Making your Competitions Fun - Iain Haywood - Brighton SEO 2015 Presentation

Brighton SEO 2015 - @iainhaywood1
Making your Competitions Fun
Iain Haywood, The Competition Agency
Iain.Haywood@competitionagency.com / @iainhaywood

At the heart of “fun” is Comic Sans MS
Comic Sans MS
is at the core
of everything
fun. This is the
most important
thing you’ll
learn today.

User
acquisition
Retention/
activity
Opt-in
Email/
address/
phone
SEO
Links/signals/
coverage
Revenue
Basket
upsell/sale of
data
Social
Sharing/
footprint
PR
Traditional/
viral
06 01
02
0304
05
What can you run a competition or giveaway for, anyway?
Amongst other things…

Fun
Time
Cost
Yield
Your campaign priorities
What’s the payoff? Quantity of
links, opt-ins etc
Can you still go home at 6pm?
What are you going to have to
spend?
Is the thing you’re making any
good?

A campaign plan is typically knocked out in less than 60 minutes
Though in many cases you can treat this as seconds
20What you’ll
give away
30What you
want out
10How you’ll do
it

Qualitative input
Time
Cost
Quantitative output
Your campaign priorities
Something for nothing?

3 Golden Rules

1: There is more than one type of entrant
• One is interested in winning your competition. They may also be
interested in your brand or vertical secondarily.
• The other is interested in your brand and vertical primarily, and
unless you’ve made a major hash of things, they’re very likely to be
interested in your competition also.
Broadly speaking, there are two

2: Your competition is unlikely to be a panacea
• With the effort 90% of people put in, it won’t be a silver bullet. It
won’t save your tanking sales.
• Don’t get dazzled by vanity metrics, remember from where and why
those numbers have materialised.
It could be, but it’s unlikely

Don’t be this guy.

3: Incentivisation fundamentally changes the nature of intent
• You are, in one way or another, changing why someone wants to do
something.
For the worse

Process

Difference between a competition and a giveaway?
Or a contest and a sweepstake for our American cousins
Competition
Skill based Entry
Judged
Giveaway
Non-skill based
entry
Random draw

This is not scientific, this is not scientific, this is not scientific
(but look at the animated bars!)
League of
Legends
F2p
bingo
KenoSpin
to win
Technical
entry
Landing
page
RT and Follow/
Like and Share
100%
75%
50%
0%
25%
Fun/
enjoyment/
quality/
merit
0%
25%
50%
100%
75%
Reliance on
Incentive

RT and Follow
Like and Share

Don’t do them
• Zero effort, zero effect
• No terms and conditions typically
• Usually unfairly drawn
• Minimal residual value

They haven’t even made contact
Your brand (surface)
A like or Retweet
Why does the entrant even need
to see or care who you are
Ooh! A prize!
Entrant is incentivized to perform
the required action

Tips (if you have to do them)
• Shorturl Terms and Conditions
• Use inline images effectively
• Use a technical draw like Tweetdraw
• Moderate your expectations

Landing page

Landing pages
• A landing surface
• Can host competition creative, entry mechanism
• Visible Terms

At least you’re capturing now
Your brand’s landing page

Tips
• Host on a landing page as close to your root as possible (for links)
• Think about barrier to entry/entry mechanism (your filter)
• Is the entry method aligned with your objective? Multiple
methods/objectives?
• Actually promote something
• What is your competition creative? Try video (avoid being ctrl + f’d)
• Include full terms and conditions
• Avoid narrative entry

Eurgh
To enter our competition, do the following:
Simply email ipadcomp@windscreenwashers.com
Follow us on twitter @windscreenwashers
Fan us on FB
Leave a comment below
Share every day
Good luck LOL :)

Technical Entry

Why technical
• Properly recorded entries, entrants more confident in entering
• Properly recorded and incentivised sharing, entrants more confident
in sharing
• Options to prioritise entry mechanics, offer more entry obligations
• Possibility of self sustainability or a viral coefficient >1
• Runs on rails/automated

You can get this in a dang box if you want to
• Promotional SaaS available
• Examples include:
–Gleam
–Rafflecopter
–Antavo

Build

Instant win

Wait.
That’s what they’re
giving away?

This is not scientific, this is not scientific, this is not scientific
(but look at the animated bars!)
We’ve broken prize orbit
now.
League of
Legends
F2p
bingo
KenoSpin
to win
Technical
entry
Landing
page
RT and Follow/
Like and Share
100%
75%
50%
0%
25%
Fun/
enjoyment/
quality/
merit
0%
25%
50%
100%
75%
Reliance on
Incentive

Games

F2p bingo – it’s not a leap
• No incentivisation
• F2p with in app purchases – users are paying to gamble for fun
• Extremely prevalent and profitable – check App Annie for f2p
bingo/casino/table games
• Same f2p features prevalent as most f2p games:
» Repeated user obligations
» Social obligations
» Repeated actions with a random result
» Visually exciting, it feels rewarding
» Progressive thresholds and levels

Introduce peers, and…
• League of Legends has 67 million MAU / 27 million DAU (as of
Jan ‘14)
• Most popular PC title/online game in most countries
• Most popular and lucrative eSport
• PvP

That’s a bit
of a leap, no?

Social obligation
Friend grants extra lives, team play
Incentivised share/friend referral
Extra plays for new players
Repeated action – random result
Mystery chest, random drops of in game items
Instant Win
No skill involved, just make sure you enter
Daily Entry
Requirements
Enter every day and
improve your
chances of winning
Recurring in-
game obligation
Mining, farming,
“Grinding”, leveling up
90% of DNA between today’s games and promotions are shared

Why

This is permanent infrastructure
That you can reuse and repurpose
Real Company “Stuff” – Wil Reynolds
• The entries, yield, traffic, new links and signals all end when your 4
week campaign does. If it’s transient, that’s it.
• You can measure CPAs against a sunk cost over years vs weeks
• If it’s good, those entries, shares, links and press snippets grow
themselves, “while you sleep”

You’ll give less stuff away
It’s a pain in the ass to post, anyway
You’ll gain
Passionate users
and advocates
(goodwill)
Better
understanding of
your users
Pull
You’ll reduce
Spend on prizes
over time
Logistical and
compliance effort
Time and effort
renewing
campaigns
Push

You actually know what the hell your users are doing
Registered Active Last played Shares Playtime total Most used
Bigjohn420 14/05/14 Y 09/04/15 3 23,03 Sword
Merknuggitz 11/08/14 N 12/08/14 0 1,01 Fists
LOL_gimp 12/08/14 Y 09/04/15 9 9,00 Mace
Lil_Kimchi 14/08/14 Y 09/04/15 1 30,02 Wand
N00benator 21/09/14 Y 09/04/15 2 66,42 Blunderbuss
Jono Alderson 01/01/15 Y 09/04/15 15 252,07 Kitten Ears
So you can continually improve every aspect of your build

Retention, retention, retention

It needn’t cost the earth
• Game engines
–Construct 2
–Stencyl
–Game Maker Studio
–Unity
• All have resource/asset repositories
• Free/low-cost
• Cross-platform publishing
• Buy off the shelf scripts and repurpose
• Want peers but don’t want multiplayer? Just get a highscore board!
• Achievements, leaderboards, social integration, can plug it in
–Clay.io

Iain.Haywood@competitionagency.com
@iainhaywood
Contact me!
Happy to clarify anything
Please remember Comic Sans

Making your Competitions Fun - Iain Haywood - Brighton SEO 2015 Presentation

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