Top 6 online contest ideas for St Patrick’s Day marketing

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St Patrick’s Day is largely a celebration of Irish culture with parades, traditional foods, music, dancing, and a lot of Irish iconography.

The fact that people are coming together and celebrating means there’s an opportunity to connect with segments of your audience, get across your branded messaging, and drive up sales.

Given the playful, jovial nature of St Patrick’s Day, there’s no more thematically effective marketing technique than gamification. Marketing games can cut through traditional approaches to get eyes on your branded messaging in the run up to the big day.

With that in mind, check out our top online contest ideas to boost your St Patrick’s Day marketing!

1. Luck of the Irish (Scratch Card)

Whether the expression comes from Irish folklore, or the high proportion of Irish-American miners who struck it big during the gold and silver rush years in the US, everyone’s familiar with the phrase “the luck of the Irish.”

And everyone is also familiar with the mechanics of a scratch card instant win game!

Therefore, a digital scratch card, customised to your branding along the theme of St Patrick’s Day, is a great way to boost sales as part of a festive promotion.

A marketing game that works for every brand: Whether it’s integrated into your loyalty app, scannable through a QR code, or accessible via a pop-up on your eCommerce site, there’s no kind of business that this can’t work for in some way.

2. Causeway Crasher (Bubble Shooter)

Finn McCool was a warrior chieftain in medieval Ireland, but according to folklore, he also built the Giant’s Causeway in order to cross the sea to fight the Scottish giant Benandonner – who turned out to be substantially bigger than Finn expected…

Supposedly, after Finn’s wife dressed him up as a baby, Benandonner tore most of the causeway down as he fled back to Scotland, as if Finn McCool’s baby was that big, Finn himself would be an insurmountable foe.

Pay homage to the legend by inviting your audience to play your customised bubble blaster game, blasting groups of three or more hexagonal icons to earn points and climb the leaderboard.

Use intermediate screens and call to action buttons (CTAs) to achieve your marketing objectives: The bubble shooter game is fun and engaging but it serves a purpose. It gives you a chance to:

• Collect demographic and preferential data from participants through data collection screens
• Get across targeted messaging with intermediate content screens before and after the game
• Include CTA buttons on end screens to send players to your strategic web pages

3. St Patrick’s Day Jersey Game (Basketball Game)

Contemporary St Patrick’s Day celebrations have been greatly influenced by the Irish American communities, and this is proudly displayed by various sports teams who commission special green jerseys during March for St Patrick’s Day.

If you’re the marketing department for an NBA team planning to green up for your clashes around St Patrick’s Day (or you’re the Boston Celtics), or you’re somehow adjacent to a team doing so, customising Drimify’s basketball game engine around the limited edition kit is a great way to engage sports fans.

Maximise engagement by making it a contest: Enable the leaderboard and invite participants shoot hoops for a top 20 position for a chance to win the new jersey.

Everyone else who plays could be sent a unique code to get 10% off the jersey (or some other prize related to your business).

American football more your game? The Drimify gamification platform has American football, soccer, and rugby, so there are plenty of customisable contests to adapt for your team and your audience for St Patrick’s Day promotions.

4. Irish Culture Quiz (Interactive Quiz)

For such a small country, Ireland is disproportionately teaming with highly regarded cultural contributions to cinema, literature, and the stage.

You could look to build an interactive quiz around an aspect of this that suits your industry to connect your audience to the subject matter – which is the product you’re selling, after all.

If you’re a bookshop running a promotion on Irish authors for St Patrick’s Day, test their knowledge of Joyce, Stoker, and Binchy. If you’re a cinema running a retrospective season of great Irish films, test their knowledge of the directors and actors who have made Irish cinema notable.

Why this works: When a form of art is something someone’s interested in, they are not only passionate about it, they’re passionate about knowing about it (and about showing they know more about it than anyone else). That’s why it drives people mad to forget details from their favourite movies or favourite novels. This can be tapped into for St Patrick’s Day-oriented marketing campaigns.

5. Feast of St Patrick’s Video Contest (Video Contest)

St Patrick’s has a reputation for being a rowdy holiday, but it’s really more about people coming together and celebrating Irish culture, including the food!

You can tap into this with a custom video contest where you invite your audience to submit recipe videos of them preparing their most innovative St Patrick’s Day dishes.

They might submit stout-braised steak and chips the family way, granny’s proprietary causeway cake, colcannon with a twist, or any number of puddings made with Guinness…

The power of mobile technology and the social cache of being able to create compelling content basically makes this as much an exercise in editing prowess as it does cooking prowess.

You’re basically putting on a play-from-home Masterchef, and inviting your audience to be editors and contestants.

Connect a voting gallery: While it’ll be a small group of your target audience willing to put themselves out there and actually edit together a video, their user generated content (UGC) will be engaging a much larger segment of your audience to vote.

What brands does this work for? This works for any brand that’s food adjacent. Think appliance brands, cooking channels (online or traditional), as well as large luxury homeware retailers and department stores.

6. Clover Rover (Dynamic Path™)

Ireland and Northern Ireland have a combined population of just over 7 million, but the total Irish diaspora population is estimated to be between 50 and 80 million – but why and how?

For nonprofit organisations looking to reclaim St Patrick’s Day and raise awareness of Irish culture, gamification is a great way to appeal to people of Irish descent who are curious about their roots.

You can use Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ format to create a gamification experience where games are grouped on backdrops of countries, and quizzes and content screens cover the major reasons why that country has a large Irish population.

Discovery as a lever of gamification: Discovery, like competition, is a reason why gamification can be so compelling. Building a gamification experience around a subject like this will massively play on people’s curiosity, but needs to balance interesting information with compelling gameplay.

Expert advice

Any occasion involving parades and people coming together creates commercial opportunities for multiple businesses, but it also creates a lot of competition on the marketing front. This is where gamification in the form of online contests can cut through – inviting your audience to participate and enter your branded space.

The marketing game ideas listed here are just some examples as starting points for creating your own St Patrick’s day online contests. There are more than 30 different game mechanics on the Drimify platform just waiting to be adapted to your next St Patrick’s Day campaign.

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