six ways to motivate

6 Ways to MotivateConsumers Using Interactive Promotions

A Launchfire Whitepaper

© 2008 Launchfire Interactive.

INTRODUCTIONIf you play a part in the drive to achieve sales and marketing results for your company, you know you’re faced with challenges and opportunities that are historically unprecedented in terms of motivating your target audience to support your brand. The Internet has created a new breed of consumer: savvier, more empowered, more selective, and more bombarded with competing demands for time and attention than ever before.

Today’s consumers:can choose how, when, and where they will engage with a brand, and increasingly choose to do so • online;are used to being entertained at the click of a mouse by everything from music and video to games • and social networks; respect innovative marketing programs that value them as partners and participants, and that re-• ward them for their interest and engagement.

This has led to the emergence of a powerful new tool in the marketing mix: interactive promotions. These are online marketing programs designed to drive measurable, immediate results, and they include online contests, sweepstakes, advergames, and viral marketing programs.

A 2008 study by Borrell Associates forecasts that spending on interactive promotions will increase from $8 billion to more than $22 billion by 2012—at which point it will overshadow spending on both online advertising and search marketing. Borrell forecasts that much of this growth will be powered by online contests and games.

What’s driving this interest in interactive promotions? They offer a direct response to the fact that our media-and-marketing-saturated environment has ushered in a new value exchange between brand and consumer, one in which the brand has to deliver far more than before by way of incentives and rewards in return for consumers’ attention and dollars. Like offline promotions, such as point-of-purchase devices at the checkout stand, interactive promotions offer concrete, reward-based motivations to engage with a brand: the chance to play and the chance to win (e.g., games and contests). Unlike offline promotions, they reach consumers where they increasingly are: online.

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In addition, interactive promotions are eminently measurable, which helps marketers learn from, evaluate, and tweak campaigns. Indeed, 65% of responding CMOs to a recent Sapient study placed “ability to measure success” at the top of their campaign wish lists.

Given the growing importance of interactive promotions in marketing today, Launchfire recently conducted a survey among 787 consumers about their attitudes and behaviors regarding online contest and game promotions. Our findings, plus our 10 years of experience in the field, fuel this whitepaper on what it takes to motivate consumers via interactive promotions.

MOTIVATION, UNPACKEDAt the heart of any marketing campaign is one ultimate goal: to motivate (i.e., move to action) consumers to respond in the way you want them to. If this isn’t achieved, it doesn’t matter how clever your creative or intelligent your media mix … it’s a waste of money. You need consumers to act and to participate in your marketing effort.

That’s where interactive promotions come in: they both entertain consumers and reward them for agreeing to support your brand. As a consumer, it’s hard to disagree with being entertained and rewarded in an appealing manner! Of course, the key word is “appealing.” As with any other marketing, there are good interactive promotions and those that are less good. So now, we’ll turn to six proven strategies to make your interactive promotions truly motivating.

#1: Use Play and Win to Strengthen Call to Action

When it comes to offering value to consumers in exchange for their participation in your marketing effort, a chance to play a game and win a prize is a vastly stronger call to action than a simple invitation

to click through to your website. Playing and winning suggest pleasure and reward, whereas an invitation to click through offers no such temptations.

The proof of the superior effectiveness of play and win is in the numbers: average banner click-through rates are running somewhere between .02–.03% these days, while in contrast, play-and-win calls to action generate click-throughs of .33% —topping the web-wide click-through average by a factor of 11.

Click-Through Rates

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The “pull” as opposed to “push” orientation of play and win reflects the new value exchange between brands and consumers: consumers expect to be appreciated for their participation in brand-building—and rewarded accordingly.

The great news is that play and win calls-to-action allow marketers to ask more of consumers. You can’t ask much if all you’re doing is inviting people to come to your website. But offering them the chance to play and win valuable prizes? That’s an incentive to “act” for a brand, as we’ll see below.

#2: Focus on Prizes Consumers Want

The prize is the lure that hooks consumer interest and initially motivates people to engage with your promotion. So job #1 is to make sure that your prizing is in fact attractive to the audience you’re courting.

To begin with, it’s important to make the prizes valuable enough. Our survey shows that fully half of respondents (50%) will not participate in an online contest if the prize value is lower than $50, and one-third (32%) won’t bite unless it’s at least $100.

