Posted by Donna DeClemente on 10th March 2010
Earlier today I wrote about this promotion and posted it on The Lip-sticking Blog since I am the guest blogger for Wednesdays. So I’m posting it here as well.
Wednesdays are my guest It’s tax season again, the time of year that we all love to hate,
especially us small business owners! I handed over all my papers to my
accountant a couple of weeks ago which of course is the hardest part of
the job. I have two daughters that are both in college now so I was
excited to learn that I’d be getting some tax credits for this. My
oldest daughter is in her second year, in what I believe to be the #3
most expensive college in the U.S. – NYU!
Anyhow I recently received an email advertisement from the Neat Company in which they invited me to “Tame the Paper Monster this Tax Season” and enter the “Paper Monster-Less Tax Day Giveaway”. So it got my attention and I clicked through to learn more.
They’re promoting their NeatDesk scanner
and digital filing system that digitizes and organizes documents, such
as all those little receipts that you need for tax time. Their website
has a brief, instructional video that demos the product and clearly
states it’s features and benefits. I’m liking that more and more
companies are using videos online to communicate their products or
services. Very smart online marketing.
Also what I like is that this promotion is very simple. They’re giving
away 10 of these little NeatDesk products with the intent to “spread a
little organized, digital love this tax season”. So I clicked on the
“Enter Now” button and was taken to this blog page which told me about the two ways I could enter the sweepstakes:
1.
I could comment right on the blog post telling them how NeatDesk will
help me reduce paper clutter and simplify my life at tax time. They
reminded me to use a valid email address so they can contact me if I
win!
2. Or I could follow The Neat Company on Twitter and re-tweet the contest by posting a pre-written tweet that includes a short url and the hashtag #papermonster.
So
I did both, entered through the blog promotion and through their
Twitter promotion. The Neat Company currently has 1,245 followers, now
including me. I did a search for #papermonster and found a whole page
and more of others who “want to Tame the Paper Monster” as well.
Yesterday I attended a breakfast event in Rochester with guest speaker Peter Shankman on social media which I wrote about on my blog here.
Peter’s advice was to keep it simple (so it can be retweeted) make it
fun and make it relevant. This sweepstakes promotion does it all. Now I
hope I win one of these little wonders. Will make my life in 2010 much
simpler.
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Posted by Donna DeClemente on 4th March 2010
My Lip-sticking blog leader, Yvonne DiVita, has mentioned BlogPaws several times over at that blog and I wrote about it here in this post back in January. We’re
now just a little over a month away now from getting together in Columbus,
Ohio with a large group of pet bloggers, online pet enthusiasts and pet
brands for BlogPaws 2010. Yvonne and her partner, Tom , who work together on the Scratchings & Sniffings pet blog, together with Caroline Golon of Romeo the Cat, came up with the idea of BlogPaws last year. Since then they’ve been very busy turning it into reality.
Now you should check out the BlogPaws website
and learn all about it. I am one of several committee members, most who
are pet bloggers, helping to organize the event. Now while I am a
blogger, I am not a pet blogger. I do have several pets though…2
dogs, 2 cats and a chinchilla who my daughter left in the care of my
husband and I while she’s away at her first year in college. My blog
is focused on marketing with an emphasis on promotional and social
media marketing, which is what I primarily blog about here as well. So
while I’m excited to be on the ground floor of this great new online
community as a committee volunteer, I am also really looking forward to
being a speaker as well. I’ll be part of the Contests, Sweepstakes, Promotions – Nuts & Bolts panel along with Jenny Cisney, Chief blogger for Kodak, Hollis Thomases, Web Ad.vantage Blog and Jane Couto, MomGenerations.com.
So in light of my promotional marketing background, and as a way to promote the event, we’ve developed the BlogPaws or Bust Sweepstakes
which we just launched on Monday. We’re giving away two grand prize
travel packages to Columbus which include round-trip airfare from
anywhere in the continental U.S., two nights hotel accommodations at
the Westin Columbus
(where the event is taking place) and a pass to attend BlogPaws 2010.
We’ve also thrown in three second place prizes which are free passes to
the event.
Now we’re using a web-based application tool to run
the BlogPaws or Bust Sweepstakes which enables us to launch the
campaign simultaneously on our website, on our Facebook Fan page and on Twitter all at once. This app creates a micro-site that can be either embedded or linked to a website or blog and added to any Facebook
fan page. The Twitter option
gives extra entries to people who tweet
about the sweepstakes and are successful in getting their followers to
enter. I’ve now used this app several times for a few of my clients and
have been happy with the results, but this is the first time I’ve used
the Twitter option.
