The bank didn’t name the client, but its disclosure followed turbulent trading on Wall Street involving forced sales of stockholdings by a large, low-profile U.S. investment firm.
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Federato | Head of Software architecture | Senior SWE | Remote |Full-time | www.Federato.ai
We are an impact driven startup helping insurance companies optimize their portfolio through reinforcement learning and dynamic optimization. We’re an early stage startup backed by VC’s in the Bay area.
We’re looking for:
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If you’re interesting in learning more, please contact me at wsteen@federato.ai
SEEKING FREELANCERS | Coding mentor (for high school students) | paid/side-hustle/contractor | Remote | US citizen or work authorization
Polygence is looking for software engineers to mentor high schoolers in webdev, gamedev, app development (iOS and android), and more. Data analytics projects (especially sports analytics) are also quite popular!
Polygence serves tons of students with 2-5 years of coding experience who want to take on a passion project. We match them with a mentor to help guide them in their project (https://mentor.polygence.org/projects). You could be that mentor!! Students are generally 15-18 years old. Most have taken AP CS or equivalent and are comfortable in Java or Python. They love learning. And can’t wait to build fun projects.
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Interest Form: https://mentor.polygence.org/interest-form
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American pet owners are some of the biggest spenders online, pet food and pet supplies being second only to vitamins for e-commerce.
Online spending for this $70 billion industry is growing year over year.
In fact, direct-to-consumer (DTC) pet brands have exploded in popularity: Over five years, the online pet product sellers saw a compound annual growth rate of 24 percent.
From special-diet foods to raincoats for dogs, desirable pet products can be very specific. Paid ads on search and social let you bid on relevant keywords to hyper-target an audience that perfectly fits your brand.
In this article, I’ll give you nine ways to use paid ads you could effectively market to pet owners.
Downtown Pet Supply, an Illinois-based company that makes its own products and sells them both online and in their store, wanted to improve its e-commerce sales and expand customer reach.
They turned to marketing firm Tinuiti (then called CPC Strategy) to help them do that through Amazon. Tinuiti decided to utilize Amazon Coupons targeting pet owners based on their Amazon search histories.
After one year, Downtown Pet Supply’s revenue increased by 40 percent, and its advertising cost of sale (ACoS) decreased by 18 percent.
That’s the power of using paid ads to target pet owners.
Common Thread Collective reports 13 percent of pet supply sales happen via e-commerce channels—and that’s expected to grow drastically over the next several years.
The anticipated increase in e-commerce purchases for pet supplies is largely because of convenience and value. However, shoppers also appreciate being able to find a larger selection and compare prices more easily than in brick-and-mortar stores.
Even for brick-and-mortar establishments, paid ad campaigns can extend customer reach and raise awareness of their brands.
Here are the best ways to harness the power of paid ads to help your company boost revenue.
When pet owners go online, they’re looking for a solution to an immediate problem. It may be their pet is sick, and they want to know why. They may need chew toys or a scratching post. Or, they may just be looking for a convenient place to buy everyday pet supplies.
The most common question pet owners ask is, “Why?”
Here are the top 10 questions pet owners ask Google:
Why do dogs:
Why do cats:
Each of these questions presents a micro-moment brands can address through ads or content marketing. They also create starting points for keyword research.
Typically, your content marketing addresses those micro-moments for your users. Blog posts and articles can answer those health, feeding, grooming, and other questions.
But, you don’t have to rely solely on SEO to get those posts found. You can also promote your posts through social on platforms you know your audience is using.
PetPlate, a meal plan subscription service for dogs, created this promoted pin on Pinterest to boost a blog post called “Tips for Welcoming a New Puppy Into Your Home.”
By directing users to their blog posts through Pinterest ads, PetPlate not only raises awareness of their brand but sets themselves up as a thought leader in their space.
One major benefit of paid ads is the reliability of keywords. With organic search, you’re essentially making a well-researched guess about which keywords will perform.
With paid ads on Google, Facebook, and other platforms, you bid on keywords that already perform. High-performing keywords cost more, but they may not even be the keywords you want.
Instead of getting lost in a sea of ads vying for the most popular keywords, try going after less expensive keywords with lower, but steady performance.
For example, “pet beds” is a generic, popular keyword a lot of companies are bid on. However, if you sell, say, “machine washable cat beds,” consider going after those keywords instead.
