Video contests are becoming a very popular way for brands to help make their mobile marketing campaigns go viral. By letting all your customers, fans, supporters, and followers know you’re having a video contest, you create a marketing machine by which they can all interact with your brand in hopes of winning some kind of in-demand prize. 
The prize can be anything, an iPad, cash, a trip, perhaps a showcasing opportunity for their business, etc – it’s all up to the imagination of the video contest designer. How do you do it? Let’s take a look:
Step 1: Determine the prize you will be giving away. Ideally it should be something related to your core business. Although this is step 1, it’s also the most important step in the entire process since the prize needs to be enticing enough for your prospect/customer to actually want to spend their own precious time creating a video in the first place. Just like the biggest obstacle to mobile marketing success is the ability to create value, so it goes for video contests as well.
Step 2: Figure out what the contestant must do to win and what timeframe will be established for the contest in general. For example, a golf course may make a summer contest for golfers uploading their funniest golf video at their course, and the video at the end of the timeframe with the most “likes” or “votes” wins. The reason this makes for such good viral marketing is that every one of these videos can be shared over social media where the video producer (your customer) is actually promoting the video themselves for others to vote on! – and when that happens, friends and followers of that contestant have a greater chance of noticing your brand than they would otherwise. (And the cost to you is absolutely nothing!)
Step 3: Create the interface that implements the contest. This is the part where most business owners need to turn to a certified mobile marketer since they most likely lack the resources to create the software and develop the technology that does this themselves. A good viral video contest allows for direct upload of a video (or the ability to link to videos on YouTube or Vimeo). You can tell contestants to create a video, upload it to Youtube, and have it featured on your contest page for others to vote on and like. The next part is crucial: you need to have links to social media associated with every video displayed on your contest so voters can share the content with their friends or ask friends to vote on their specific videos. This is what makes it go viral. Having the contest housed on your Facebook Fan page makes the entire implementation go smoother since it’s a great way to get people “liking” and interacting with your Fan Page as well. Mobile marketing companies can do this entire setup process on your facebook fan page for about $120 – a small price to pay for the literally thousands of likes you’ll get on your page as a result of establishing a video contest.
Step 4: Promote your contest initially to get the video contest going. One easy way to do this would be to create a video yourself announcing the contest and display it on your website, contest page, or facebook fan page. But being mobile marketers, we know of an even better way – send out a mobile campaign announcing the contest and get people involved via their mobile devices! Email blasts with a link to your announcement video aren’t a bad idea either, but we all know the stats on email response. Mobile is the way to go! If you’re serious about marketing results, you no doubt have already implemented a SMS text message mobile marketing campaign and have a strong list of permission-based opt-in cell numbers…. right? This is why mobile is so important! Generating the list allows you to use it as a tool to further enhance the viral nature of campaigns such as video contests. You see how these are all inter-related!
Step 5: Once launched, continually keep the program going by providing mobile updates, twitter posts, and Facebook status updates to let everyone know where the contest stands and who’s winning. This will keep the video contest in the forefront and have eyeballs constantly aware of its status, which in-turn further promotes the viral aspect of what you’re achieving.
The benefits to your business and brand of implementing video contests are threefold:
- Your brand is going viral without any real cost to you other than time (and possibly the contest setup if you outsource the production to a mobile marketing agency).
- You are getting more and more “likes” to your facebook fan page (if you implement the contest on your Facebook fan page and “force” people into the “like” before allowing them to access content)
- More people are subscribing to your SMS text message marketing opt-in database (because you’re including an actionable item into your marketing campaign as in “text KEYWORD to SHORTCODE for <BENEFIT>”)
And of course the REAL benefit of this entire procedure is the increase to your business’ bottom line in the form of more sales for your product and/or service. Until now, only the big-time companies had the resources to create these viral video contest campaigns. It’s your turn now. Consult an established mobile marketing company and get your video contest going right away for some really effective low cost mobile marketing!
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