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John Hanlon Reviews

John’s Monday Tip of the Week: Five Ways to promote contests without using web ad inventory

Good evening, adiposity

Most of you are currently working on promoting the “Dreams Come True” contest but even if you aren’t, page I’m sure there are contests or events that you are trying to promote. Finding open ad spots on your websites might be tough with other clients using up some of your inventory and finding room to promote the contest through radio spots is tough as well (although you should still be doing that).

With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of five ways to promote contests without using ad inventory on your sites. This ideas should only complement the promos and ads you are running now but hopefully they will push your station a little bit further over the goal line.

With that in mind, this is John’s Monday Tip of the Week.

1.) Talking Twitter: One tool that you should be using every day is twitter. If your station has a twitter account (as you should), you should be promoting your contest every day at a different time. One day, you could tweet out a link to the contest in the morning. Another day, you could tweet out a link to it in the afternoon. You want to reach the biggest audience you can so tweeting at different times each day can capture a larger audience.

2.) Finding Facebook: You can also be promoting your contests on Facebook as well at least once every 2-3 days. Mix up your promotion of contests with news stories or upcoming events but make sure your promos are in the mix and receiving Facebook likes and comments (the more likes and comments you receive, the larger of an audience you can reach).

3.) Keeping Keywords: Some of our users might not see a rotating 300×250 ad that appears every few minutes but they might have heard about your contest on the radio and want to see what it’s all about. With that in mind, you can all set up keyword searches for this contest.

This should be easy for the “Dreams come True” survey. In the Newstalk admin tool, there’s an option called “Keyword Search.” Using that, you can set it up so that users– if they search for a specific keyword on your site– are redirected to a specific page.

Our friends in San Diego are already using the keyword search to promote their “Stand with Israel” campaign. If you go to their site (http://am1170theanswer.com/) and you type in the phrase “Stand with Israel” in the search box, you are automatically redirected to their “Stand with Israel” page.

If you are promoting the “Dreams” survey, you should set up keywords (or phrases) like “Dreams.” “Dreams come True,” and “Dreams survey” to redirect users to your survey page. This might only get a few more listeners signed up but every bit helps.

4.) Broadcaster Buy-In: This is a tricky one but one that could help. A lot of your Newstalk stations have local clients who pay to have shows broadcast on the stations. Those clients have their own subjects and ideas to talk about but it wouldn’t hurt to let these hosts know about your contests (through an e-mail to them or even a posting at the station). If local hosts are willing to mention the contest on their shows, the better it is for all of us.

The worst a broadcaster can say is “no” but if they say yes, that might be a new audience you could be reaching.

5.) Newsletter Notices: For many of our stations, the “Stand with Israel” promotion is no longer in effect, meaning we might have some available inventory in the three Newstalk daily newsletters. If you have available inventory there now, it would be great if you started promoting the contest there. A lot of our newsletter subscribers are already in Fan Club but we want to keep them there and maybe even have them spread the word about our contest. We definitely want all of these users to fill out the surveys.

The more submissions we have, the greater the chance we might have of doing a similar promotion in the future so we want to promote, promote, promote this contest in any way we can.

This has been John’s Monday Tip of the Week.

Note: Alliteration won’t be a regular occurrence here but hey, it’s been a manic Monday so why not?

Have a great week everyone!

Best,

John

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