5 Blue Monday online contest ideas to make customers smile
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Garfield famously hates all Mondays, and he’s not alone, but there’s one that’s supposedly the worst of the lot…
Defunct TV channel Sky Travel claimed that the third Monday in January was the most depressing day of the year, getting a psychologist to attach his name to a supposed equation that proved the notion.
It was reported to factor in weather data, debt, time since Christmas, and motivation levels relative to when New Year’s resolutions were made. The result: “Blue Monday” – was released to the world in 2005.
While it was clearly a nonsensical PR stunt, and while Sky Travel has gone the way of the Dodo, Blue Monday did, and still does, sell holidays for the travel industry. (After all, pseudoscientific mumbojumbo or not, who’s really enjoying mid-January and not thinking of a sunny getaway?)
And whether you’re selling holidays or consumer goods, promoting movies, music, or winter programming, mid-January is a time of the year when your marketing could use a major shot in the arm.
Online contests and marketing games could be just the ticket! In this article, we’ll run you through our top ideas.
1. Two Tickets Outta Here! (Product Recommendation Quiz)
Let’s keep it in the original spirit of Blue Monday with the first idea: a product recommendation quiz that delivers a holiday package recommended to your personality type!
Who is this for? This is great for any business that’s directly involved in travel and tourism. Think TUI, Jet2, or BCD, or it could even be directly through airlines recommending flights.
This is where you could tie some great package deals to personas or personality types, potentially to hidden gem locations: “the next Santorini” or “the next Venice.”
Not really in the holiday business? The product recommendation quiz mechanic adapts to any business with products to recommend.
If you’ve got compelling deals or new products, and a couple of hours to come up with some questions and answers, you can create interaction and engagement and bring some excitement to customer interactions.
2. Blues Buster (Wheel of Fortune)
Let’s keep it simple and posit an idea that works for every brand and every audience: an interactive Blue Monday giveaway!
Set a frosty, possibly animated background against which to stage your bright, colourful, bursting with life Wheel of Fortune, and invite your audience to spin for a chance to win a big grand prize!
Bright is good, brighter is better, brightest is best: It sounds simple, and it is (that’s why it works), but the Blue Monday aspect means this is an opportunity to tell a visual story.
Set your branding and your wheel as bright, warm beacons against a frosty backdrop to position your experience as a beacon of positivity amidst the gloom.
Spread the cheer: Make it so everyone who plays at the very least wins a promo code. This way, every participant is that much more likely to make a purchase.
Drive to store: If you have a physical premises, this is also an opportunity to try and generate some much needed foot traffic. After the bustle of the winter sales have started to die down, anything you can do to encourage a little extra footfall gives your staff an opportunity to make some extra sales.
3. Blue Monday Hit Parade (Audio Quiz)
Long before Blue Monday was the saddest day in the calendar, it was a hit song by New Order…
Pay homage to the true origin of Blue Monday with a music quiz to engage your audience!
You can customise the Audio Quiz format to play videos or just audio files, and you can challenge participants to answer questions based on the music, whether that’s identifying artists, song titles, lyrics, or even trivia related to the music in question.
Music has a way of lifting people’s spirits and changing the mood, so an online music competition is a great way to cut through the Blue Monday gloom and connect with your audience.
Make it a contest: Enable a leaderboard, and set up terms and conditions where the top 20 will be entered into a prize draw to motivate participation.
Who’s this for? Radio stations, music streaming platforms, pop culture magazines and websites, or any brand whose audience loves a particular type of music.
Blue Tuesday, Blue Wednesday, Blue Thursday, and so on…
Why not use Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ to deliver an audio quiz per day?
Bust the blues over a whole week and use a global leaderboard to encourage repeat engagements (and multiply customer/ listener/ audience exposure to your branded messaging).
4. Feel Good Football (American Football Game)
Do you have sports fans in your audience?
Well the Super Bowl is less than a month away, so why not create a custom-branded American Football Game to remind them that one of the biggest sporting events in the world (or perhaps the biggest if you’re in America) is less than 25 sleeps away.
On Drimify, you can customise sports games based around football (soccer), rugby, and basketball, so wherever you are in the world, and whatever your market, if you have sports fans, you can cut through the Blue Monday gloom with a sports-based marketing game.
Make it a contest: This isn’t peewee football and sports fans don’t buy into this “Everybody gets a trophy” nonsense – enable the leaderboard, and enter your top 50 scorers into a prize draw to jack up participation numbers and maximise engagement.
The more engaged they are in the contest, the more focused they are on your messaging.
5. Winter Warmers: Favourite Recipes (Media Contest)
What hot dish turns a drab winter night into a cosy indulgence for you? Raclette melted over boiled potatoes? A gooey grilled cheese sandwich with just the right amount of mustard? Lasagne or beef stew?
Everyone thinks their dish, or their wife’s or husband’s, or their mum’s or grandma’s, is the best in the game, so give them a reason to whip out the recipe and get creative with a Video Contest.
Their challenge is to create an engaging micro-video cooking lesson.
Make it a contest: Connect it to a Voting Gallery, and invite more of your audience to engage with your content and vote for the winner (or winners if you enable categories).
Go hard on the promotion: You can use the user-generated content from the videos to promote the Voting Gallery on social media, maximising exposure, and participations.
Who is this for? Obviously, this is super on-brand for any company in the food space, from meal prep brands, to appliance manufacturers, but everyone loves to eat, right?
Expert advice
Blue Monday may be another silly made-up marketing day, and while the pseudoscience is nonsense, the lived experience of people does tend to correlate: mid-January gets a lot of people down in the dumps.
It’s a time where people are day dreaming and looking for distractions and excitement, and that desire for diversion is a prime opportunity for brands to connect with their audiences and deliver win-win experiences.
The marketing game concepts listed here are representations of what you can do by customising various game engines on the Drimify platform, but there are several other game engines in the catalogue just waiting to bring your ideas to life.
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