Challenges: Setup Best Practices How to set up effectively engaging Challenge campaigns to generate UGC, increase site traffic and put your biggest fans to work.
Introduction
Gigg Challenges are the heart of Gigg’s brand engagement platform. If executed properly, they can be a very effective way to engage your existing fans as well as attract new ones. Like any marketing campaign, they do take effort. In the end, however, you will not only have engaged your followers in a unique way, but you will have new, organic and authentic user-generated content (UGC) that you can then use on your websites, social media profiles and other marketing channels.
In this article, we will focus on the more complex challenges that are typically hosted on your site and/or challenges.gigg.com. Having run hundreds of these challenge campaigns, we wanted to share a few tips and tricks to help maximize your return and keep your followers engaging with your brand and remaining excited for future challenges, as well.
For the purposes of this article, we’ve broken the tips up into two main categories: Successful Challenge Criteria and Marketing the Challenge. Without further ado, here are a few of our suggestions with links to good and less good examples:
Table of Contents
Successful Challenge Criteria
Content Type:
-
Make it video: Video content is best. People love to watch videos and will spend more time on your site and engaging with your brand and challenge when there are interesting things to watch. Image competitions (unless photography focused) are a distant second, usually.
-
Make it desirable: Ask for content that people will want to consume! If your challenge is exciting/fun, people will want to come and watch and participate. If you aren’t excited about it, they won’t be, either. A before and after fitness challenge (like the one highlighted here) worked really well because people were proud of their progress and the general public is typically enticed by before and after fitness photos. It's something positive that people want to share about themselves.
-
Make it easy: Where possible, make the content easy enough to produce that almost anyone can enter. Think about content that is either easy to create or that your followers might already have on their phones. For example, song cover competitions can be great if you’re a band, but you won’t get TONS of entries, most likely. If your prize is unique enough, though, those few entries will work really hard to send people to your challenge for votes (See the Bands/Music example below for some additional clarification). However, a funniest fail caught on your home camera is something that a lot of people already have and the general public will love to watch (see Family/Home Videos example for more on this).
-
As a rule, it's great if you can tie the competition to your product or brand, but it is absolutely NOT necessary. If you're going to lean a direction, lean toward a competition idea that the public will actually enjoy entering and enjoy consuming rather than something very strictly related to your brand.
Prizes:
-
Make it unique: Main prize needs to be either completely unique or quite valuable. It doesn’t need to be cash. As a matter of fact, unless the cash prize is quite large, an experience does a much better job enticing your fans to enter the challenge. Your brand probably has product, connections or opportunities you can leverage to make your grand prize as, well, grand as possible.
-
Multiple prizes: Think about smaller prizes for entrants, voters, etc, throughout the challenge. The more chances there are to win, the more often people will come back! You can use Gigg's social challenges (included in your Gigg subscription) to automate the process and run these smaller challenges right from your social accounts. As a matter of fact, use the heck out of social challenges! A few ideas might be: prizes for the most consistent voters or prizes for voting for the winner during the first round will also help.
Promoting/Marketing the Challenge
The Intro Video
-
The intro video is your fans's first introduction to the challenge. Make sure it's done correctly. This article will walk you through the criteria needed to give it the highest chance of success.
Using Social Media
-
Use influencers: Your brand's existing relationships (or new ones you'd like to forge) are a great way to get the word out. Utilize their reach to get their followers involved.
-
Post often: As is the case with any good social media account, frequency matters...a lot. Have your brand channels, influencers’ channels and anyone else post about the challenge often throughout the duration. Sharing past entries, experiences, anecdotes, advice, invitations, social challenges (more on that below) to Stories, Reels, Posts and anywhere else are all welcome. The more effort you put into getting the word out, the more people will know about it and the more likely you are to get more entries. More entries means more eyes on your challenge and/or site.
-
Post everywhere: Don't just share on one platform. Share on all of them. Share via email or newsletter. In short, share with vigor and vim.
Using Ads
-
Using your typical marketing efforts can only help with Gigg Challenges. There have been many a time where our clients have put about $200-$500 toward Facebook Ads (as an example) to really blast the word out about their challenge and it made a huge difference. Don't be afraid to market your challenge in the ways you typically market your brand.
Other Helpful Hints
If Submissions are a Little Slow:
-
Run an ad: For a relatively small cost, you can dramatically increase your challenge'sPromote a post on Facebook/Instagram or run an ad
-
Recruit entries: Go find and invite people who have already made a qualifying video and invite them to enter. If you’re doing a mountain biking video, go find some
-
Run a social tag competition: Give smaller prizes to random people who tag their friends on one of your social posts about the challenge.
-
Use Influencers! See more under the "Using social media" topic here.
-
Give smaller, frequent prizes: As mentioned above, give smaller prizes using Gigg's social challenge types to continuously engage and reward those who are entering your competition, promoting it and engaging with it often. For more on how to setup and run social competitions, see this article.
Poor Quality Submissions
Most of the content won’t be professionally produced and could be downright poor quality. Don’t worry about it! Remember that your goal is to have a You just want to create a challenge where your entrants are willing to work hard to send their friends and family back to your challenge to vote and participate. In the end, the production quality is irrelevant.
