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How To Crowdsource Your Problems And Grow Your Brand At The Same Time

Generate Leads And Fix Your Problems With Minimal Effort From Your Employees

Crowdsource With Social MediaYour business has a problem to solve. Not a serious issue that effects operations or logistics, but a visible issue that effects perception or is holding back your company’s growth in the marketplace. Your customer base is stagnant (or worse, decreasing) and you need to right the ship.

Lucky for you, you can kill two birds with one stone.

Using a contest that is promoted through social media, you’ll be able to get your audience engaged with your company by providing you with possible solutions, spread the word about your contest AND will have your problem solved!

The best part is that once you select a winner (and maybe some runners up), you can ask them to share their new accolade with their friends to brag a little…oh, and get your company in front of more people.

Your Theoretical Problem

Let’s start off with a possible problem: You have a little character in your logo, but he doesn’t have a name yet and you want to make him the forefront of a new marketing campaign. Without a name, (think Ronald McDonald or Flo from Progressive) you may be missing out on a real connection that people can make with your brand.

The problem is, no one sitting in your decision making room can choose a name that they want to run with.

The Solution

Since your goal here is to actually grow your audience so that you can generate more business, reaching out to your target demographic is the perfect place to start.

Create some messaging about how you need to come up with a new name for your company’s mascot. Send out a brief press release, email to your list and post to your website and social media channels. Let everyone know that they have a chance to come up with the name of a real company’s mascot. Before you start reaching out to people, you’ll need somewhere to send them so they can help you.

Social Media Contest Entry Form Contact Info

Easily choose what information people have to give in order to enter the contest.

Using a tool like WildFireApp, you can easily set up a contest on your Facebook page or on your website to collect entries (and contact information, you sly dog). WildFireApp can take the ideas and email addresses in an intuitive form for the entrants and create a database of information for your company. With a few mouse clicks, you can select a random winner or you can read through the entries to choose the best. But why stop there on the possible viral spread of your contest?

Your contest can have a voting system associated with the entries so that once someone submits their idea, they have to go and tell their friends to vote for it so that they can win. You can choose to have votes to narrow down finalists for judges (that would be you) to choose from, or you can have them actually pick the winner. It doesn’t get much better than having your customers proactively telling their friends to go to your Facebook page, does it?

Your Social Media Contest Success

Once you’ve set up your landing pages for the contest, sent out the word about how people can enter and win, it’s time to kick back and let the magic of social media do it’s job.

Captured contact info from Facebook contest

Everyone who enters your contest will be entered into an easily accessible database. You’ll also be able to export all of that information to add to your CRM. (Not sure what a CRM tool is? Contact us and we’ll tell you all about it.)

Your company now has more traffic to their Facebook page and website.

You’ve collected contact information for potential customers (don’t spam them!) that you can follow up with when you have new, fun content on your website to get your name back to the front of their mind, and best of all, you have solved your mascot naming problem!

Congratulations on your successful social media contest!

Have You Solved Business Problems By Connecting With Your Audience Via Social Media?

We’re looking for success stories to feature here at Tresnic Media, so if you or a company that you know of has run a successful social media contest to solve a problem for their business, please send us a message and let us know.

Is A Social Media Contest Right For Your Company?

If you want to learn more about how a social media contest may be able to help your company with growing your audience or solving a problem, fill out this quick form and  we’ll gladly reach out to you about how we can help you grow your business.

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How To Use Social Media Contests To Generate B2B Leads With Jeff Molander | Tresnic Media says March 25, 2013

[…] my post last week on using social media to build brand awareness and solve business problems at the same time, I spoke with Jeff Molander from Make Social Media Sell. Jeff has been using social media contests […]

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