Cash is king when it comes to prizing. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents chose cash as their preferred prize with travel (15%) and cars (11%) lagging behind significantly. This makes sense when you consider that, practically speaking, a cash prize allows the winner to create their own prize by using the cash for whatever they might need or want. Travel prizes might fuel our mid-workday escapist fantasies—but a travel prize generally comes with some kind of hassle factor (new cabana wear, the need to get time off work…). Plus, enough cash buys a vacation at the time and place of the

It’s one thing to get consumers to click through to the site you want them to visit. But do play and win platforms motivate beyond this action? The answer is yes. The advantages of a play-and-win call to action translate into buyer behavior. Two-thirds (66%) of respondents to the Launchfire consumer survey rank “the chance to win an online contest” (e.g., through their purchase giving them a promotional code allowing them to enter the contest) as most important as a motivation to purchase, way ahead of TV commercials (17%), radio commercials (1%), or print ads (7%).

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winner’s choice. Cars, like travel, may be appreciated as high-value prizes but still offer more restricted opportunities than cash does.

It’s not only the prizes themselves but also the prize structure that can make the difference in a consumer’s decision as to whether or not to engage in a promotion. Our survey respondents consider the chance to win multiple high-value and multiple low-value prizes the most appealing prize structure (63%). This last finding points to the importance of human psychology in interactive promotions: people are more likely to participate when they perceive that they have a greater chance to win, and a multiple-prize structure is a great way to tap this powerful consumer motivator.

Remember: the prize is the lure. If you don’t make your prizing strategy appealing, you won’t optimize participation in your promotion. And if you can’t get people to even enter your game or a contest, you can’t motivate them to do anything else.

3. Introduce Different Rewards for Different Levels of Participation

Offering increased chances to win is a key lever in motivating consumer response, both in terms of participation in the marketing campaign and also in terms of driving purchase behavior.

Think about all the ways a consumer could engage with your brand through an interactive promotion: They could spend time on your website • They could purchase your product or service• They could enter a UPC or other promotional code • They could complete a survey, take a quiz, or view a product demo• They could refer their friends to your site• They could opt-in for email or SMS communications, including newsletters• They could post a web link•

You will often want to encourage your target consumers to do many of these things within a single campaign. Tying different rewards—such as varying numbers of chances to win—to different levels of participation allows you to engage a broad audience at a basic level and then also encourage the most motivated consumers to extend their engagement with the campaign.

It’s amazing what offering more chances to win can prompt your audience to do. Our survey found that:more than half (54%) would invite friends to participate;• seven-in-ten (71%) would receive newsletters, updates, or special offers from the sponsor;• seven-in-ten (69%) would view a brief product demo from the sponsor;• eight-in-ten (81%) would complete a survey.•

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Collectively, these proportions illustrate that offering increased chances to win gives you far more access to your target audience to tell your brand story (e.g., via newsletters or product demos). Each time you offer an increased chance of winning, you get a reason and a license to reach out to your audience, and to do so in a positive way they will accept. This is active engagement … and a way of establishing ongoing communication.

Looked at individually, the findings suggest that consumers are considerably more likely to act for your brand in ways that involve only them (e.g., completing a survey); they are relatively less likely to invite friends in exchange for additional chances to win. Asking them to invite friends, therefore, may require a greater reward—that is, more chances to win. But it’s worth it: by inviting friends, the consumer becomes part of the promotion and boosts the effectiveness of the campaign.

Another Launchfire survey finding clearly illustrates a link between increased chances to win and higher likelihood to purchase: more than half (52%) of survey respondents say that getting more chances to win a contest makes them more likely to purchase a sponsor’s products. This correlates with a Gameasure/Interpret study that found that consumers actively engaged in contests and games online are 22% more likely than the general population to seek information about new products and 36% more likely to switch brands. In this sense, interactive promotions can clearly spur purchasing interest and drive sales.

4. Extend Consumer Engagement With Games

Games are one of the most addictive forms of online entertainment, and a good game can engage consumer interest for extended periods and many game plays. In fact, half of the respondents to our survey said the presence of a game on a contest or promotional website increases the amount of time they spend on the site. Because of this strong consumer-game connection, game-related advertising is expected to quadruple to nearly $2 billion by the year 2010.

Game advertising breaks down into two categories: in-game advertising where ads or product placements are integrated within the game, and advergames—games built around a product or brand.

Advergames are highly effective at delivering branded content within the game, and also at presenting large volumes of targeted advertising messages during natural intervals in the game, such as pauses in game play between levels. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of our survey respondents say they accept the presence of brief ads from sponsors within online games.

“Consumers actively engaged in contests and games online are 22% more likely than the general population to seek information about new products and 36% more likely to switch brands.”

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According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, video gaming is one of the fastest-growing forms of entertainment. There are more than 500 million gamers worldwide, and US consumers play online games more often than they watch online videos or visit social networking sites, and gaming has a broad demographic reach.

A large percentage of gamers measure weekly playing time not in minutes, but in hours. The average casual gamer, for example, logs about four hours per week on her favorite online games.

