Promotion Planning and Trends Archives

6 Tips for Creating a Contest Winning Entry

Creating a winning entry isn’t hard. As a promotional agency, Marden-Kane has helped our clients judge and moderate hundreds of thousands of contest entries over the last 57 years. We have seen great entries. And we have seen terrible ones. Be one of the great ones! Just follow these simple tips: Don’t use, mention or show any copyrighted materials! Thousands of entries are disqualified every year for not following this one simple: don’t use any copyrighted material in your entry. This means that if you can see the Nike logo on your shirt in your entry photo you will … Continue reading →

Stream promotional content with Meerkat

Those of you who have used Meerkat know about its ability to create an engaging mobile experience. It is pure fun for the casual consumer and social media enthusiast. It is pure gold for the digital marketer. If you’re not familiar yet, Meerkat is a live streaming mobile app that links to your Twitter account. When you use Meerkat the app tweets a message that there is live video being broadcast along with a link where everyone can watch. Meerkat works with your Twitter credentials. Log in and you’re ready to share what is basically a selfie but in … Continue reading →

Top 10 Promotional Marketing Blogs of 2014

As 2014 wraps up, we thought we would look back and see what our most popular blogs of the year were. Here is the list of the Top 10 blogs published in 2014 ranked by the number of times they were visited this year. 1. 5 Social Valentine’s Day Sweepstakes Ideas Love is in the air! Make it work for your brand with a Sweepstakes. Here are five ideas to get you started. All of them are social in nature, and there is still time to put any one of these into place before the big day. Continue reading→ 2. … Continue reading →

Wearable Technology Provides Promotion Marketers an Edge

In 2013 Google Glass became the tip of the spear in demonstrating that wearable technology is a viable channel to deliver promotional messaging. A survey conducted in the UK by YouGov, the international Internet based market research firm, revealed a few compelling facts. 28% of consumers would welcome, welcome not merely tolerate, promotional messaging with a nearly equal amount saying that they would opt-in to be informed of additional offers from the sponsor. One key to the latter is providing these consumers with some unique ability to receive special offers not available to the general audience. This is totally … Continue reading →

How Instagram Direct Changes Promotions

One of the biggest challenges we have had with Instagram promotions has been contacting winners. Instagram had no way to privately contact potential winners to notify them that they won – which led to potential to fraud when we were forced to post a public comment to notify winners. Marden-Kane came up with a workaround to this problem, which involved asking people to verify their account when they contacted us. This worked out fine – but we prefer to not announce winners in public until they have actually been cleared as a winner. So the news that Instagram had … Continue reading →

10 Simple Photo Contest Ideas for Your Brand

With social media and user generated content being on every marketers minds these days, you may have thought about running a photo contest. But how can your contest stand out and attract a lot of quality photo entries? Try one of these simple photo contest ideas out. Run a photo contest asking for users to insert your company brand in the photo in a creative or unique way. You could ask that people simply print out your logo or take along your mascot and include it in their everyday life or in their travels. Go with a favorites theme. … Continue reading →

Tumblr is a Great Tool for Promoting Social Media Sweepstakes and Contests

Most marketers share the common goal of generating and sharing as much social media content as possible. This is balanced against what they determine to be a practical level of effort. Complicating things is the fact that social media content is untamed. Most content is totally random created in the moment for immediate gratification. It is fun, easy to take, and 99% of the time too easy to forget. The clutter and noise is a recognized evil. But a brand must not try and fight its way through it. Our advice is to find a way to fit in. … Continue reading →

Practical Advice on Planning a 2014 Winter Olympics Promotion

Update: See our updated guidelines for the Tokyo Summer Olympics. The next Winter Olympic Games are set to take place in Sochi, Russia in February, 2014. The U.S. Olympic Committee, in tandem with the International Olympic Committee has been lining up sponsors of the games. If you are using the Olympics to promote your brand, or if you are just curious about how to grab some attention for your brand, here is some advice on how to proceed. First – If you use any Olympic Games Intellectual Property you must work within their guidelines. This is black and white, … Continue reading →

Using Bloggers for Sweepstakes and Contests with Your Brand

With an estimated 200 million plus blogs out there, there is probably a good fit for your brand to run a sweepstakes or contest with a blogger. So how do you find that good fit and avoid this? Controversy for Chrysler over online contest Or this? Samsung Leaves Indian Bloggers Stranded in Berlin, Issues Apology With both of these promotions, the brand intent was sound, but the execution was lacking. If you plan on doing a sweepstakes or contest with bloggers, here are 5 simple rules to follow to avoid problems. Do your research. You will need … Continue reading →