in the habit of curating content. Store interesting articles, videos and images in one place.

Pro tip: Install the Pocket browser extension to easily save content on the web.

Post Planner: Discover data-driven shareable content suggestions for social media and watch your engagement grow.

Feedly: Aggregate and browse feeds from your favorite sources on mobile or desktop within a beautifully simple user interface.

Digg Reader: A great minimal RSS reader to help you stay up-to-the-minute on the latest content from some of the top sources.

Twitter Lists: Curate subsets of users that you follow on Twitter related to specific topics. This is a great way to cut through the clutter and find the Tweets that really matter. Learn how to set up a list here.

Pro Tip: Check out these already curated 101 Best Twitter Lists to Follow by PostPlanner.

Content Gems: Quickly find and share the most valuable content in one easy-to-use platform. This one gets bonus points for such a beautifully designed site!

Flipboard: Flipboard is my personal favorite content curation tool. It allows you to create your own personalized magazine with all the topics you care about (and none that you don’t.) Flipboard is a fantastic tool for finding and organizing  content – but be warned, you may spend hours on Flipboard without even realizing it!

Learnist: Use a format similar to Pinterest with boards to search content from industry leaders by topic. Learnist is very user-friendly and full of brilliant content on endless topics.

Evernote: Easily clip web articles, add your own notes and communicate with your team in real-time using this comprehensive workspace tool.

Readability: Similar to Pocket and Evernote, Readability gives you the means to collect and save interesting content from the web in an organized way. It also cleans up articles to present them in a more readable, simple format – making your life easier as you’re browsing content.

Pro Tip: Check out the “Top Reads” section to see the most read content that hour, day or week.

Over to You!

If you haven’t experimented with content curation yet, there’s no better time than now to get started. Curating relevant content is one of the best ways to build trust and become the go-to expert for your audience. Regardless of the size of your team, I hope you’ll find one of the above tools to work for you.

Would you add any tools to this list? What tools have worked best for your content curation?

This post was originally written by Christina Sullivan for the Heyo Blog.

Votigo Overview from jim risner on Vimeo.

Nothing generates more leads and more engagement than cross-channel social promotions and engagement apps. Votigo’s easy-to-use and highly customizable platform allows brands and agencies of all sizes to create contests, sweepstakes, landing pages, and engagement campaigns quickly and affordably. All promotions can published to your Facebook Page, Website, Microsite, and Mobile. Integrate with Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. No coding skills required!

For larger brands and agencies looking for custom solutions Votigo offers full services including design, development, rules, winner admin, moderation, and prize fulfillment.

With over 20 different Campaign templates and over 14 supported languages Votigo provides solutions for Small Businesses to Global Enterprises.

Come join the thousands of companies already using Votigo to generate leads and engagement.