The Quad-City Times wins by selling Facebook contests to their advertisers
Recently, we hosted a webinar to explore ideas on how to package and sell Facebook contests to your advertisers. The Quad-City Times shared their success stories and below you’ll find how they generated thousands of sponsorship revenue from adopting the agency model.
Background:
The Quad-City Times, part of Lee Enterprises, is a 50,000 daily circulation paper in Davenport, Iowa. The team at the paper has been running contests to engage their audience and drive revenue from their advertisers with great success.
Challenge:
The digital team at the Quad-City Times has been toying with the idea of building an internal marketing agency, but they wanted to get some hands-on experience before they invested the resources. The digital team wanted to pull advertiser dollars out of direct mail and put them into digital.
To gain some experience and perfect their sales technique with the agency model, the paper decided to run an integrated promotional packaged centered around Facebook contests for their advertisers. Their goals were to offer marketing solutions that help advertisers grow their database, gain “likes” and build their lead list.
Results:
At the end of April 2012, the Quad-City Times had run seven advertiser Facebook contests, that ranged anywhere from $5,000-$15,000 a piece. Their promotional package included email blasts, a homepage ad, run-of-site ad, and a Facebook contest on the advertiser’s page for two weeks.
Julie Foley is Second Street’s Director of Affiliate Contesting Success. She works with nearly 2,000 UPICKEM partners to help them succeed with online contests. As a former partner and Online Sales and Marketing Director for The Statesboro Herald, Julie was a huge advocate for the power of contests. In her time at the paper, she ran 50 contests and generated thousands of dollars in sponsorship revenue.
