Set up a “Test Drive” Contest for Your Project with Free Admission
Remember saying: “If only I’d known earlier, I could have avoided this mistake?” Exactly! Everyone thinks that a second chance is a life saver. But, what if it makes a real difference? By test driving your project, you can identify all the weak points and find ways to improve your current strategy.
Why should you test your contest?
Running contests is an easy and effective way to reach out to your target audience and communicate a message. The spirit of competitiveness, anticipation, and engagement drum up much public interest. This is why creating contest experiences that require the maximum involvement of an audience is the best strategy for project promotion.
To ensure the high quality of public involvement, contest testing has to be used. Here are the reasons why you’d better test drive contests before the final launch:
- Making an introduction. The first appearance of your contest in public makes a great introduction for your idea. Track the reaction of the target audience to the concept of a competition, monitor the stages at which they might give up, and capture their initial feedback.
- Exploring preferences. Through the use of public voting, referral incentives, and other engagement-driven practices, you can find out what your target audience expects from you.
- Testing a technical side. Contest engagement requires the use of digital platforms for voting and interacting with the audience. By testing the contest, you can observe if the system you intend to use is convenient for your audience.
How to test contests
Conducting a successful test drive that won’t damage the final contest launch is a true art. The thing is, to ensure meaningful involvement, you have to find a smart balance between testing and introducing a fresh contest concept to your target audience. Here are some clever ideas that can bump up the impact of your test drive:
- Don’t duplicate – align. Of course, setting up the same contest twice only skews the final result. Instead of launching a test duplicate, think of a resonating idea that is well aligned with your contest.
- Make it free. Free admission is a necessary prerequisite for a test drive contest, because it helps capture maximum attention. What’s more, this strategy has a “demo effect,” which means you can entice a new audience by offering to test your project free of charge first.
- Filter it out. The core disadvantage of contests with free admission is that they usually attract many irrelevant entries. To avoid this problem, use a system that allows filtering out submissions based on the set regulations.
- Encourage public voting. Although it’s always good to have a judged component in your contest, public voting as a form of contest evaluation is a perfect fit for a test drive. Track the performance of decision making, both on a technical level and a social scale, to explore the audience’s engagement with the contest.
- Maximize public control. To elevate involvement, provide participants with top-notch public voting tools like social media promotion, rating, and scoring. This boosts contest virality.
What do you need for a contest test drive?
With a well thought-out strategy in place, it’s time to think about the key ingredients of a contest test drive. First, use the same contest management system you’re going to use with your final project introduction. This will help you and your audience gain relevant experience in convenient contest involvement. Second, set up the necessary integrations that align your contest submission system, social scale, public voting, etc. The more authentic the contest engagement is at the test drive stage, the less issues people face with your project. Last, use relevant promotion techniques to encourage free involvement, but don’t forget to highlight the “test” status of your initial campaign.
How to use the gained information
A contest test drive is a treasure for your project’s research if you know how to make the best use of the gleaned information. To turn actionable test drive data into productive results, employ the following framework:
- Use reporting. Integration also involves effective analytics tools. Pick contest systems that allow automated performance tracking and easy retrieval of results. This will not only minimize time and labor spent on the results’ evaluation, but also ensure analytic precision.
- Benchmark every target segment. To make the results meaningful, you have to explore a contest test drive performance in its relevant contexts. Pick a benchmark for every contest metric, like the use of social scale, the number of submissions, and public voting rates, based on relevant market research. Once you get the test drive data, compare each indicator with a benchmark and explore the trends.
- Short-survey your audience. Data is mighty, but not all-mighty. To understand the difficulties that people might have faced with your test drive contest, ask them about it. Short surveys with relevant questions won’t annoy your audience too much but can help you spot the hot issues that need improvements.
- Learn your lesson by heart. With all the trends identified, it’s time to correct the mistakes. Eliminate erroneous contest stages and simplify the processes which your target audience considers the most problematic. The golden rule here is adjusting your lesson to future campaigns not only based on the results of one test drive, but rather a combination of a market research, survey evidence, performance results, and the relevant context.
Conclusion
Test drive contests with free admission give event organizers a second chance for having a perfect project launch experience. Set up your test contest for free with Judgify to maximize the impact of your business efforts in future.