So if you’re thinking of running a contest or sweepstakes, here are some key considerations.

Start With the End in Mind

Brainstorm on the following questions before you go ahead with a social media contest.

• What are your marketing objectives? Get a clear and realistic objective to your contest campaign. Are you looking to generate leads or Likes, engage or activate your existing user base or reach a new audience?
• What is your budget? Yes, social media promotions can be executed at a relatively low cost. But budget considerations should guide your decision on the type of promotion you choose to run and will impact your ability to achieve certain outcomes.
• Where are you on the consumer engagement pyramid? Assess what type of promotion is right for you based on the level of engagement you expect from your users.

Whats In It For Me ?

The above  is the question every individual asks when doing an activity. Your target audience needs to be clearly communicated about the privileges or advantages of participating in the contest. Besides it needs to be brainstormed about how to make this contest attractive. So that your target audience can actually participate and spread the word.

Plan, Prepare and Prepare for the Unplanned

Though you might reap the benefits of a successful social media promotion or viral message, there should always have in place a proper marketing plan.

Make maximum utilization of resources available,  be that social media, paid media or promotional partners. Don’t overlook any opportunities to get the word out.Participation at the outset will generate the ROI that comes from social sharing. And remember that your existing customers are most likely to engage. By targeting them first, you can build momentum that will spread through their social networks.

Lets all hope that the promotion “goes viral,” it’s not something you can bank on. Nevertheless, it’s important to plan for the scenario in which it does. If you’re running a photo contest and plan to moderate all of the submissions, are you prepared to handle the potential volume? If you’re running a contest on Facebook, are you prepared to manage the community dialogue?

The Johnson & Johnson viral contest required “round-the-clock” support

Execution Over Concept

Too much glitter might ruin the art. It is important to keep things simple to focus on the objectives of the promotion.When running a social media promotion, the first rule is ensure that it’s easy to enter and easy to share. It should be creative , yet simple,fun and cool for your audience to share. Avoid complicating the activity when audience comes to visit your promotion.

Listen, Engage and Learn

Running promotions must be part of your overall social media strategy and not approached as a one-off event. Because promotions today are inherently social, take advantage of that to engage and gather target audience insights. Adding a survey question to the entry form, encouraging conversations help you  gather feedback and apply learning’s to future campaigns.

What are your experiences with online contests and social media promotions? If you have questions that you would like to see addressed in a future blog post, feel free to ask them here.

Contact Details, Web marketing Academy Bangalore

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The cream of digital marketing and entrepreneurs gathered at Christ University on 21^st of April as Online Marketing Enthusiasts meet up. The event started with an introduction of attendees and members followed by a small introduction about OME Community by Suresh Babu. Mr. Manjunath G then took the podium to preside this event on the topic “B2B Digital Marketing Best Practices”.

B2B Digital Marketing Workshops Bangalore

Click Here for Pictures of the event

Manjunath G is currently the Global Marketing Manager at a global corporation and prior to this; he has contributed in organizations like SAP Labs, Wipro and Redington in various marketing functions from product manager to Global Marketing roles across various geographies. He has more than 10 years of experience in various marketing functions like strategic & product marketing, digital marketing, B2B lead generation, social media, search engine marketing & sales enablement in Information Technology & Services Industry. The engineer from Bangalore University and manager from IIT Madras, Manjunath is today a Certified Digital Marketing Professional from Web Marketing Academy.

Power Tips Session:

1. Sagar Mandal : Quantcast – (www.quantcast.com)
2. Name Not Known : BulkPing – (www.bulkping.com)
3. Suresh Babu :
   1.  LuckyOrange- (www.luckyorange.com)
   2. Google Internet Stats –( http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/)
   3. Live Fyre  (www.livefyre.com)
   4. Conver Social (www.conversocial.com)
   5. SGPlus (http://sgplu.me)
4. Name Not Known: Using Images in terms of graphs and star ratings to appear on SERP for more clicks.

