Top 5 online contest ideas for your father’s day campaign

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When you think of the big occasions for gift giving, and the enormous commerce opportunities that come with them, you think primarily of Christmas, but what’s next? Apart from birthdays, that happen every day and as such are impossible to build a date-specific campaign around, next on the list has to be Mother’s Day. According to the National Retail Federation (US), the expected total expenditure on Mother’s Day in 2022 was $31.7 billion, with 84% of US adults expected to celebrate it. While not as big a money mover as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day’s 2022 projections were £20 billion of consumer spending with 75% of US adults celebrating the occasion, making it an incredibly significant time of year for any retail business looking to maximise it’s marketing potential.

Just think about that number: $20 billion in the US alone. You better believe that equates to a lot of pounds and dollars in the UK, Australia, and Canada too. That’s a lot of commerce, and a big reason for brands to put time, resources, and innovation behind their Father’s Day marketing campaigns. One of the most effective content marketing strategies businesses can use in today’s saturated marketing space is online contests and competitions.

Online contests: the standout marketing solution

Whenever Father’s Day comes around, or any occasion that offers enormous marketing opportunities for retailers, every billboard, every advert on TV, and every other post on social media is par for the course: “Give him the gift he really wants this father’s day.” It could be for a fragrance, a coffee machine, a train set, for a home hair colouring set – it can feel like a sea of sameness and practised professional homogeneity. It can become something the average consumer begins to tune out, and yet, for the sake of sales, and to help the brand, it’s an area and a time of year businesses can’t afford to be left behind in.

Offering something like an online contest or competition that can be easily shared across social media, and invites users to participate and engage with your content and messaging, by contrast, can work like a hot knife through butter on target customers.

The benefits of running a contest to promote Father’s Day

The main aim of the online contest is to engage your target audience in your messaging and boost brand awareness. By tying it around an occasion like Father’s Day, you’re finding that commercial hook, and using the theme and timing of that holiday to maximise what your contest can achieve.

With more people looking to make purchases, and more consumers looking for gift ideas, the build up to Father’s Day is the perfect blend of volume and curiosity. The primary potential benefits you can yield from your Father’s Day-themed online contest or prize giveaway are:

• Grow your email list or marketing list
• Grow your social media communities
• Product promotion
• Create customer loyalty
• Gain brand awareness
• Help encourage sales

Whatever your marketing aims, we’ve got you covered with ideas that can serve as starting points for your own online contests and promotional giveaways.

Top 5 Father’s Day contest and giveaway ideas

Running a successful online contest requires careful planning. You need an appropriately attractive prize to encourage users to participate, the best game mechanics to deliver the desired experience to your audience, simple instructions to make the process effortless, efficient branded copy to get your messaging across, and effective promotion to ensure your contest gets as many entries as possible and maximises on your marketing aims.

Here are our top 5 ideas for Father’s Day contests.

1. A “Which Onscreen Dad is your Father?” Personality Test

You could tie this piece of content with a call to action (CTA) and a prize giveaway. You could say in your entry screen that every person subscribing gets entered into a competition to win a certain product – for example, let’s say it’s a new ergonomic razor that’s got a patent on its unique design, and is going to be a high demand but high ticket item (it could be anything though, so long as it fits the bill of something most dads would like, and would probably be gifted, or, thematically linking with the Personality Test, maybe a red-carpet experience linked to a movie premiere).

To begin with, you create your results. In this, your answers are movie dads: Darth Vader, Furious Styles, Edward Bloom, Marlin, Mufasa, Phil Dunfy, Uncle Phil, Walter White, etc. Then your questions run through the format of posing scenarios and asking which action your father is most likely to take as a response. The multiple choice answers all correlate to the different results, and at the end of the Personality Test, players are encouraged to share their result. It’s a bit of fun that runs alongside a prize giveaway, with great scope to get marketing newsletter signups over the course of the experience. You could even include promotional codes as a special thank you to all signups to further incentivise purchasing.

2. A “My Father and Me” or “Then and Now” Photo Contest

This is a great contest to leverage the collective enthusiasm nearly all target customers have for taking photographs, and their social motivation to share them.

You could use the Photo Contest format on the Drimify platform to encourage target users to submit a selfie of them with their father, with directions to mimic a particular style, or possibly even in fancy dress if it’s in a way that’s on brand (for example, out on a run or playing basketball if you’re a sports retailer). You can then invite people back when entries close to a Media Gallery to vote for the winning entries – the winning entries could be from a shortlist you’ve preselected to prevent offensive entries or people trying to game your contest without putting in effort.

You could also set up a Photo Contest where you encourage entrants to submit an old photograph that they have digitally stored somewhere of their fathers in their primes. It might even be fun to ask participants to enter a side-by-side of their Father in the prime, next to an image of themselves trying to recreate the look.

3. A “My Dad’ll Know That” Quiz

When you were a kid and you needed to know the answer to a question, you’d just ask your dad… well, for most of us that was the case, obviously, some of Gen Z and Gen Alpha can ask their fathers a question, then catch them in the act of making up nonsense by Googling the same question, but for most people, it was the case that on certain topics, in your household growing up, dad was basically the fountain of knowledge and wisdom.

In that spirit, you could customise a general knowledge Quiz but skewed towards decades and ages that the dads of your target audience would be more likely to know, with the idea being that participants play the Quiz with their dad and it’s a team effort. For example, let’s suppose it’s a sports Quiz, and your target audience for the campaign is generally in their 30s. People that are into sports tend to have great knowledge about the decades for which they’ve been alive, it’s all about the live experience, except for exceptional circumstances, like the Rumble in the Jungle or England actually winning the World Cup in 1966, historical sports is confined to the history books, but pops might remember the obscure benchwarmer who has an unusual and obscure fact attached to their name.

Of course, the beauty of the Quiz format is that you can pretty much make a Quiz on anything so long as it’s relevant or appropriate to your brand and at an appropriate level of difficulty to be fun. Just make sure if winning the contest is based on a player’s final score that you use features like leaderboards, and make sure your contact forms are well-placed and that your CTAs are crystal clear.

4. An instant winner game for mass participation

Customising a Spin the Wheel or Wheel of Fortune game on the Drimify platform is an easy way to appeal to a lot of people and get them excited about winning a specific prize, and a Father’s Day campaign where you’ll have a lot of people looking to engage in new ideas is an ideal occasion to make the most of its potential.

With these formats you customise the graphic representation of prizes on wheels, have your audience push buttons, and deliver a highly visual experience where they can win a prize, or even a promotional code as a purchasing incentive which could be available to all players.

While the instant win style of game is quite simple, that’s kind of its charm – anyone can win. You don’t need to create the perfect image with a witty caption, and you don’t need you and your dad to be regular killers on the local pub quiz circuit to excel at a general knowledge contest. You just spin to win. Because it’s simple, and short, it could also make more sense to include an intermediate screen like a video or pop-up for some extra pep in your promotional campaign.

5. Create a Dynamic Path™ experience to create a series of games promoting your Father’s Day campaign

The Dynamic Path™ allows you to create far more sophisticated contest experiences. You could make a series of levels, or a series of contests that could be released in the build-up to Father’s Day, giving you multiple chances to engage your audience and giving your audience multiple chances to win a contest.

The Dynamic Path™ gives you access to all the game engines on the Drimify platform, so your contests could take the form of all the examples listed here, as well as many more – a customised, branded game of Pacman, or a branded game of Basketball, Rugby, or American Football. All the content in the game engines are fully customisable to your prize giveaways: your branding, your copy, your prizes, and your terms and conditions.

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