Maximise your mothers day campaigns with online contests
Resources
Mother’s Day is a huge opportunity for brands and businesses looking to maximise sales and their marketing reach. According to the National Retail Federation estimates, 84% of US citizens planned to celebrate Mother’s Day in 2022, and would average $245.76 per person – that’s a lot of money, $31.7 dollars to be exact, $10 billion dollars more than was estimated to have been spent on Father’s Day, and up by over $3 billion from 2021.
While the numbers won’t be quite as high in the UK, Canada, and Australia, because the populations just aren’t as high, the Mother’s Day concept and significance, as well as reverence to mother figures generally, is culturally universal, so the date represents a lot of opportunity for businesses the English-speaking world over. Because every brand with a stake in the Mother’s Day game will be playing for keeps come March or May (depending on where you live), it’s important to make the most of the occasion by setting your marketing campaign apart from your competition.
This is where including online contests and competitions as part of your marketing campaign comes into play.
The aims of an online contest
“So why bother with an online contest or giveaway?” I hear you ask. “Aren’t we trying to make sales here?” Well, yes, obviously, but by introducing online contest or prize giveaway ideas as part of promotional campaigns you can help your business and brand in the following objectives:
- You can maximise brand visibility because people LOVE free products, and love free products all the more when the free product is an exclusive prize
- You can help your brand’s marketing campaign stand out by making it more participatory and social, by having gamified, playable elements
- Online contests make it far easier to “ask” for personal information, and can be far more effective at encouraging users or participants to opt in to marketing newsletters
- As well as including a grand prize, you can use the online contest to give everyone who participates and provides an email address with a promotional code to incentivise purchasing and help increase sales
- You can include calls to action (CTAs) in your the copy of your contests to drive traffic to your strategic website pages
- You can help to grow your social media communities across different social media platforms
Creating an online contest to support your Mother’s Day promotion, whether you’re an online retailer, a restaurant, or another type of business that will benefit from more customers and increased sales in the build up to the day, is a great way to maximise your marketing efforts.
Top 5 ideas for online contests to support your brand on Mother’s Day
Here are 5 types of online contests and competitions that really can be effective additions to your Mother’s Day marketing campaigns.
1. Photo and Video Contests to appeal to the more creative and outgoing members of your target audience
Every target customer these days is carrying a Smartphone that makes the digital cameras of the 2010s look and feel about as relevant as overhead projectors and fax machines. In their day, having a good one made you feel like James Bond, but now it takes an Olivier award-nominated actor to play a Q who has to convince the movie-going public that he’s giving the eponymous hero something that won’t look stone-aged within a couple of generations of the Iphone or Galaxy. The point is that today’s smartphones are unbelievably good, and for the purposes of a Video or Photo Contest, you can take advantage of the fact that nearly all people have the equipment to shoot and edit high quality videos and photos sitting in their pockets.
The Photo and Video Contest game engines can be easily customised to your branding, your graphic design, your copy, and your prizes. You can encourage participants to take photos along a particular theme, or record a heartfelt or humorous video message to their mother, and submit them with a witty caption. You can then use some of the highlight entries to further promote the contest, and then invite audiences back to vote for a shortlist of winners which you can approve of.
Exactly how you customise such a media contest is down to your own creativity, the needs, aesthetics and values of your brand, and the nature of the product or experience you’re promoting for Mother’s Day, but if executed well, you can create a game that will appeal to the social and creative whims of your audience, source a lot of user generated content (UGC), and have a contest that’s practically tailor-made to thrive on social media platforms.
2. Instant win games customised around popular Mother’s Day gifts
Why would a customer buy a gift when they can win an even better gift? I know, I know, you’re looking to maximise sales with your prize giveaway, not literally give stock away, but bear with me…
Let’s say you’re selling and promoting a type of gift that will be a popular gift for Mother’s Day like a particular fragrance. Offering a Scratch Card or a Spin the Wheel to give your audience the opportunity to win a limited edition bottle of your finest new perfume would most likely make for an amazing Mother’s Day gift. You can customise the prize wheel or Scratch Card background images to run through a range of perfume related prizes with limited numbers (which you can of course customise), but could send all participants a promotional code, which would encourage more sales of the product at a time of year where it will experience a significant peak in demand.
Again, the allure of the limited edition top prize could make it a really successful online contest when it comes to getting across social media, and you could even include call to actions (CTAs) to encourage more followers, and more visits to your strategic website pages.
3. A gamified contest to deliver a more immersive experience
There are a range of game engines that can be customised on the Drimify games creation platform, but something that might work from the perspective of encouraging email signups or newsletter opt-ins would be a piece of gamified content.
For example, you could invite users to play a Memory Game or a Pacman game customised to your brand’s graphics and copy, or if it’s more appropriate to your customers, a Crossword as an enticing brainteaser. You could make it clear through the content on your game that all participants opting in to your newsletter will be eligible for a prize draw or receive a special promotional discount.
3. A Product Recommendation Quiz for the clueless adult child
It’s a classic trope, the slightly clueless adult child who has no idea what to get their mum for mother’s day, and somehow couldn’t get it more wrong if they tried. An oven glove? A cake stand? A scented candle? From the borderline offensive to the safety play, that disconnect between the child’s noble intentions but their lack of expertise is a great opportunity to introduce a holiday-specific Product Recommendation Quiz.
With a Product Recommendation Quiz, you start with your results: in this case, your results are the items you’re promoting. For example, let’s say it’s a range of beauty packages. Your questions then help the participant, or the user, to use what they know about the intended recipient to help inform their purchase. By essentially educating and helping a user, you can potentially get them to sign up to your marketing newsletter as if your information is good, it’ll help them make future gift purchases. Birthdays and Christmases present much the same challenge to clueless gift buyers as Mother’s Day.
Obviously this sort of game works best if you have a specific range to promote near Mother’s Day with clear points of difference for different user types. You could also include a prize giveaway for all participants who provide an email address to offer that extra incentive to engage with your content.
5. Build Mother’s Day into an event by creating a digital calendar of online contests
Remember, Mother’s Day is a big deal, maybe not as big a commercial opportunity as Christmas, but why not borrow the concept of the Advent Calendar and make it a bit shorter, like over a week or a few days, but ultimately make Mother’s Day more of an event.
Using the Dynamic Path™, you can make a series of online contests and games using all the game engines and mechanics on the Drimify platform. You could have them released on specific dates to give your audience multiple chances to win, and give you multiple chances to capture data and get your messaging across, and deliver more than one call to action (CTA). The other advantage of delivering multiple contests is that you’re getting multiple chances to promote your experiences across social media. By promoting more than a single individual contest you maximise the marketing potential of the whole promotion.
Want to know more?
