The key to organizing an annual contest is to provide users with new motivators to keep coming back. You can do this by either bringing in different dynamics every year, changing the contest’s topic, introducing new products or features, or organizing promotional campaigns to catch participants’ attention.
So, let’s take a look at some examples of what big companies and entities have done to organize their annual contest online.
Annual Before & After Voting Contest
The Eastwood Company is an automotive restoration solution provider headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA that provides DIY customers with the tools, know-how, educational videos, and technical experience to assist them in their automobile restoration projects.
Knowing that car enthusiasts put a lot of work into their rides and want to show off the results, they organize Virtual Car Shows and ask participants to send before and after photos and videos of their restoration projects. With this action, Eastwood gathered valuable UGC and increased brand awareness and product visibility while engaging its audience both in the entry and voting stages.
Annual Contest to raise awareness
This example is less of a digital marketing action and more of an awareness raising one, and a heartwarming too. Organized by the “Club de las Malas Madres” and Cinfa Pharmaceiutical, «Ellas cuentan» which can be translated from Spanish as “They tell (their stories)” but also as “They matter”, is a charitable event to support and give voice to women facing different kinds of struggles in life such as disease or kids with special needs.
In the shape of a yearly Writing Contest, this initiative, which is celebrating its third edition in 2023, gives voice to women and mothers that live maternity differently or have a challenging life story that needs more visibility and support. Participants submit their story for public voting and the five most voted stories then move on to the final stage in which a jury picks two candidates per category who receive funding for a treatment, workshop, or any other kind of support they might need.
Annual Photo Contest by Greenpeace
As in the case of the NGO Greenpeace, your marketing strategy should include yearly contests. With a promotion like this you can increase brand awareness, increase your followers in social networks and promote your values and services. With Easypromos you can set up a Multimedia Contest in which participants submit photos, videos or PDF documents and create excitement around your brand. Users are always on the lookout for discount and prize opportunities. Therefore, organizing a contest that offers prizes is a good way to collect user generated content easily.
Let’s take a look at an event that we look forward to every year. The Greenpeace Photo Contest. Every year, users submit their nature or wildlife photos in the hopes of being featured in Greenpreace’s magazine or calendar. Pretty stunning images, aren’t they?
Malaga city festival Pick your Favorite annual contest
If you’re looking for community engagement for your project, it’s a good idea to involve them in some sort of decision making for your event. For instance, you could ask for users’ opinions through a popular vote to choose a new brand image, a new product or service, an event’s poster…
With the Pick your Favorite app you can get people’s feedback through a transparent and trustworthy process. As a matter of fact, the Spanish city of Malaga did just that and asked its citizens to vote for their favorite poster for the annual city festival. And if you’ve ever been to Spain, you probably know that city festivals are a BIG deal.
Being a public contest, transparency, fairness, and trust play a major role. In order to guarantee that, our platform provides an anti-fraud system made up of 11 security controls to prevent invalid votes.
With Easypromos you can create a Voting Contest and set it up to select the winner through a popular vote. What’s more, you can set up a public gallery to display the images, videos, or texts in a vertical or gallery view mode, and ask users to vote their favorite to select a winner.
Keep in mind that you can share the contest in your social media and web page using the promotion’s url. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Annual Photo Contest
This is another photo contest example. We are pretty sure you’ll agree with us in that these are great marketing tools for all kinds of businesses. You can use the submissions to promote the contest itself while promoting your product or service. Take a look at the example of the SCUBA diving website Diving Specials. Every year they organize the popular photo contest Miss DIving Specials, where women from all over the world participate for the chance to win a diving cruise. Interesting, isn’t it?
This kind of contest will help you gather user generated content (UGC), promote your brand, build customer loyalty, and obtain new leads for later email marketing campaigns.
Annual Company Photo Contest to engage the community
The Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway Company organizes an annual photo contest and asks participants to send pictures of their locomotives, facilities, maintenance crews, etc. The company then chooses the best 12 photographs and features them on the company’s calendar. Additionally, the grand winner among the 12 finalists gets a cash prize.
With this action, the company not only engages its audience and strengthens brand awareness, but also gather high-value, high-quality UGC for a fraction of the cost of a professional photo shoot.
Reasons to use Easypromos for your online annual contest.
Easypromos offers several tools to make it easy to configure your promotion and to maximize participation:
- Every promotion has its own url that you can share on social networks, in a newsletter, or embed in your website.
- You will get your own participation and engagement statistics to use in your monthly or yearly reports.
- Copy the same promotion feature available. You can store one or more copies so you can use the same promotion the following. You will have the same configuration and save time.
Are you ready to set up your yearly contest? Do you have any questions? Contact us via live chat. Our customer support team will be happy to help.
