Seiko Champion

Another in-process small promotional campaign we created is doing well, with a current run rate of 2500 entries per day…



Certainly those numbers are nothing compared to larger mass-market contests. However the client is a smaller, regional player with limited budget – per dollar results for this campaign are well above industry norms. A campaign like this has nowhere near the reach of a Budweiser promo, but it has nowhere near the same budget either!

In this case, E.D.SMITH are an Ontario based manufacturer of branded consumer and private label jams and sauces. We promoted the contest on their home page (earlier revisions and regular content updates to the main corporate web site, had created increased repeat visitor traffic), did some targeted online advertising to a specific demographic, did PR releases about the winners of the last promo, and leveraged past promotions through an e-blast to prior entrants.



One of the lessons to learn here is leverage … if you start a ball rolling, take advantage of inertia before it slows down. Whether it be repeat visitors to a site, publicity from a promotion or PR release, accidental PR from something outside your control, getting a surge in web traffic from a news article or blog post, USE IT! Leverage creates higher multiples of impact per spend. Otherwise, waiting until your next scheduled campaign just wastes the advantage.

You know when leverage is there if it’s something you planned like a promotion. But there are lots of other things outside your control that create leverage also – company purchases, newspaper interest articles, health blogs, you name it. Typically you only find this out from being a recipient of the news yourself, or from the impact.

If you’re in the world of online advertising, use web analytics, review them once a week (or better yet use a system that alerts you about sudden traffic increases), and if you see a surge in traffic, jump on it and ride the wave (making sure you leverage the pages that are getting increased traffic, otherwise why bother ). Even if it’s just adding some more content of interest – a press release, a recipe image, a new product – do it then not later.

Leverage is a judicious use of a smaller budgets that can result in high results per dollar – in this case increased brand awareness in a key demographic, increasing repeat visitors to the main web page, valuable marketing contact lists for both the client and the co-sponsor, etc, etc … it’s easy to give something away in a promotion, it’s important to USE LEVERAGE to make it worth more for your client.