How a Month-long Pet Photo Contest Received More Than 7,000 Votes and over 1,200 entries
Since it’s the end of the year, we like to revisit the most popular articles and case studies from the past 12 months — the collection of which can be found on our homepage. Looking back at top content helps us see what our readers found to be the most helpful and valuable content, and it helps you to know what your peers are looking for.
This year, we published two case studies back-to-back in the B2C and Inbound marketing channels covering the efforts of My Pooch Face, a site that provides acrylic and digital pet portraits. Both popped up as the most popular of the year, so I decided to dig back in and focus on a portion from my notes that was previously unpublished.
David Lefkovits, Founder and CEO, My Pooch Face, and his team launched a Pet Photo Contest on October 26, with the aim of running it six days until the end of the month. They used a dedicated page www.mypoochface.com/photo-contest and also the link www.vote4mydog.com, which re-directed to the same page.
It was launched the evening of the 19th with a post on the My Pooch Face Facebook page at 10 p.m. People were asked to upload a cute picture of their pet and then ask their friends, family and colleagues to vote. The photo with the most votes (whoever had shared it the most) would win an acrylic portrait of their pet.
The system of customers promoting the contest organically to start saw results that “far exceeded my expectations for a Facebook post,” said David.
Just two hours after it was posted to Facebook, the contest had 24 entries, 575 visits to the website and 142 votes (with only one vote allowed per IP address).
At that point, the My Pooch Face team decided to push it forward a bit by reaching out to an Instagram influencer with over 500K followers who had worked with the brand before, @mydogiscutest, to promote the contest. Also, the team sent out an email to the database informing that audience about the contest.
For at least a half an hour after that email send to the email subscriber base of over 60K, they saw an average of 180 people on the site concurrently. That send was followed by two others during the life of the campaign.
This campaign also helped My Pooch Face obtain “a few thousand new subscribers with whom [they] intend to build valuable and lasting relationships that [they] can convert into customers in the future,” David said.
David provided metrics from each stage of this six-day contest showing its progression. The results below are from a half an hour after the email send — under 24 hours after launching:
These are from a little under 48-hours after the launch:
Finally, David said, the contest concluded 30 days after launching with over 1,200 entries, nearly that many likes, and over 44K visits to the landing page. The winner alone had 324 unique votes.
“This is one of those lead generation and brand awareness campaigns that does not come across as sales-y,” David said. “[It] is a lot of fun, heartwarming and exciting for our target market.”
The team’s total investment was $50 in social media ads to promote the contest, and “of the 44K+ visits, we were able to capture 3% of these via our pop-ups and lead capture strategies,” he said.
Now, he said they can also retarget that traffic through remarketing ad campaigns. Because of the contest’s success, David said they plan on continuing it quarterly.
You might also like…
Inbound Marketing: How a pet portrait site grew its audience cross-channel using content and social media – My Pooch Face’s first case study
B2C Marketing: How a pet portrait site increased website session duration by 37% with a customer-focused design – My Pooch Face’s second case study
B2B Marketing 2016: How marketers used data and testing to nurture prospects through relevancy
B2C Marketing 2016: How marketers changed their messaging to drive conversion
Categories: Inbound Marketing contests, facebook marketing, Inbound Marketing, my pooch face, social media