The application, called Wildfire, is included on Facebook’s Preferred Developer list and is in compliance with Facebook’s promotional guidelines
that they recently released in December. Facebook now states that you
need prior approval to run a sweepstakes or contest on their platform,
however, by utilizing this app prior approval is not necessary.
So this is a very cost-effective way to get a promotion up and running
on multiple platforms quickly and fairly easily. This makes it a great
tool for anyone who wants to integrate a promotion with their social
media efforts, what I call Social Sweeps promotions.
The app offers a premium or standard version that helps to fit within
most budgets. We’re utilizing the standard version for the BlogPaws or
Bust Sweepstakes.
So whether or not you want to join us pet
enthusiasts in Columbus, please check out the sweepstakes and go ahead
and enter and please let us know what you think about the promotion.
Follow any of links above to get to the entry form.
Oh yeah,
we’re also having a Twitter Party tomorrow night where we’re giving
away some great prizes. Please join the fun if you can for a
#blogpawspawty on Thursday, March 4 @ 7 pm EST. You can get more info
on this here.
Hope to meet some of you in Columbus!
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Posted by Donna DeClemente on 27th February 2010
Back in October I announced that my company, DDC Marketing Group, was expanding our services to include a variety of social media marketing solutions under the umbrella of Social Sweeps promotions. Since then I’ve been assisting brands as well as other agencies and marketing services companies incorporate social media into their promotional marketing strategy.
Recently we assisted our friends over at the American Sweepstakes and Promotions Company launch a sweepstakes on the Facebook platform for one of their clients, MSC Cruises. Visitors to MSC Cruises’ Facebook fan page are invited to enter the Splendors of Fall Sweepstakes for a chance to win a fall foliage cruise for two. Once someone enters the sweepstakes they are invited to post it on their Facebook wall and then they can send an message to some of their Facebook friends inviting them to enter as well. So by integrating a sweepstakes promotion with the viral features of social networks it enables participants to easily spread the word and create positive brand awareness for a company far more widely and cost effectively than ever before.
We again utilize the Wildfire application for this promotion that enables marketers to launch campaigns such as sweepstakes, contests, coupons, surveys and quizzes simultaneously on Facebook, on a website, and also on Twitter. The Wildfire app creates a micro-site that can be added to any Facebook fan page and also either embedded into a webpage or linked to it. It includes a Twitter option that gives extra entries to people who tweet about the sweepstakes and are successful in getting their followers to enter.
The Wildfire application is included in Facebook’s list of preferred developers and is in compliance with Facebook’s promotional guidelines that they released back in December. Facebook now states that you need prior approval to run a sweepstakes or contest on their platform, however, by utilizing this app prior approval is not necessary.
The application is a very cost-effective way to get a promotion up and running on multiple platforms quickly whether you chose the Premium or Standard campaign versions. We utilized the Premium campaign for the first time for the MSC Cruise Sweepstakes which allowed us to create a custom design using a CSS Style sheet to fully integrate with MSC Cruises’ graphic theme.
What’s great about running these promotions on a Facebook fan page is that it enables marketers to reach their customers and prospects where they are online instead of having them have to come to them. With Facebook now claiming to have over 350 million active users worldwide and over a 100 million in the U.S., they cannot be ignored by marketers any longer. In fact January data recently released by Compete states that Facebook took the #2 spot away from Yahoo as the most popular website in the U.S. with over 134 million visitors during that month. Plus. according to January numbers released by Nielsen, Facebook users spent more than seven hours on the site.
So I would like to extend an offer to anyone interested in learning more about our Social Sweeps promotional services and the Wildfire app and how we may assist you with your marketing programs or your client’s to please feel free to contact me. Also if anyone else has any experience using the Wildfire App I would love to write about your promotion it here.
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Posted by Donna DeClemente on 2nd February 2010
Did anyone watch the NFL’s Pro Bowl this past Sunday? I didn’t and not many of us did either since it got some very low viewership numbers. It does seem odd having it the week before the Super Bowl. Not sure why and who made that decision. This year
Super Bowl XLIV between the
Indianapolis Colts and the
New Orleans Saints should however draw some big numbers. Last year’s Super Bowl game between the
Pittsburgh Steelers and the
Arizona Cardinals was the second-most-watched game ever with 148.3 million people at least seeing part of it. This was just behind 2008’s record-breaking game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots.