Whatever you do, make sure your keywords match your target audience as well as your product or service.
Pro Tip: If you want to direct traffic to your products, insert the word “buy” in front of a keyword. For example, for “pet beds,” try “buy pet beds.”
Millennials are the largest pet-owning demographic in the U.S., according to the American Pet Products Association (APPA).
APPA President and CEO Bob Vetere says, “We know this generation is willing to pay more for quality products and services to improve the health and well-being of their pets. Today more than ever, pet owners view their pets as irreplaceable members of their families and lives, and it’s thanks to this that we continue to see such incredible growth within the pet care community.”
According to a study by online retailer Zulily, 77 percent of millennials prefer to buy certain pet products—toys, accessories, and food—online. However, there are no pet products strictly bought in-store these days, so it’s important to know where you can reach this audience.
Luckily—or unluckily, depending on how you look at it—”Millennials utilize a diverse range of platforms since many platforms were released while they were growing up. Facebook is the platform that they utilize most frequently, often multiple times a day, followed by YouTube and Instagram,” according to GenGuru.
However, since they grew up as social media started taking steam, they’re also on pretty much every other social media site. Trying out all sorts of new media is normal for them.
This all means you should not just look at the age group but also try to discover where products like yours fit the best. Then, put your money where it’s more likely to reach your target audience.
Purina wanted to learn if in-stream ads on Facebook could lift brand awareness with mobile users for a new product in their Fancy Feast line of cat food, Fancy Feast Savory Centers.
In the first phase, they tested a variety of videos for other pet brands they owned, playing with length and messaging. They learned short, clear ads lifted brand recall, video views, purchase intent, and offline sales.
With that knowledge, they repurposed an existing TV ad for Fancy Feast Savory Centers to a web video. In the process, they shortened it to fewer than 15 seconds and ensured it had a clear message with or without sound. They tested it against the TV ad to see which better raised brand awareness.
They ran the test for six weeks through Facebook In-Stream Reserve, a line of premium ad spots, and found an 11 point lift in brand recall, 12 point lift in brand awareness, 91 percent video completion, and 1.5 percent incremental lift in sales.
You don’t necessarily have to target the most expensive video packages online as Purina did, but video and images can have a big impact on your paid advertising online.
Consider another example.
Below, there are paid ads for pet beds on the left and right sides of the Google search results. On the left are text-only ads, and on the right are Google Shopping Ads that feature images.
Google found 50 percent of online shoppers are more likely to purchase if there’s an image of the product.
To convert and keep new customers, you have to build relationships with them. Offer something that makes their lives, and the lives of their pets, easier.
If you’re already a service-based brand, that’s pretty easy to do. If you’re product-focused, you can still provide a service.
Let’s take another look at PetPlate.
Their paid ads for their product actually spin it as a service. They provide fresh-cooked food for dogs so owners don’t have to.
This ad showed how PetPlate could solve a problem for its audience.
Brick-and-mortar stores and services might consider targeting a particular geographic area, something that’s very possible with Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms that allow for hyper-targeted advertising.
Of course, veterinarians, groomers, and other service-based businesses can benefit from geo-targeting on social. However, boutiques and small businesses that sell pet food and other supplies shouldn’t overlook the power of location-based social media ads.
According to Zulily’s study, millennial pet owners prefer to shop for some products in person at smaller, locally owned pet shops. Those products include treats, bedding, and clothing items.
If you want to get super local, check out a social platform made for your area. A commonly-used app, Nextdoor, lets advertisers both pay for ad space and engage with users in their immediate areas.
Nextdoor may be a good choice because they report 45 percent of users have at least one dog and 25 percent have at least one cat. They also note that pets are a regular topic of conversations on their platforms. Why not become part of the conversation with paid ads?
There are two types of influencers pet brands can go after: Humans and animals.
There are plenty of human celebrities and influencers across social media who include their pets in their content.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Nick Jonas, for example, regularly feature their dogs Diana, Gino, and Panda on their Instagram accounts.
The second type of pet influencer is the furry, scaly, and feathery type. Pet influencers, particularly cats and dogs, have a huge presence on virtually all social media platforms.
In fact, pet influencer content has a higher engagement rate than overall global engagement. While cats rule the internet overall, dogs are actually more popular on Instagram.
There are all kinds of pet celebrities out there, from cats and dogs to pigs and hedgehogs.