This makes online gaming a highly sticky web application, where audience commitment far exceeds that of virtually all other media categories. Aside from the considerable time an average user spends on a gaming site, gamers are engaged with the game content in a very active way—as opposed to more passive media consumption, such as watching a television show. More time on site translates into a deeper attachment to the game, and more frequent and extensive interaction with the brand.

5. Invest in Outstanding Content

The Internet requires consumers to actively interact with content—it asks them to make choices and engage deeply with the content they select. In this sense, it is tailor-made for marketing programs that harness brand strategy to good content. But it does have to be good … faced with a multitude of content options, consumers will ignore promotional content they don’t find entertaining.

Moreover, they will associate promotional content to the advertiser behind it—for better or for worse. Of our survey participants who say they are generally at least sometimes aware of a contest’s sponsor

Casual Gamer ProfileGender: FemalePlay Time: 4hrs/week

Gender Profile

It might come as a surprise that gamers aren’t all—or even mostly—18-year-old male skateboarders. The average online game player is 33 years old, and women make up a significant proportion of the market. While the overall gaming audience is 57% male, women are heavy players of so-called “casual games,” including puzzle and word games. When the gaming audience is segmented to focus on those who prefer casual games, the gender mix shifts to 24% male and 76% female.

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(98%), a huge majority (82%) say the contest’s quality influences their perception of the sponsor. Advergamers also make the association: of those we surveyed who say they are at least sometimes aware of the game’s sponsor (86% of respondents), just over half (52%) say the game’s quality influences their perception of the sponsor.

High-quality content extends to purchasing decisions as well. Two-thirds (65%) of our survey respondents have switched brands or tried a product for the first time because they were impressed with an advertiser’s online contest. Thirty-five percent (35%) have switched brands or tried a product for the first time because they were impressed with an advertiser’s online game. These are amazing proportions: convincing consumers to try a product or switch brands is no mean feat in today’s cluttered marketplace.

6. Motivate Opt-Ins for One-to-One Relationships

Seven-in-ten (71%) of our survey respondents say they would receive newsletters, updates, or special offers from the sponsor for an increased chance of winning. That’s seven out of ten people who are giving you permission to communicate with them, to tell them more about your product, and to send additional sales promotions to them directly—all in return for additional chances to play and win in your interactive promotion.

We live in an economy where attention is the ultimate commodity, and a scarce one at that. In this environment, an opt-in, one-to-one relationship between brand and consumer is the holy grail of marketing. By giving contest and game participants an incentive to engage with your brand in this way, you’re translating their immediate participation in your interactive promotion to an ongoing, long-term relationship with them. This moves the ROI on your campaign beyond the life of the immediate promotion and into the realm of long-term value for the brand.

71% of consumers opt in for an increased chance to win.

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SUMMARYNo matter what your business, it’s worth considering whether your marketing mix is doing everything it can to motivate consumers. A recent Borrell Associates report quoted the axiom, “Advertising makes people want to buy. Promotions make them want to buy now.”

Advertising has a longer-term orientation toward building consumer awareness, establishing an emotional connection to the brand, and building sales; whereas promotions have a near-term orientation. They are designed to achieve an immediate, measurable spike in sales.

Promotional spending is moving online because of the Internet’s ability to harness creativity and technology to motivate consumer response. Case in point: more than three-quarters (78%) of the respondents to our survey say they participate more in online contests than offline ones.

Interactive promotions also achieve, in a way that other online marketing programs cannot, an effective value exchange between Internet users and marketers. Because of this, spending on interactive promotions will soon exceed other major categories of online marketing, including both banner ads and search marketing.

This paper has presented six proven strategies for motivating consumer participation through interactive promotions. They are:

Use play and win to strengthen call to action1. Focus on prizes consumers want2. Introduce different rewards for different levels of participation3. Extend consumer engagement with games4. Invest in outstanding content5. Motivate opt-ins for one-to-one relationships6.

These strategies have certainly proven effective for us at Launchfire. We hope they also help you.

For case studies about motivating consumers please visit: http://www.launchfire.com/casestudies/

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ABOUT LAUNCHFIRE

Launchfire is a full-service interactive promotions company. Our promotions have been providing measurable results for leading brands and agencies since 1999.

We specialize in contests and advergames, use-generated content and viral marketing. Launchfire is the only company that combines a complete range of contest-sweeps strategy, development, and management services with the ability to develop high quality interactive content.

We achieve the best results because we understand how to motivate consumers, and to connect brands with innovative online promotion strategies.

www.launchfire.com

ABOUT TURNER-RIGGS

Turner-Riggs provides marketing and communications expertise to clients and colleagues in the private, public, and non-profit sectors across Canada, in the United States, Europe, and Australia. We are based in Vancouver and at www.turner-riggs.com. Please visit us online to review our portfolio and learn more about our work.

www.turner-riggs.com

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