My Marketing Strategy

Nicolette Lemmon, President & Founder

As you venture out into the online world, there are always contests to encourage consumers to send photos for a contest, enter videos to win a prize, write stories of their experiences, and leave comments on blogs. As a business person, my issue remains that there must be a strategy for the activities – ultimately to build the brand and sell products/services. It’s not always obvious how those consumer generated content avenues work.

Usually, I avoid these offers, until last week. There was a new contest mentioned online for HGTV.com and that happens to be one of my favorite cable networks. When checking out the contest page, I noticed a simple boxed ad for entering an audition for the HGTV Super Fan. This was finally something that I could not resist!

My daughter and I created a fun one-minute video to mark the success of decorating her new “pre-teen” room. I uploaded it with ease to their Super Fan site and was pleasantly surprised to see it uploaded the next day.

Check it out:

As a market research project for myself, Amanda’s video has had 472 views in 8 days which was incredible for me to imagine the high interest level of the HGTV fan base. However, there were no posted criteria, no timeline of the contest, and no description of how the video “auditions” were being judged. Friends mention how they hope she will win, yet we have no clue since there is little information available on the site.

The key takeaways for offering a customer-generated promotion?

• Give complete information including the beginning and end dates
• Manage expectations of the participants by describing how their participation is of value
• Provide additional touches to email addresses provided by participants to keep them informed during the contest