10 UEFA Euro online contest ideas for football marketing
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When it comes to international football, after the World Cup, nothing’s bigger than the UEFA European Championship. With the exceptions of Argentina and Brazil, every 4 years, all the top national sides will battle it out from June to July.
Germany, Spain, France, England, Belgium, Portugal, Croatia, and the rest of the European continent will do battle in a football tournament that will dominate news cycles, overwhelm social media algorithms, pack the pubs, lead to increased subscribers across TV and streaming platforms, and be on the tip of nearly every tongue, among hardcore and casual fans alike, for a whole month.
If your business is even vaguely adjacent to the European Championship, it’s a great opportunity to increase sales by piggy-backing on an occasion that will capture the hearts of millions around the world.
So whether you’re selling sporting goods, looking to boost beverage sales at your bar by catering to more football fans, or you’re in the eCommerce game and looking for a new digital angle to make the most of this golden opportunity, check out our best original concepts for UEFA Euros marketing games.
1. Euros Penalty Shootout! (Football Game)
No game on the Drimify catalogue is better coded to marketing campaigns coinciding with a football tournament than the penalty shootout format of the Football Game.
Clad the goalie in your team’s rival’s colours, brand the stadium hoarding with your branding, and invite your audience to score as many goals as they can.
Give players the classic 5 opportunities to score, or up the stakes and make it sudden death: miss a single shot, and it’s game over!
Enable the leaderboard to foster competition: With the possible variations to the format of this game, there’s the opportunity to have a real differentiation in users’ scores. In addition to showing players where they are after playing, embed the leaderboard on one of your strategic pages, so players can check at any time how they’re ranked.
Encourage repeat engagements: By having prizes up for grabs at the end of the campaign for the top players, they’re encouraged to engage with your experience multiple times to climb the leaderboard or reclaim their place. By using intermediate screens before or after game play to promote your products or services, you can not only collect user data, but have them repeatedly engage with your branded messaging.
2. Winger’s Wordsearch (Crossword)
From the most obvious game for campaigns tying into football tournaments to perhaps the least? Introducing Winger’s Wordsearch.
Give users clues to player and manager names from Euros past, and see if they can find them on the word grid.
Pro tip: Utilise intermediate screens and definition pop-ups (which occur after each solve) to pepper your audience with your branded messaging.
3. Greatest Goal in Euros History (Voting Gallery)
The diehard football fans (and statistically, there A LOT of diehard football fans) wear their knowledge of the game’s history like a badge of honour.
Tap into that by inviting your audience to have their say on the best goals ever struck in Euros history.
By using the Voting Gallery app, you can customise it to display a video of the greatest goals ever scored in the Euros. The diehards can make their cast iron votes, and newer and younger fans learn more about the game and the tournament.
Enable the categories: You can include categories, such as “Best goal from a set piece,” “Best volley,” and “Best goal by a keeper,” for a few examples to make it a more complete experience.
Use it to interact with your audience: The most effective marketing is often conversational. Follow this process:
- Use individual videos to promote the game and whet audience appetites to participate.
- Include a form after the voting portion of the experience where you ask users if they think you missed the best ever UEFA Euros goal, and if so, to name it.
- Create an article, “The best ever goals of the Euros, as voted by you.”
The types of companies this works for: This is ideal for sports streaming platforms, betting agencies, publishers offering coverage of the games, or any other media corporation who are looking to generate content and engagement around the tournament.
4. Kit Man’s Crucible (Pacman)
If we learned one thing from Ted Lasso, it’s that the kit man might be the most important player off the pitch. To that end, invite your audience to play Kit Man’s Crucible!
Your national side is in the final, but the morning before game day, the opposing manager has hired not just 1, not even 2, but 3 utterly reprehensible goons to steal all the kit and wreck your changing room.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to collect every last jersey in the changing rooms while avoiding the goons, and knocking back the occasional can of soda to give you the kick of caffeine you need to temporarily overpower them.
Will your side’s 11 line up looking their best, feeling their best, and ready to play their best? Or will they be forced to relive the childhood trauma of rummaging through the lost and found before PE, ready to stink up the pitch and cause national embarrassment?
It’s all down to you, the Kit Man, as you face your own personal crucible, and strive to be the MVP history will never know…
Brands this works for: This is ideal if you’re a drinks or food sponsor of a team, or even if you just produce or distribute an energy drink and you’re looking for a fun way to capture audience attention and align your product with sports fans.
These kinds of higher concept marketing games, where you can incorporate your product into the story and the gameplay, can create real engagement and dialogue with your audience.
Pro tip: Enable the leaderboard and embed it on a dedicated page.
5. Euros Forever (Dynamic Path™)
Invite your audience to keep returning to your marketing to win prizes, solve Euro-themed puzzles, and show off their UEFA Euros knowledge to foster long-term loyalty with the Euros Forever concept!
In an order you can define to your exact requirements, players spin wheels, play the slots, scratch cards, while also taking on Quizzes, puzzles, and mini-games. With each completed step, they gradually advance the length of a football pitch with a packed capacity crowd, and add to their cumulative score on the global leaderboard.
The sort of business this works for: If you’re looking to drive loyalty and your target customers are football fans, this concept and this particular app is the framework to build a loyalty programme.
