Top 6 online contest ideas for Earth Day marketing

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Business in the 21st century has become about much more than meeting customer needs. It’s also now about meeting customer expectations. You see, there is now a significant crossover between commerce and conscience, and navigating that crossover can be a marketing conundrum.

Advertising needs to be short and to the point. But how do you get across how environmentally conscious your organisation is while still communicating the usual marketing focuses, like the latest and greatest new products and special offers?

The answer is that every marketing message has a time and place. Keep your offers and deals-based marketing to your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, but frontload your environmental bona fides in your Earth Day campaigns.

What on Earth is Earth Day?

Earth Day is an annual occasion raising awareness about the environment, and the need to protect the planet’s natural resources.

The first Earth Day was a USA-only affair in 1970, and saw 20 million citizens take to the streets, engaged in green issues and concerned about environmental damage. 20 years later it would become a global event, and now – according to organisers – it involves over 1 billion people across nearly 200 countries.

For businesses, it’s an opportunity to (most importantly) be a vehicle for positive change, and from a bottom line point of view, make sure your customers know that when they support you by doing business with you, they’re supporting the good guys. The percentage of shoppers who spend by their conscience is only going up.

When it comes to raising awareness and influencing new behaviours, there’s no more effective modern method than gamification. Interactivity and repetition help to enforce ideas, and the ubiquity of smart devices and mobile internet make online marketing games effortless to distribute.

With that in mind, here are our top 6 online contest ideas for Earth Day!

1. Pulse of the Planet (Interactive Quiz)

There’s really no game mechanic better suited to getting across important messaging than the interactive quiz.

Customise your Earth Day quiz to invite participants to estimate things like:

• How many tonnes of plastic are discarded in the sea annually?
• How long will the Earth’s coral reefs survive if water temperatures keep rising at the current rate?
• What percentage of the global polar bear population declined in the last 10 years due to losses in sea ice?

Then, using the intermediate screens feature, you can elaborate on the issue, and tie it to your company’s sustainability initiative which is contributing to combat said issue.

Participants learn about the state of the planet, and they learn the part your business is doing to minimise its footprint and be a responsible corporate entity.

Make it relevant: The trick here is to make the questions link to your own CSR initiatives. Remember, this is about connecting with your audience, and positioning your brand as a wearer of white hats.

Make it a contest: It may feel curious to make it a competition, but people are competitive, about pretty much everything. Knowing the most about relevant environmental issues isn’t excluded from that list.

Secondary objectives: While the core goal of businesses on Earth Day is to say, “Hey, we’re doing our part!” there’s no reason not to customise your data collection form in such a way as to enrich your data lists, nor boost your marketing newsletter signups. Equally, if you have a product that’s been built specifically with sustainable methods (think of the 100% recycled versions of various running shoes and fashion items), build your questions around this product.

2. Anti-plasto Joe (Pacman)

Your Earth Day sandwich store/ deli chain mascot – Anti-plasto Joe – is tearing across the city picking up plastic and litter to make the world a better place while being chased down by “Big Fastfood’s” goons.

Every time Joe can grab one of your signature subs, he’s powered up enough to fight off the goons (and corporate greed), and keep on making sure good food comes with a minimal environmental footprint.

What is this? Anti-Plasto Joe (or your actual mascot) is Pacman, the plastics are the coins, the goons are the ghosts, and the subs are the powerups – on Drimify’s Pacman template you can customise all of the game’s elements to represent your brand.

What sort of brands does this work for? Subway? Quiznos? Truthfully, this was just an example based on the initial pun (“antipasto,” get it?), but no matter your industry, if you’ve found a way to significantly cut down on unsustainable packaging materials, this can be adapted as a fun way to connect with your customers and shed light on your green initiative.

3. Carbon Neutral Crossword (Crossword and Word Search Game)

A customised crossword allows you to use in-game pop-ups to follow up participants solving clues and finding words with information about your sustainability activities.

Word games are an ideal way to connect audiences to your environmental projects, as words (basically information) form the very mechanics of the game.

Pro tip: Tailor your crossword to your target audience’s level of environmental awareness. If you’re trying to raise awareness about your brand’s green activities, keep it simpler and easy-ish to solve, to appeal to a broader audience.

If your audience IS already super conscious, and you’re looking to directly appeal to such a segment, make it more challenging and enable the leaderboard so you can use competition as a motivator.

4. The Big Prize Recyclone (Spin the Wheel)

The recycling symbol is quite literally arrows representing a circular economy, so customise each segment of your Earth Day spin the wheel with those arrows, set the backdrop to an Earth Day theme, and set your messaging accordingly.

This is a more commercial approach to an online contest, so make sure to include an intermediate screen and relevant call to action buttons (CTAs) on your end screens to redirect participants to an appropriate blog post on your website highlighting your sustainability strategy.

5. Steps to Sustainability (Dynamic Path™)

This is a tailor-made approach for promoting a new product built with sustainability in mind.

Launching a fully sustainable product, particularly in specialist niches, is what everyone says you should be doing, but you can then come up against some scepticism from customers. “Is it really performance focused? How can I justify the cost?”

Well, the fact is, sometimes, sustainability costs a little bit more – at least initially while processes are being established.

The Dynamic Path™ is an experience builder that allows you to combine different game mechanics across a user journey, combining game-play and story telling to explain in a fun way:

• Why you’ve developed this new product
• The processes that have brought it to life
• The reception from user testing
• The future of the industry

Why this works: Environmentally conscious shoppers WANT to buy products produced greenly, but they don’t want trade-offs in performance (and if they have to pay more, they really want to know why). If you create interactive, gamified material, you’re directly connecting target customers with the information they want in a way that can really illustrate the product story.

A perfect launch date: If your brand is launching a sustainably produced product, or something that’s built as a prototype for a 100 per cent recyclable product, Earth Day is the perfect day to launch, as you can piggy back on the additional publicity around Earth Day for extra engagement and awareness.

6. Eco-Hack or Eco-Tack? (Photo Contest/ Voting Gallery)

This one’s a community-building game.

Essentially, you’re asking your audience to share pictures or videos of their most creative green hacks around the house through a customised media contest.

Connect a voting gallery to make it a contest: It’s a small amount of your target audience that will actually share and consider their green hacks interesting enough for public consumption, but a much larger percentage will look to this user-generated content (UGC) for inspiration in your voting gallery.

What brands would this work for? This one’s really for brands with an audience they know to be environmentally conscious, and actively looking to minimise their own carbon footprint.

Expert advice

Earth Day isn’t the most obvious day in your marketing calendar, but it can ultimately carry more weight than you may expect when it comes to branding your company as environmentally responsible.

The ideas listed here are starting points from which to build your own experiences, perfectly tailored to your brand, and the theme of sustainability and global responsibility.

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