 Minutes of Meeting:

The presentation started with a brief interaction between the presenter and the attendees on the question – “Is B2B Digital Marketing Different or Difficult?” The various inputs gathered veto the fact that B2B Digital Marketing is different because:

• Sales Cycle is very long compared to B2C
• Too many touch points within a department and /or  enterprise
• Involvement of many individuals  in the Sales Cycle
• Limited Budgets
• Lack of alignment between sales and marketing

The next slide was even more interactive as Manjunath asked the attendees to write down “3 Goals & Objectives from Marketing Perspective”. After the discussion Manjunath, defined the B2B buying persona as consisting of: Users, Decision Makers, Influences and Stakeholders.

Manjunath then expertly narrowed down to the various methodologies that can be followed to reach the goals and objectives:

• B2B- Search Engine Optimization: It is important to know what are the keywords used by your target market and what type of transaction takes place for those particular keywords. According to the consumer behavior, the website should be optimized for those particular keywords.
• B2B – Social Media: Organizations should use social media as a way to increase brand awareness and communication for the benefit of the organization by revenues, sales or understanding demand for new products. The importance should be given to engagements with the online community to meet the goals and objectives.
• B2B – Email Marketing :  For B2B email marketing it is important to look into the three factors – deliverability i.e. the email should reach the inbox instead of spam ; relevant content with a Call To Action to meet campaign objectives and understand the perfect day and time to send the email to your target market.
• B2B – Blogging: Corporate blogs can be a face of your business as a thought leader in your sector of industry. An amazing way to interact with your employees, stakeholders, suppliers and consumers.
• B2B- Google Ads & Videos: There was a lot of discussion on the effectiveness of the Google Ad words and Videos for the purpose of meeting the marketing objectives of the organization.
• B2B- Webinars: According Manjunath, this is a very much sort after methodology to generate leads to sell products and create a buzz about the new products/services.
• B2B- Media Pitching: Numerous organizations publish news articles and cover stories based on new products/services on various websites visited/read/followed by the target market.
• B2B- Marketplaces & Testimonials: Listing products/services on various online marketplaces helps in brand awareness and the online user’s comments/reviews contributes to decision making of the consumers. Provided the reviews are positive for the product/service.
• B2B – Press Releases, Newsletter, Case Studies & Whitepapers: Sharing is caring and when enterprises spread information through the various mediums, they become a part of community interested in the products or services of the enterprises.

After the interactive presentation which involved both the presenter and audience come together to share their views, Manjunath came up with the case study. It is based on a real life success story on the ability to make a webinar go viral using 360 degree Digital marketing.  Manjunath faced many questions both technical and strategic to which he gave his best shot. He concluded the presentation by presenting the Tip of the Day – “In Digital Marketing Never Stop Testing”.

Ensuing Questions & Answers :

Q:What is email marketing ?

A: Information to your target market in terms of deals, information about your products.

Q: What type of contents in the email?

A: It depends on the type of campaign and relevant content for your target audience.

Q : What are the open rate best practices?

A: It should not land into the spam folder, should have relevant title and content for the target audience.

Q : How to prevent spam?

A: Headline should be clear, should   not contain spammed keywords, content should be proper format and it should have option for subscribers to un subscribe from the mailing list.

Q: Is it possible to extract email address from facebook Likes

A: No

Q: How much content should be put in the email marketing campaign?

A: Content is important part in every email marketing campaign and should be relevant to the profile of the target receivers.

Q: What are the uses of blog marketing for a brand?

A: It is a window for the brand to showcase its thoughts & success stories directly with the target audience. The brand can later utilize them for understanding trends and creating new products.

Q: What kind of people can be involved in blogging for B2b?

A: Blogging can involve the brand mangers, executives , employees and part of the B2B buying persona who can share their experience and success stories associated with the brand.

Q:  Any free tool for webinar?

A: AnyMeeting (http://www.anymeeting.com/) provides free webinar services for a maximum of 200 attendees.