Equally, if you have a lot of different products and services, or you’re specifically working on fan engagement, possibly for a sponsor, this is a great way to keep an audience engaged across multiple games and get across multiple branded messages.
Possible variation: You could opt to make this an Advent Calendar instead, with each step unlocking periodically. This approach lends itself nicely to unlocking a new step on the date of each match, allowing you to mirror the narrative of the tournament.
6. Hat-Trick Hero (Bubble Shooter)
Explode footballs to clear the screen by creating groups of 3 or more of the same design!
Include a leaderboard, and you’ve got a fun, addictive game to engage your audience with while you collect data and hit them with your branded messages.
Hyper versatile to adapt to your brand: You can upload 9 unique images for the ball designs, so they could be balls based on the different nations’ kits, your logos and other visual brand assets, or even inspired by your product range.
Like all games in the Drimify catalogue, there’s an extensive range of customisation and configuration options to make this unique to your business, your campaign, and your audience.
7. A game of 2 halves (Combo™)
A game of 2 halves is where a football match spends the first half being a specific type of way (either boring, or with one side playing atrociously), and the 2nd half being completely different (like suddenly it’s goal city, or the team that sucked turn into 11 Lionel Messis).
Playing on that classic football idiom, invite your audience to play a game of 2 halves!
▼ Try the demo ▼
The Combo™ allows you to combine apps, delivering players from game to game directly and seamlessly. Start them off with a game of Sudden Death penalty shootout (Football Game), then throw them straight into a custom Euros-themed Memory Game where you can incorporate your products and messages in the pop-ups that appear when they’re able to match a pair of cards.
Extra time: Reward your players at the end by delivering them to a branded Spin the Wheel to distribute promotional codes and prizes!
8. Early Doors Earner (Slot Machine)
Get fans excited about the UEFA European Football Championship early doors with the Early Doors Earner!
Customising a Slot Machine is a visual and highly intuitive mechanism to distribute multiple prizes – from discount codes to be redeemed on products and services, to a single grand prize that could be a fan experience package including travel, accommodation, and tickets to watch the final!
This is a great way to capture some of the early enthusiasm and anticipation just before the tournament starts, or as the group stages begin.
When nobody’s been knocked out, everything is possible, and everyone’s excited. (Maybe it really is coming home?)
Pro tip: To maximise completion rates, keep your data collection form as short as possible. Not all prizes will require an address or a phone number, but some higher ticket ones might. You can customise your Drimify instant win games to include a 2nd contact form that only applies to certain prizes.
9. Looks Like Team Spirit (Photo Contest)
Invite your audience to show their team spirit before the UEFA Euro with a custom-branded Photo Contest!
Who’s bought the whole family matching national team pyjamas with emblem-crested dressing gowns? Whose matchday barbecue takes the cake, cuts the mustard, and makes any self-respecting fan wish they were there?
Define the parameters of your Photo Contest and invite users to submit their best pictures.
Connect it to a Voting Gallery: After collecting user-generated content (UGC) of fans showing their fanaticism, use the Voting Gallery mechanism to engage more of your audience (including less participatory segments), and use some of the best submissions to promote this 2nd phase across social media.
The sorts of brand this works for: It can be adapted to almost any company by how you define the parameters of entry. For example, a beer company might ask users to show a matchday party with cans of their beverage being enjoyed responsibly. An air fryer brand might ask users to submit photos of their best air-fried matchday snacks.
10. Group of Death (Leaderboard Combo™)
You’ll likely be aware that the “group of death” is when multiple big hitting teams find themselves fighting to escape the same group, with less qualifying places to advance to than teams expected to have an impact deeper into the tournament, making it incredibly competitive.
It’s the football equivalent of a shark tank, and can serve up some of the most exciting early doors football of a tournament.
As there are few sports fans as passionate as those cheering on their national football side, appeal to that passion and pit them all against each other to create your own gamified Group of Death.
This is a series of campaigns, either customised Football Games released at different times with different configurations, or a mix of Quizzes to test their Euros trivia over multiple quiz formats (a what happened next round, an odd-one out round, a name the year round, and a classic trivia round, for example), all being unified in a Leaderboard Combo™ embedded on its own web page.
No type of audience is more competitive than sports fans, so harness their natures to create repeated engagements across different campaigns that all contribute to a global leaderboard.
Keep them coming back: The sorts of apps you use can be almost any combination, but the truer they are to both your brand, and the more coded they are to football, the more effective they’ll be. Ultimately, the Group of Death concept with the Leaderboard Combo™ is to create an investment in your campaigns among your audience.
Fun fact: One of the toughest “Groups of Death” in Euros history was Euro 2012’s Group B, featuring Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Denmark. Their respective world rankings were 2, 4, 5, and 10.
Expert advice
By incorporating gamification into campaigns tying into the UEFA European Football Championships, you can increase sales and capture new personas, as audiences become more receptive to branded messaging when it’s both coded and connected to an event they’re actively following.
The spirit of the UEFA European Championships is rooted in the beautiful game, and the universal language of play – reflecting this in your marketing through gamification and marketing games is the best way to appeal to sports fans, and to make the most of the opportunities such a globally significant sporting event offers businesses.