For instance, Waffles the cat is a celebrity on Facebook with 2.4 million followers.
Meanwhile, on Instagram, Tuna the dog commands a following of 2.1 million.
Take a look at your audience and their social media habits. Who are they following? Do they have two legs or four? Then, choose the influencer that best fits your brand and your goals.
Paid ads on search and social media are an effective way to market to pet owners. It gives brands the opportunity to reach very specific audiences for their products and services, and then measure the success of each campaign.
Pet owners spend a lot of money online, and knowing where and how to reach them could help you increase conversion rates to your own pet supply site.
How could paid ads help your pet supply brand?
Are you a minority woman in business? Or are you starting a business? Money is always going to be an issue. What if you could get what is essentially free money? That’s what grants are – for the most part. So it would behoove you to look into business grants for minority women.
How do you find the best options for you? How do you know if you need to be looking for grants or business loans for minority women? We recommend that you explore every option. This is because it will probably take a combination of funding options to fully fund your business.
There are business loans for minority women. But they’re often not for them exclusively. But there are other funding choices out there. Loans, crowdfunding, and even angel investors are all viable options. More on those later.
The government and private organizations want to GIVE you money! They’re highly competitive and rarely enough to fund a business on their own. Still, grants are a great way to supplement other business funding. And they are still worth the effort to apply. There really isn’t anything to lose except time – it’s free money. Here are a few you can start with.
The Amber Grant awards one prize of $10,000 per month to a woman-owned business. One of the recipients also receives an additional $25,000 grant at the end of the year. Applicants only need to tell their story and turn it in with a $15 application fee. See ambergrantsforwomen.com/get-an-amber-grant/apply-now.
This award is for women but there’s no specification that a woman be a member of a minority group. The Cartier Women’s Initiative Award has a regional category award and a science and technology award. The regional award is $100,000 for first place, and $30,000 for second and third place.
The award goes to three women from each of seven international regions. This award is a grant to 21 female business owners from around the world each year. Women business owners who are just getting started may qualify. Look over the complete application for more information. See cartierwomensinitiative.com/about-us.
The Cartier Science and Technology Pioneer award is new as of 2021. With this award, three more women impact entrepreneurs at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation will get recognition. Open to women entrepreneurs from any country and sector. This award will highlight disruptive solutions built around unique, protected, or hard-to-reproduce technological or scientific advances. The laureate will get a $100,000 grant. Each of the two remaining finalists will get a $30,000 grant.
Cartier also offers a fellowship program. The fellowship is an educational program geared towards the 24 fellows selected each year. The fellowship program aims to equip the fellows with necessary skills to grow their business. And it helps them to build their leadership capacity. It does so by drawing upon the experience and expertise of many academics, practitioners, industry experts, and entrepreneurs.
The fellowship isn’t exactly a grant. But while it’s not a monetary award, the mentoring and networking opportunities could be worthwhile to apply for. See cartierwomensinitiative.com/fellowship-programme.
Demolish your funding problems with 27 killer ways to get cash for your business.
Also known as NBMBAA, the Scale-Up Pitch Challenge has cash prizes from $1,000 to $50,000. The association’s purpose is to help newer businesses with African American ownership. This is a pitch competition for startup businesses. See nbmbaa.org/scale-up-pitch-challenge.
The US Department of Commerce runs the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA). It works to help minority-owned businesses get the resources they need to grow and succeed. The MBDA is not just for women. Grant competitions are regularly changing.
Visit the MBDA’s website for info on all current opportunities. Currently, the MBDA helps its members apply for grants via Grants.gov. This involves help with how to apply for government grants. See mbda.gov/grants.
The MBDA oversees the Enterprising Women of Color (EWOC) Initiative. The initiative focuses on the fast-expanding minority women entrepreneur population as a revenue generators for families, communities, and the nation. Minority women are the fastest growing population of entrepreneurs. While many women are making tremendous strides in the business world, they still face obstacles as entrepreneurs
MBDA is an advocate for women’s economic empowerment. They support efforts to advance women’s equality and promote women economic advancement programming. The vision of EWOC is to ensure women worldwide reach their economic potential. See mbda.gov.
