What are Your Goals?

First things first. You need to know why you’re running a game-based promo.

There are a ton of different marketing goals you can achieve with a game-based promotion, including:

• Increasing purchase frequency
• Increasing basket size
• Growing your email list
• Driving loyalty acquisition
• Educating consumers

You need to decide which goals are most important, and prioritize them to maximize your ROI.

2. What’s Your Budget?

Here are the components you’ll want to consider when budgeting:

• Development
• Graphics & animation
• Legal & administrative fees
• Hosting
• Tech support

A good vendor should include these costs in their quote, but be sure to ask if any of these services are “add-ons.”

In addition to budgeting for the promo build, you’ll want to consider media spend, prize acquisition, and fulfillment. Some vendors will take care of prize acquisition & fulfillment, but there is typically an added cost depending on the number and size of prizes.

3. How Will You Drive Traffic?

Your game-based promotion is like a big event. It doesn’t matter how cool it is — if you don’t tell anyone what’s happening, they’re not going to show up.

There are a number of different tactics you can use to promote your game-based marketing promo including:

• Banner ads
• Email blasts
• Assets on your website
• Sweepstakes forums
• Social media posts & ads
• In-store marketing

You can also encourage participants to share your promotion with their friends and family. Just provide an incentive, like extra game-plays or chances to win. This helps spread word organically. This tactic isn’t a magic pill, but every click counts, right?

4. How Will You Measure Success?

It’s important to know how you’ll define success before you start, so you have a baseline to evaluate your promotion’s results.

Keep your KPIs aligned with your original goals. For example, if your goal was to drive loyalty acquisition, you should measure success based on the number of new loyalty members — not the number of people who registered for the promotion.

5. What About Prizing?

Prizing is a critical part of your game-based promo planning.

It’s what gets consumers to register in the first place, and often what keeps them engaged — so it has to be strategic.

There are three things to consider when thinking about prizing.

1. What will the structure be?

Your prize structure should be determined based on your objectives.  For example if your goal is to generate repeat traffic, then you should consider a higher quantity of prizes which are awarded more frequently.

2. What will you offer?

Unless your target consumer is everyone, you need to think about what prizes will generate the most valuable leads for your business. Offering too general a prize can result in high registration rates, but ultimately leave you with a list of prize hunters — not qualified leads.

3. Will you find a prize partner?

A prize partner can be a huge asset for your promotion — from reducing costs associated with prizing to kicking in cash to feature their products. But to get them on board, you need to offer value in return.

Free Download: Choosing the Right Prize Worksheet

6. Do You Need a Vendor?

Planning, developing, maintaining, and administering an game-based marketing promo is a considerable amount of work.

If you’re planning to handle the project in-house you need to make sure you have enough bandwidth. You’ll need people to handle sweeps strategy, development, technical support, prize acquisition & fulfillment, legal requirements (i.e. rules and regs etc.), administration, and reporting.

If you decide to go with a vendor, be sure to choose one with a background in game-based promotions. Check out our tips for choosing the right vendor here.

7. How Will You Convert Registrants into Customers?

Yup, game-based promotions will achieve a variety of different marketing goals. But the real reason we do campaigns like this is to sell stuff.

You need to have a plan for converting players into customers.

There are a variety of ways you can educate consumers and prompt them to buy. But the best way is to reward for purchase.

Some tactics you can use to reward for purchase are:

• Pin-on-pack
• UPC
• Photo receipts
• Loyalty integration

Having a direct tie to sales not only helps drive a sales lift, it also makes it easier to measure your promo’s ROI.

8. What Will You Do With The Data You Collect?

Game-based marketing will yield a ton of data about your consumers. You can collect everything from basic demographic information to product and shopping preferences.

One of the best use cases for game-based marketing data is targeted ads based on product preferences. Promotions like build-your-own-grand-prize sweepstakes provide a ton of information about a customer’s shopping preferences — information you can use to target them with personalized offers and ads after the promotion ends.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.