Contests are an excellent way to motivate employees.  If you need to educate your staff about a new product or service offering or you’re trying to push your business development team to increase sales, consider offering incentives to motivate them to help you reach your goals.  Here are five tips for successful execution:

1. Execute Online

Executing online allows employees to access the contest from anywhere.  For companies that have employees in more than one location executing online ensures your contest can reach all employees.  Consider adding some fun content to your contest and employees may even participate from home!

2. Make sure your employees know about your contest

Be sure to use all available resources to drive employee participation.  Send out a dedicated email blast with a link to the contest.  Put promotional posters up on the wall and in meeting rooms.  Mention it at all staff meetings.  Create buzz by offering daily or weekly prizes and send out winner announcements.  Be creative and don’t miss an opportunity to remind your staff to participate.

3. Content is king

Just offering a prize isn’t enough to drive the results you’re looking for.  Incorporate some interactive content such as a quiz or a game to convey your messaging.  If you make it fun for employees to participate you’ll get much better results.

4. Choose relevant prizing

Be sure to offer prizing that is appealing to your employees.  If you’re trying to reach a diverse group, consider something as simple as a day off.  If you have the budget trips and cash are always compelling.

5. Dot your I’s and cross your T’s

Make sure to have your contest plans reviewed by your HR and Legal teams to make sure you’re not breaking any contest/gaming or labor laws.  Someone once said it’s better to be safe than sorry.  That was sage advice.

Being in the interactive promotions business I check out online promos every day.  While many are run of the mill enter-to-win contests and sweeps I do on occasion see some very intelligent promotions.  This was the case yesterday when I came across a promotion being run by Rittenhouse Guitars (www.rittenhouseguitars.com).   Rittenhouse is a boutique guitar company that makes custom reliced guitars.  Factoring in their size and the current state of the economy one can assume that they had limited funds with which to generate awareness of their company and its offering.  So they came up with the following outstanding promotion idea:

They launched an online sweeps in which they gave away one of their custom reliced guitars.  While that is nothing unique, their promotion strategy was brilliant.  Given their limited budget they needed to find some creative ways to generate awareness of the promotion.  Their solution was to award participants additional chances to win for:

1. Becoming a Rittenhouse Guitars Facebook Fan and writing “I want a Rittenhouse Guitar from www.RittenhouseGuitars.com”.  Of course when I did this the post showed up on my facebook page.  Because I am a guitar player I have a number of friends who are also guitar players.  Now Rittenhouse had a post on my page that all my guitarist friends could see.  And it cost them nothing to reach that target audience.

2. Follow Rittenhouse Guitars on Twitter and tweat the phrase “I want a custom guitar from Rittenhouse Guitars at www.rittenhouseguitars.com”.  Same principle applies.  They got access to their target audience for free.  Plus I could earn an additional entry for each day I tweated that phrase thus ensuring that my friends who weren’t on twitter when I tweated still saw my tweat .

3. Write a post about this giveway on your own blog.  (I suppose you could say I’m killing two birds with one stone!)

4. Purchase a custom Rittenhouse Guitar and get 5 entries.

5. Refer an order and get 5 entries.

The strategy, which is one we constantly use here at Launchfire, is to offer registrants value in exchange for their participation.  In this case, specifically offer value in exchange for help promoting the company and driving sales.  This is the type of common sense approach that will drive results.  Nice work RittenHouse Guitars.  I’d sure love to find out if your guitars are as good as your promotions.

Nugget #6

Common sense is remarkably uncommon.  Me.