The Verizon Small Business Recovery Fund is new. It is in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The fund offers $10,000 to successful applicants. The fund specifically focuses on providing grants to business owners of color, women-owned businesses, and other underrepresented entrepreneurs. See lisc.org/covid-19/small-business-assistance/small-business-relief-grants/verizon-small-business-recovery-fund.
Demolish your funding problems with 27 killer ways to get cash for your business.
The mission of this group is to offer grants that help Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Native Americans. These grants are for any gender. So you would be competing against Native Hawaiian, Alaskan, and Native American men. They help in the application process in addition to funds.
First Nations also helps point individuals to appropriate grants offered by other organizations, including the US government. This includes help with writing grant proposals. See firstnations.org/grantmaking.
The NABDI Grant is funded by the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is not just for women. It provides funding to business owners of Native American or Alaskan Native descent. In 2019, the program provided more than $727,000 to 21 indigenous tribes. So this was to support economic feasibility studies for specific economic development projects or business startups.
For 2020, NABDI planned to award 20-25 grants. There is no minimum or maximum amount of funding you can request. But most awards range $25,000 to $75,000. They only fund projects for one year at a time, which is when they expect projects to be completed. To apply for a NABDI grant for your proposed economic development feasibility study, go to bia.gov/service/grants/tedc/apply-nabdi-grant.
There is more available via the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Businesses owned by Native Americans can get financing from the federal government through the Indian Affairs branch. These are not just for women. An individual can fill out an application for up to $500,000. But business entities and tribal enterprises may apply for more.
Potential borrowers can apply with any lending institution, they just have to use the application for Indian Affairs. Additional requirements are in place if the funds are used for construction, renovation, or refinancing. In general, you must supply a list of collateral, a credit report, and an analysis of business operations. See bia.gov/as-ia/ieed/loan-guaranty-insurance-and-interest-subsidy-program
If your business is in the arts, and you’re of South Asian descent, then check out this fund. The fund is operated by the India Center Foundation. It is designed to support US-based South Asian arts workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic
The fund will disburse grants up to $2,000, depending on financial need to US-based arts workers of South Asian descent. This includes those in the performing arts, film, visual arts, and literature. It’s for people with heritage from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Initial funding for the program is $20,000. But the India Center Foundation is soliciting donations to expand the grant program.
Applicants must be of South Asian descent, work in the arts and demonstrate loss of income due to COVID-19. Additionally, applicants must be at least 21 years old. You can’t be enrolled in a degree program. Plus they must be able to receive taxable income in the US. Grant funding can go toward any artistic project you can develop, create, and present within 4-6 weeks of getting funding. See theindiacenter.us/artsfund.
Demolish your funding problems with 27 killer ways to get cash for your business.
The federal government gives out grants to all genders and all races. Grants.gov is a running list of over 1,000 available government grants. So this includes minority business grants. The website compiles grants from more than two dozen government agencies. These are agencies like the SBA, USDA, and the US Department of Commerce. To find grants right for your business, use the Search Grants tool on the site. Sort the list of grants by keyword or opportunity number.
Once you have located the grant you wish to apply for, click the hyperlinked opportunity number for more detail. There, you will find more information about the specific grant as well as any associated documentation you might need. To apply for a grant through Grants.gov, you must first register. Then, you will be able to download an application package for the grant you want. Be ready for a lengthy process. See grants.gov.
If you’d rather not rely on grants so much to start and run your business, crowdfunding is a viable option. Still, not everyone with a campaign on a crowdfunding site is successful. This is because more unique products and services tend to do better. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are two of the most popular crowdfunding platforms to use. Some platforms may have higher success rates for women than others.
Angel investors are informal investors. So essentially, you are selling a part of your business to them. They tend to not want a huge percentage of your business. And they won’t pass by more conventional businesses, like with crowdfunding and venture capital. Hence they can be another supplement or replacement for grants.
If grants aren’t an option, loans might work. So if you’re an immigrant, try the Business Center for New Americans. They offer a pilot program for microloans up to $75,000. They work with immigrants, refugees, women, and other minority entrepreneurs. The goal is to help minority business owners who have not been able to get traditional financing. Terms are 3% interest. Loan repayment term goes up to a year. See accompanycapital.org.
So there are several options for grants for minorities and for women. Minority women should apply for grants they feel they are most likely to get. Other options for funding include crowdfunding, angel investors, and loans. Credit Suite can help you get the funding you need.