So which advertisers will make out this year? Last year I wrote this post in which I included results from Reprise Media’s 5th Annual Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard which told us that 95% of Super Bowl advertisers were visible on the first page of organic search results and 69%, 2/3 of the advertisers, bought paid search keywords on their brand and products. The advertisers that direct people to their website with a specific call to action are the ones that can really make their investment pay off.
Last year Denny’s promoted it’s Grand Slam breakfast giveaway and traffic to Dennys.com soared 1700% as consumers visited the site to find details of the promotion and find directions to their nearest restaurant. And Denny’s didn’t even include a URL in its TV ad for the free breakfast promotion which ended up a good thing since it’s site crashed right after the ad aired and was down for the rest of the game. Nevertheless, it brought more than 2 million consumers to its restaurants on Feb. 3 for the giveaway.
Denny’s is back this year with two 30-second ads and one 15-second spot promoting another giveaway offer similar to last year’s. This time, Denny’s will offer a free Original Grand Slam in its restaurants on Tuesday, Feb. 9, between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. The first ad will appear in the third quarter, the second during the fourth quarter and a third will appear just before the game’s two-minute warning.
Denny’s is also integrating an extensive social and digital media program into the mix by creating exclusive webisodes utilizing the characters from the Super Bowl spot and featuring them on their Facebook Page, on Twitter as well as a radio tour. The chickens featured here are from the sneak peak of the spot that Denny’s posted here on Facebook. Denny’s is also running a sweepstakes promotion on their website for a chance to win a free Grand Slam every week for an entire year by joining Denny’s Rewards.
So we’ll have to wait and see who the winners are after the game is over. It’s always hard to beat free food!
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Posted by Donna DeClemente on 16th January 2010
Borrell Associates held a great webinar yesterday in which they invited me to attend since it was about interactive promotions and that’s a lot of what I write about here. It was titled “Use the Internet to Tap Faster-Growing “Promotional” Dollars. They spoke mainly about the use of coupons, contests and of course plain old promotional offers.
This chart shows the steady growth they predict we’ll see in online promotions up to $21.7 Billion in 2014 .
Online promotion on the local level will see growth as well growing from under a billion in 2009 up to $3.6 billion in 2014. So these are good signs for any of us involved in the promotional marketing business.
Online couponing is predicted to skyrocket. In 2009 34% survey of respondents said that they received their coupon online vs. 47% that still get them in the Sunday newspaper flyers.
We saw a huge jump in coupon usage over the past year which is logical since Americans have been looking at every way they can to save money during these recessional times. Total coupons went from 317 billion to just under 400 billion at 394.2 The following chart predicts what we’ll see in coupon usage going forward in 2010:
Coupons.com is by far the leader in distributing online coupons in which they currently have 2.3 million monthly visitors, me being one of the regulars. Coolsavings.com is second with 1.6 million and third is couponcabin.com at 1.2 million.
Next they went through several very successful case studies of contests and sweepstakes that were executed by local media. KTTV in Los Ageles tied in with the theatrical movie release of New Moon and gave away tickets to the premiere showing. They gathered 12,000 new email addresses to add to their database.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune partnered with Gander Mtn. to conduct the Reel ‘em In Fishing Photo Contest. They received over 1200 submission, 2700 registrations and $35,000 in sponsorship dollars! You can see the top winning photos here.
And of course some of the most popular and successful promotions just offer a really good deal.
The TV morning news program for OK43 brings representatives from local businesses to come on for a 3 minute segment each Wednesday to talk about their business and to announce the half off deal. It seems that they have combined a cooking or food segment with a deal offer. What a great idea!
Offering one exclusive deal per day drives people to visit your site. Woot.com is one online website that generates excitement around the limited time offers. Sometimes the deals sell out, making it even more crucial that a user visit the site each day.
So thank you Borrell Associates for including me in the session. It’s great to get some updated stats and hear actual results from a promotion.
BTW – Borrell Associates is getting ready for their Online Local Advertising conference taking place at the Grand Hyatt in New York City on February 8-9. It’s called “the Business of Making Money” Conference. Sounds like a good one to attend. I’m considering going, but not sure of my schedule yet! Let me know if any of you are planning on being there.
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