Sales are so-so. Conversions have plateaued. Leads are lackluster. Your company needs to quickly kick things into gear. Which is why you've decided that now is the perfect time for a contest promotion. After defining key goals and objectives, researching target audiences, forming partnerships and developing guidelines, the only thing that remains is coming up with a contest idea. Which isn't always as easy as it seems. Fortunately, we've helped many businesses develop and implement contests online and off. Here is a list of our favorite concept directions for contests to help you generate your own.

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Before you jump on the contest bandwagon and whip your marketing/PR/interactive team into a frenzy, take note: contests are a lot of work. There are seemingly a million details to iron out, contingencies to plan for, people to manage, sponsors to coordinate, partnerships to form - and that's just the tip of the iceberg. But don't let that detract you. Contests can be worth every penny of your carefully allocated marketing budget. The results can provide your company with great exposure, new customers and loyal fans. That is, if you start out right.

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With both Mercedes-Benz and Audi both running high-profile social networking contests integrated with their Super Bowl marketing efforts, it's clear that contest marketing has evolved to a whole new level. Forrester Research notes that "50% of online users like to enter a contest or sweepstakes at least once a month and businesses that offer contests have twice as many social network followers." We predict this trend to continue and see 2011 as "the year of the contest" as it becomes the central tactic for social media engagement. How long will the trend last? When will contests go the way of "quizzes" on Facebook?

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Delivering and Not Performing
This is a scary scenario because you're having no trouble spending money, yet you're not seeing any return on your investment. When a campaign is meeting delivery goals and falling short of performance goals, the first step is to troubleshoot what is causing the problem. Run site performance reports to find non-performing inventory. Run analytics reports to filter Ads and offers that aren't working as well. Below is a troubleshooting checklist for under-performing campaigns.

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Performing and Not Delivering
Delivery is a tricky problem. If you have a very specialized audience such as a remarketing group, it's most likely a small audience. In these cases, it's often a high performing campaign while it struggles to meet delivery goals. If a campaign is meeting or exceeding the performance goal but not meeting delivery, there are several approaches to take that will accelerate spend while minimizing the risk to performance.

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Getting the performance and delivery results that you need from display advertising campaigns can be difficult. It's often a complex puzzle to solve with myriad variables affecting the outcome - an adjustment to frequency can set off a dip in performance, for example, yet adjusting it the other way would impact delivery.

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Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) has been on the top of advertisers' priority lists for a while now. These have historically been the primary and least expensive ways to drive traffic to a Web site. But what if you're among the top search results and the traffic doesn't come? Microsoft's new Bing "Decision Engine" is starting to change the landscape for search engines. It's goal is to push relevant, quality content directly through to the user, keeping traffic from clicking off.

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The simple answer is one word: Relevance. In fact, the only reason to even bother enhancing and fine-tuning your targeting strategy is to be able to speak to a specific audience with a relevant message of interest to them.

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You know who your best audience is. You've done the market research and compiled mass amounts of analytics on past campaigns telling you exactly what segments of the consumer population are most likely to become your customers. Now, how do you reach them?

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The Fourth Digital Advertising Campaign Type - PART 2

A dynamic CPM or dCPM campaign works the same as a CPM campaign in that you set a bid that is a flat price for one thousand impressions and add a CPC or CPA goal to optimize toward. The important difference is that with CPM, the ad server can only pay the exact bid amount for each impression, regardless of the goal. With dCPM and with the advent of RTB exchanges, each ad call can be evaluated in real time to determine what the impression is worth and the DSP can bid that price. In the end, it will average out to the set bid price or just under.

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