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Biden compares state voting bills to Jim Crow, never mind the facts. The post ‘Jim Eagle’ and Georgia’s Voting Law appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.
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It’s a pay-to-play world. From social media to Google Ads, companies invest thousands of dollars a month into paid ads. However, there’s a lurking metric you might not be tracking: your PPC churn rate.
When it comes to paid ads, most marketers and business owners track metrics like click-through rate (CTR), quality score, and cost per click (CPC). While those are important metrics, they tell only part of the story.
If your PPC conversion rates are high, but your overall revenue isn’t, the issue might not be your ad. It might be that your customers aren’t sticking around.
What is the elusive PPC churn rate, and, more importantly, why should you care?
Your PPC churn rate is the number of people who convert via paid ads but don’t hang around. They might buy or subscribe to your product or service from a paid ad and then decide to end the relationship.
It’s similar to a standard churn rate in that it tracks the number of customers who convert but then leave your company. However, your PPC churn rate looks specifically at the customers who convert from your paid ads from platforms like Google Ads.
Most PPC metrics tell you how well your ads convince people to buy. For example, CPC tells you how much you spend to get one person to click on your ad. Conversion rates tell you how often people actually purchase from your paid ads.
Those critical metrics let you know if your ad and landing page match, if your targeting is on track, or how well your copy speaks to your audience.
There’s also a lot those metrics don’t tell you.
For example, how well does your onboarding process work? Do your ads focus on the features customers care about the most? Are customers disappointed with your product or service?
Let’s look at a (fictitious) example to see why PPC churn rates matter. I’m looking for a grammar tool, so I type in “grammar help.” The first ad is for Grammarly, and it says it will help me eliminate mistakes and find the right words.
Say I decide to purchase based on that ad. However, a few weeks down the road I find the tool didn’t quite meet my expectations. Maybe it didn’t work as well as I had hoped, was too hard to use, or I found a better solution. I end up canceling my subscription.
Does that mean the ad didn’t work? No, the ad did what it was supposed to do, but something along the way didn’t meet my expectations.
If Grammarly is only tracking their PPC conversion rate and not their churn rate, they might not realize they are losing customers until it’s too late.
Here are a few things PPC churn rate can tell you:
If you aren’t paying attention to what and why customers are leaving, you might be wasting valuable ad spend on customers who won’t stick around.
To calculate your PPC churn rate, you’ll need to calculate how many customers sign up from your PPC ads and then how many customers from paid ads you lose by the end of the month.
The formula you’ll use to calculate churn rate is:
(Customers who left by the end of the month / Customers from PPC ads at the start of the month) x100
For example, if your business has 100 customers who converted from PPC ads at the beginning of the month, and it loses 25 of those customers, you’d calculate your PPC churn rate like this:
(25/100) x100 = 25% PPC churn rate
One of the biggest challenges of accurately tracking PPC churn rate is following customers that convert via paid ads throughout their lifecycle so you can tell when they churn. If you can’t access this data, you can use your overall churn number, but it won’t be quite as accurate.
If possible, use a customer relationship management (CRM) system or other customer lifetime tracking tool to see where customers come from and when they leave.
Now you know how to calculate your churn rate and why it matters, but what happens if you realize there’s an issue?
If you are disappointed in your churn rate results, there are several ways to improve them. Let’s look at a few.
The first step to addressing a high PPC churn rate is to identify why it is higher. This can be a challenge because there might not be an easy answer, or you might have several issues!
Start by looking at things like:
Perform a competitive analysis and UX testing to try to locate the cause. Customer reviews may also shed light on where customers are struggling.
If you can find the source of your high churn rate, obviously, you can lower it. However, what if the cause of churn isn’t clear? Let’s look at a few other strategies.
One of the best ways to reduce churn rate is to make sure your customers are happy. After all, satisfied customers are far less likely to leave.
Here are a few ways to improve customer loyalty.
Rewarding long-term customers fosters a bond between your brand and your customers. Consider offering high-value customers early access to new features, a dedicated customer support line, or a free month for signing up for a new year.
One of the top reasons customers churn is poor customer service. Don’t make customers wade through terrible documentation to figure out how to use your tool or service. Create an easy-to-use FAQ or video documentation and consider using a chatbot to provide timely service.
