If you were given $100,000 to travel anywhere in the world for a year where would you go? Earlier this year, the travel-planning agency
Jauntarooposed this question to the world in their
Best Job Around the World campaign. Fans and world travelers alike were given the opportunity to win this incredible price by recording and submitting a 60 second video that makes their case for why they should be the ones to win.
With the prospect of winning a year long trip around the world, this user-generated content(UGC) campaign was sure to be a huge hit. What they didn’t expect was just how successful it would be and the viral buzz it would create. After the story was showcased by major news outlets and shared across social media, traffic hit such a spike that it crashed their servers and took their page down for half a day.
While it is a marketers dream for their campaign to ‘go viral’, a brand’s image is hurt if the campaigns online experience doesn’t function properly—even if it is only a temporary issue. Running a successful campaign requires a huge amount of contingency planning to ensure you are prepared for all eventualities.
Here at Thismoment, we have worked on countless Fortune 500 UGC campaigns. Here are some of key elements we have identified to make your campaign successful.
Low barriers to entry
Don’t let your fans struggle to contribute their content. Entry barriers should be minimal with only the most basic of information required. Any extra processes or requirements for entry will cause a significant drop off in submissions. That said, know your audience and know their online behavior. When Canon launched its Imagination campaign, they knew their audience already shared the photos they took with their Canon cameras on social sites like Flickr based on their research. Having an understanding of existing advocacy and customer behavior is key to any campaign success.
Mobile, mobile, mobile!
If you haven’t optimized your campaign for mobile experiences, you have potentiallylost 21% of your audience (and that’s not even including tablets). With a large variety of devices at our fingertips today, it is essential that your experience is optimized for any screen size to make it easy for users to be a part of your campaign.
An efficient moderation system
To ensure brands are protected from false and malicious content, it is essentiaon that they leverage tools to help them easily filter, moderate and manage user submissions. A lot of our customers create dedicated moderation teams to help them approve and remove inappropriate content.
A compelling reward
An opportunity to shareMake it easy for users to spread the word by using all the sharing, commenting and follow social functionality available to you. Consider the use of social hashtags
to make it easy for users to be a part of your community, like Nokia’s #Discover or Levi’s #501 or #MakeYourMark. Your users should be able to easily share their entries with their network, delivering you more impressions, votes and engagement.
Patience is a virtue
Successful UGC campaigns are not born overnight. Promoting your UGC campaign before you open it up for entries can help to create a social buzz. Once the campaign is running, maintaining an extended content submission window is essential. Limiting the entry window can seriously hurt a campaigns performance, as often a campaign will take a few days to start driving the desired results. To expedite this process, creating example content will help drive interest to your campaign.
User-generated content campaigns are an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. Ensure that your contest experience drives maximum engagement and runs smoothly for both your brand and your fans by following our best practices.
Abhishek Lahoti
Senior Director of Product Development
Abhishek Lahoti
@tmshake
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