Q: What are the idle times for conducting webinars?

A: India – weekends US – Morning

Q: What is tool to measure traffic on marketplaces?

A: Marketplaces provide info about number of views reviews and downloads. Google Analytics can be used to track the number of incoming traffic from the marketplace.

Q: What is the use for Whitepaper and Case Studies?

A: It can be used to showcase the brand as a thought leader or expert in the industry. Enterprises also use it as a tool to generate leads about interested prospects.

Stay Tuned for May OME Meetup. Our May Event is going to be a day long event with Workshops and more:  We post all our updates, pictures and videos here in Face book. Join the conversion and get exclusive content

With large opportunities come a large number of choices for the consumer, which brings up an uphill task for the marketer to “sell”. The large growth canvases provided by the metros have already been highlighted, which indicates it is time for marketers to set sights beyond for traction. Here are four exciting arenas marketers should look for in 2012.

Middle India

Cities have always been regarded as “engines of growth” with access to Man, Material, and Money, whereas villages are regarded as the “Bottom of the Pyramid” providing opportunities to provide low cost products and services. But as times have changed “Middle India” has been the hero of the all – India growth story over the past few years. Middle India is composed of towns comprising of population between 1 lakh and 1 million people. It is not something fictional as Nielsen Company published in December 2011 after continuous research, supports the under-rated opportunity.

Typical Middle India towns are Haldia, Serampore, Bijapore, Hajipore, and 400 other such towns . Over 100 Million Indians live in Middle India, and according to the research estimates by the year 2026, the FMCG market alone will be worth Rs 4 trillion. The per capita consumption of  FMCG products in these 400 towns stood at Rs 2,800 versus Rs 1200 – the all – India number.

Marketers need to understand the behavior of the consumers in this market segment to be a part of the ” Middle India Gold Rush”. It is time the global market launch should include these towns beside the usual gamut of Indian metros.

Digital India

The new face of India is the rapid increase in use of digital technology and digital media. Today, more than 120 million Indians are subscribers of an Internet Service Provider, more than twice three summers ago. ”Take the world in your hands” is a fact today with more than 40 million Indians availing internet access on their mobile phones. Further research published by JuxtConsult ( India Online Landscape 2011) enlightens that over 4 out of 5 internet users either search or buy online- translating into a half a billion online consumer base.

Further insights have revealed that an average Indian spends 45 minutes on Facebook  in a day. The huge number of smart phone users with apps adds up further to the consumer base for brands to interact and take opportunities. The recent hit of the “Kolaveri Di” song, reaching more than 50 million users globally is a measure of the impact and spread of internet.

The digital media playing field in quite huge providing accommodation to a list of brands, but yet to be utilized to its fullest potential. This year the marketers need to take the online test for their brands and get rewarded with the vast target market to be acquired.

Green India

In the year 2007  the Supreme Court had  decided to include “Environmental Education” a mandatory part of the curriculum of every educational board. The publishers may have made some new business, the students may have struggled but 5 years later, today, there is an increase in preference for  ”Green” products and services. The 2011 Green Brands Global Survey, conducted with 9,000 consumers across 8 nations shows that more than 64% of Indians have an affinity for green products. Significantly, nearly 48% of consumers are willing to spend an extra 10% for environment-friendly products.

Marketers need to take efforts to create green products and services and market them accordingly to the target audience. Every product should be associated with “greenness” as a measure of being environment friendly. Communication should be based on how the brand and/or the products contribute to the environment or  are environment friendly. Interactions with the target consumers should be revolving around conserving the environment with the featured products.The first – mover in this segment shall be the significant gainer, else the brands would miss the flight to profits altogether.

So take the first move to capitalize on the digital spread in India. Watch the best practices to B2B using Social Media Marketing tested, and followed by Manjunatha, and more details on the latest Online Marketing Enthusiasts community meet up here : https://www.facebook.com/events/123418927781987/