People like to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. Creating a community lets die-hard fans interact with other customers, allows you to interact with customers, and can drive user-generated content you can use in other marketing efforts. Use a platform like Facebook, Reddit, or Slack to create a place where your customers can get tips, make new friends, and interact with your team.
Customer friction refers to anything that makes your customer’s life more difficult. For example, poor UX, a lack of training for customer support teams, or hard-to-navigate documentation. Making it easier for customers to buy, navigate your website, and get information improves customer loyalty by ensuring customers can get what they need quickly.
Good customer service is crucial to reducing your churn rate. Nothing makes customers cancel faster than struggling to get a hold of support when they have a question or an issue.
Start by responding quickly to messages and posts on paid ads. For example, Sipsey Wilder ran this paid ad on Facebook for their hip bags.
The ad has several hundred comments, and the brand made sure to respond to questions and requests from customers.
Responding provides customers with the information they need and establishes trust.
Here are a few more tips:
If customers know they can get in touch with you and count on you to help them, they will be less likely to cancel your product or service when they get frustrated.
Paid ads might convince a customer to convert, but the onboarding process can make or break how the customer feels about your brand.
Ensure your onboarding process is seamless. If people are confused about how to use or even set up the service your business provides, you have an issue. If customers don’t understand how to use specific features, they might not get any value from your product or service.
Here are a few ways to improve the onboarding process:
You could also test your onboarding process every few months. There’s a good chance what works now might not be as successful in six months, or you might find that specific types of customers need more (or less) support during the onboarding process.
If you’ve ever left a job, there’s a good chance you were asked to do an exit interview where the company asked why you were leaving and what they could do to improve. These interviews allow companies to gather honest feedback about things like work culture and management decisions.
Cancellation surveys serve the same purpose: Understanding why customers are leaving allows you to improve and prevent other customers from leaving.
When people go to cancel, attach a survey with just a few questions. For example, when the user clicks “cancel,” a question box could come up and ask why the customer is leaving.
Make it easy to complete by offering a multi-choice answer without too many choices so users don’t get overwhelmed and click away. For example, “too expensive,” “went with a competitor,” or “no longer needed the service.” Create an “other” option with an answer box so customers can leave more detailed feedback if they wish.
Tracking the effectiveness of paid ads starts with tracking metrics like CTR and quality score, but it shouldn’t end there. Tracking your PPC churn rate highlights issues that can tank long-term profits.
Start by figuring out why your churn rate is high and remember that several different issues may contribute to customers leaving.
Next, focus on improving customer loyalty, making it easy for customers to reach you, and streamlining the onboarding process. Finally, ask churning customers why they are leaving. You might find the answer to your problems is an easy fix; and if not, our agency here to help.
Are you struggling with high PPC churn rates? What strategies will you try first?
Instagram accounts that hold contests can achieve up to 70% faster follower growth than accounts that don’t hold contests.
If you want a popular Instagram account, coming up with and executing some Instagram contest ideas is a great start.
In this post, we’ll explore how you can use Instagram contests to raise brand awareness for your business.
We’ll also dive into some of the best practices to keep in mind when running your contests.
By the end, you’ll know how to run a successful Instagram contest that will bring your business the attention it deserves.
There are other ways to get more Instagram followers, of course, but few other methods can increase your follower numbers so quickly, and with such minimal effort.
Not only that: Instagram contests can also help you achieve more engagement.
Posts that are related to Instagram contests tend to earn roughly 64x more comments and 3.5x more likes when compared to ‘normal’ content.
On top of that, 91% of the posts that have achieved 1,000+ comments are contests.
All of these stats show that running Instagram contests is one of the best ways to improve brand awareness.
If you’re worried about being stuck in a cycle of constantly churning out contests, all in the name of boosting brand awareness, don’t worry; you don’t need to continuously run contests to reap the benefits that good Instagram contest ideas can offer.
That’s because you’ll notice a trickle-down effect on the rest of your normal content as a result of running contests. People will feel a greater affinity toward your brand due to the goodwill you’ve generated with your contests.
As a result, they’ll be more likely to share and engage with your normal content.
Plus, because contests generate more followers, there will naturally be more people exposed to your content. This increases the likelihood that share and engagement levels will be higher than ‘pre-contest levels.
Before you run your first contest, you need to be aware of some important best practices. Failure to follow some of these best practices could mean that you’re going against the rules of Instagram.
It could also lead to your contest producing lackluster results, which can amount to a lot of wasted effort.
What are these best practices?
The first is to make sure that you write a clear and detailed description for your contest.
When writing the description for your contest, be sure to cover:
Doing things this way makes it easy for you to stay on the right side of the promotion guidelines provided by Instagram.
It is important that you don’t stray from the guidelines, as doing so could put your account at risk.
Here’s a great example of a contest description.
They’ve done a good job of making this detailed, so it’s difficult to fit into one image.
Here’s the first part, which helps establish a reason for the competition while also describing what’s on offer.
This second part does a good job of letting people know what they need to do to be eligible to win.
The next bit tells people how they can gain an extra entry. The terms of the contest are clearly shown, while also indicating how the winners of the contest will be announced.
By studying how others are writing their contest descriptions, you’ll learn a lot about what separates a bad description from a good one.
You also need to ensure you’re giving away relevant prizes that your target audience will feel compelled to have.
If you focus on giving away prizes that are relevant to your target audience, your contest will generate better results.
If the products you’re giving away aren’t specific to your target audience, you run the risk of attracting followers that don’t care about your business or the products or services it provides.
In the long term, this arguably does more harm than good.
Such individuals may unfollow your account after a contest, or simply not engage with your profile in the future.
By picking the right prizes, you can reliably attract the right kinds of followers and generate brand awareness among the best demographic for your business.
All of which helps increase the odds of you earning a return-on-investment from your efforts.
As you might have guessed, giving away items of high value tends to produce higher levels of engagement.
The chart below shows that prizes worth $1,000 or more generally achieve 5.8 engagements per 100 followers.
This figure is quite high when compared to the 1.7 engagements that brands enjoy when they give away prizes worth $99 or less.
If you want to give away a high-value prize, but you don’t have the funds to invest in one, consider arranging a partnership deal with another brand. Provided that you have a large enough follower count, there will be brands that are willing to provide a prize for your contest in exchange for some promotion.
The way you promote the brand that provides the prize should be low-key. In the description of the contest, simply mention that the contest is sponsored by a particular company.
This Instagram post shows how you can pull this off.
You also need to put some thought into how you’re going to announce the contest.
It’s a good idea to use a custom image within the post that announces the contest.
Here’s an example of how you can do that.
As shown above, there’s also the option of adding the terms of the competition to the image, too.
With all of that out of the way, let’s check out some of the contest ideas you can use.
The tag-to-win contest idea is nice and straightforward.
All you’re doing is asking people to tag a friend in the comments section so that they can enter the contest, as well, and become eligible to win the prize.
This contest format does a great job of improving your profile’s organic reach.
That’s because once people are tagged by someone, they’ll likely receive a notification.
These people will then check out your profile and potentially become a follower.
They may also tag others. This will create a viral feedback loop, bringing more people into the competition.
To increase the impact of this feedback loop, you can also ask people to follow your account in addition to tagging someone.
Here is an example of a brand that uses this strategy.
If you want to be brave, you can ask people to tag two people. This, again, increases the potential reach of your contest.
The contest below shows how this can be done.
Once the competition is over, pick someone at random from the comments section. You can use an automated system to do this so that the contest remains objective.
If one of the entry conditions is to follow your profile, cross-reference the winner’s account with your follower list to make sure that everything is in order.
An alternative take on this format, the ‘nominate a friend to win’ contest, can work equally well.
Instead of asking people to randomly tag someone, you can instead suggest that they tag someone they believe deserves to win.
With this kind of format, the winner of the contest will be the person who has been tagged, and not the person who left the initial comment.
With this Instagram contest, you ask people to like your content if they want to enter the contest and have a chance of winning.
You can even use the phrase ‘double-tap to win’ since, on the Instagram app, double-tapping a photo automatically likes it.
There’s also the option of asking people to like your brand on Facebook, making it easy to increase the visibility and, therefore, the impact of your contest.
If you want to boost your follower count, mention that people also need to follow your profile if they want to be eligible to win.
Here’s an example of how that can be done.
This profile has used the combination of asking people to follow and like, thereby increasing the potential engagement this contest can produce.
Instagram is arguably the home of selfies, so this kind of contest is a great match for the platform.
It’s a type of contest that works particularly well with products.
With a selfie contest, you ask people to post a picture of themselves while they’re using your product, or with the product somewhere in the background.
This contest format is especially useful for a business because it helps show potential customers how a product can be used. It’s an excellent form of user-generated content.
When writing the description for a selfie contest, create a unique hashtag and then ask people to use this hashtag whenever they post their photos.
You can find the pictures people have uploaded for this contest by searching for the hashtag on Instagram.
At the end of the contest, pick the picture that you think is best.
Make sure that, when you create the rules for a selfie contest, you add that you might use the content at a later date.
User-generated content can provide an excellent source of social proof. Long after the contest is over, you can repost the content that the contest generated.
Here’s an example of how you can do a selfie contest.
Similar to the ‘like-to-win’ example from earlier, you can combine the format of the selfie contest with the other contest formats we’ve already covered.
You could mention that people need to like the post that announces the contest as well as posting a selfie.
The photo contest is closely related to the selfie contest we just covered.
The difference, however, is that you’re not asking people to take a selfie. Instead, they can take any type of photo they wish.
Like before, you ask people to submit photos using a relevant hashtag that you create.
You then search Instagram using this hashtag so that you can find a winning photo.
With this kind of contest, you don’t always have to offer a physical prize for the winner.
You can just let people know that the prize is that you’ll feature their content on your profile.
Here’s an example of a photo contest of which relates to a Boston News channel.
Here’s another one from the Empire State Building Instagram account.
It may be that you have a product or niche that is perfectly suited to photo contests. GoPro is an example of such a product.
If so, you should place a special focus on running photo contests.
That’s because this format will be especially easy to pull off while also providing you with an abundance of user-generated content that you can feature on your Instagram account.
A voting contest revolves around the following steps:
This contest format is great at generating engagement because you’re asking people to take a lot of social actions. Plus, the people who enter the contest will promote their own entries through their social channels.
However, you could argue that such a format is potentially asking too much from people.
Because of this, you may want to use this contest format only when you have a highly-engaged audience that cares about your profile and its content.
With that being said, another way you can run this contest is by having people submit photos first, and then only you find them using the assigned hashtag.
Based on what you find, you pick 3-5 finalist images and host them on your own profile.
You then ask your followers to like the one that they think is best, and the photo with the most likes wins.
This approach can help you achieve great results with a voting contest without asking too much of your followers.
Here’s an example of a profile that is doing something similar, but instead asking people to submit the photos to the host’s account directly.
Here’s a bit more context.
Here’s an example of how someone might post their own content in the hopes of obtaining a vote.
When running this kind of competition, you can also ask people to post their contest content to Facebook, as well.
Then you can count the likes that people have gathered on that platform and combine them with what they’ve achieved on Instagram.
Doing things this way can help expand the reach of your contest, improving your ability to generate brand awareness.
A caption contest is a contest in which you ask people to caption a photo that you’ve uploaded.
From that point, you can either:
The caption with the most likes is the winner.
While the second option can be a good way to engage your audience, the first option can help prevent people from artificially inflating their likes.
Here’s an example of a caption contest:
You may want to edit the image you use to announce the contest so that it highlights the fact that you’re in need of a caption.
The speech bubbles in the above post are a good example of how this can be done.
If you’re in a position where you need to put together a contest in a short amount of time, a challenge contest can work wonders.
With this contest format, you just need to come up with a simple challenge for people to meet, and the person who solves the challenge wins.
The challenge doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, simpler contests generally draw more social engagement and participation.
The post below shows how this can be done.
All that’s being asked of in this contest is that people guess which number the account owner is thinking of.
It’s simple and fun. The spontaneous feel helps to increase the authenticity of the profile, too, which helps boost long-term engagement.
Here’s another example, this time using a ‘guess the marbles’ challenge.
This contest format is simple and low-effort, making it a good choice for anyone who is new to running contests on Instagram.
You should now understand how to use Instagram contests to grow brand awareness.
As soon as you run your first contest, you’ll find that the whole process is a lot of fun. It’s also probably much easier than you expected.
Decide on a contest theme, create the rules, and establish a dedicated hashtag. Increase user engagement by cross-posting the contest on Facebook.
If you’re feeling nervous about setting up your first Instagram contest, get in touch and we can help you strategize (and assist you with your other digital marketing efforts).
If you can encourage people to invite their friends to participate in the contest, do so. The more people who see your contest and content, the better.
Do you have any tips related to running Instagram contests?
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