The financial facet of Mother’s Day is, in one word, massive! According to the U.S. National Federation, over the last decade there has been a staggering rise in estimated spending from $14.59 billion back in 2010 to $26.7 billion in 2020. These figures definitely put this holiday among the top gift-giving days, and a Mother’s Day contest is a fabulous idea to attract attention for your business!
A whopping 78% of consumers plan to celebrate Mother’s Day this year as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our lives. Consumers also plan to spend more each this year than they did last year on a Mother’s Day gift, averaging about $205 per gift, up from $177 in 2020. Obviously this holiday is important to the typical consumer, which begs the question: have you included it in your annual marketing strategy yet?
Unfortunately, when we talk about promotions, a lot of businesses board the winter holidays train and put all their efforts into promoting products and services around Christmas, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. While this strategy yields positive results, what about the other ten months of the year? Allocating a part of your budget to Mother’s Day promotions is bound to benefit your branding efforts.
The History of Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day celebrates mothers, motherhood, maternal bonds, and the influence they have on society. It’s celebrated in over 40 countries around the world on different dates, with most celebrations happening in the first half of the year.
The idea to honor all mothers came from Anna Jarvis. After her mother’s death in 1905, Jarvis organized the first Mother’s Day celebration in 1908. Her idea of the holiday was to organize a special day where we would spend time with our mothers and thank them for all that they did.
Yes, showing respect, love, and appreciation to our mothers should be something we do every day, but this special occasion gives us a chance to show how much we care about them in a more intentional and spectacular way.
Since today’s consumers are all about creating interactive and lasting relationships with companies, the idea of connecting your brand to the values of Mother’s Day and motherhood is priceless in terms of customer loyalty.
Apart from building strong bonds with your loyal customers, earning a profit is also cited as an important goal of a promotional campaign.
Time to redo the marketing math now, huh? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. This is just the right time to start planning your Mother’s Day contest strategy.
Mother’s Day Contest Ideas and Examples
The next big thing Mother’s Day celebrates is emotions – love, care, and respect we feel for our mothers, which adds another important feature to the promotion: emotional aspect. Namely, it needs to be carefully thought through because you don’t want to turn the campaign into a cheesy, corny thing, as many are easily repelled by such a campaign tone. Meaning and message simply have to be aligned with the values of this holiday.
Contest Rules of Thumb
There’s no one unique formula for success when it comes to organising contests and giveaways, but there are some rules of thumb that can put you on the right track:
- Keep everything simple and easily accessible – If you make people jump through too many hoops, it might turn them away from entering.
- Know your audience – Asking mothers to share something important to them to enter the contest has the potential of creating a lot of interaction in the community.
- Choose the right promotion channel – Social media are, once again, a proven and powerful marketing tool.
- Keep the prizes attached to your brand – The prize needs to be equivalent to the effort users need to put in; whether it is in the form of a product or experience, make it something especially attractive to most mothers.
- Be ready to send follow-up messages – Engage and stay connected with your audience.
- Do everything by the book and in accordance with the contest and giveaways laws and regulations.
Let’s take a look at a few ways you can check all the boxes off and create a successful Mother’s Day contest.
Photo Contest
Speaking of the keeping-it-simple aspect, photos and videos seem to be the real winners here. The stats show that there are over 3.7 billion mobile device users, most of which have a camera. It’s never been easier to create photo/video content and access and upload it on the Internet to share with your friends and family. That’s why a photo-based contest can create quite a buzz.
Photo Contest Period
You will most likely be using platforms like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter for this kind of promotion, which is great for driving likes and follows to your social pages. Typically, a photo contest should run for 4 weeks:
- Weeks 1 and 2 should be reserved for photos upload, and
- Weeks 3 and 4 for the voting period and time for contestants to promote their content and ask their community to vote. The “friendly” element of the competition keeps participants engaged and encourages sharing their content for more exposure.
Photo Content
When it comes to content, there are plenty of ideas you can employ. You can ask your audience to submit material with a specific Mother’s Day-related theme:
- Branded photos – Ask mothers to submit a photo with their children and one of your products.
- Mother & child photos – Ask for photos of moms and their kids.
- Kids’ love for their moms – Ask for photos of kids’ crafts they created especially for their moms.
- Time travel – Ask for photos of moms when they were younger.
…and so much more.
There are so many ways you can connect your brand to the Mother’s Day depending on your niche. For instance, if you are in the travel industry, ask for photos of a mom’s favorite place. If you’re in the beauty business, request a photo of a child and a mother doing hair together, giving each other a makeover, painting nails, etc.
Simply be creative, as there are countless opportunities!
Important Steps
Make sure you remind and encourage all contestants to:
- use a specifically designed hashtag for your contest so that you can easily track all entries and contact them later,
- like and follow your Facebook and Instagram or other social pages, but make sure these features are optional to avoid repelling those who don’t have social media profiles.
Don’t forget that you can use the submitted photos only if you have clear permission from the contestants. Therefore, ensure that all the rights and waivers in your contest rules are clearly stated.
Writing-based Contest
Another great way of engaging and interacting with your audience is through text-based contests. Again, keeping things nice and easy is a priority, so asking your audience to submit around a 30-word text material or a short story is just about right.
Writing content
Like with the photo contests, the content ideas are numerous. Some great examples are:
- The best beauty tip your mother gave you – a campaign organized by a popular cosmetics brand which asks its audience to share their mom’s words of wisdom;
- The best childcare tip your mother has taught you – something your mother advised you to do to raise a great kid like yourself (wink, wink, nudge, nudge);
- What are the three words that best describe your mother;
- What would you like to tell your mother today;
And many more.
This type of contest engages your audience and asks them to share something personal, hence creating a stronger emotional bond with your brand.
Sweepstakes
Sweepstakes are a great way to build your email list and sign-ups and collect information about your audience makeup and customer interests. These campaigns are simple and effective and people seem to love them because in most cases they just have to register and subscribe to an email list to participate.
This is also a chance for you to shine in the customer relationship department. The importance of a good follow-up can’t be emphasised enough. Create a nice Thank You page and offer discount coupons to the contestants. Adding the element of surprise will certainly work those engagement muscles. How? In your sweepstakes announcement, don’t tell the audience anything about getting discount coupons if they decide to partake in the contest. Instead, send the coupons along with your Thank You email and see your email list skyrocket.
The philosophy behind it is simple – everyone likes the attention. There are several great ways to show your audience that you care and stay connected with them even after the promotion ends:
- Create a drip email campaign for new subscribers and introduce them to your brand.
- Send them free resources, guides, and content.
- Encourage them to purchase your products/services by including discount codes and/or coupons.
Facebook Sweepstakes
You can organize a Facebook timeline sweepstakes as a part of your Mother’s Day promotion. The thing about this social network is that it only allows this kind of contest among comments or likes. Facebook allows businesses to encourage participants to take other actions, however, such as to follow your page or share a post.
Focus on boosting your initial post, and others should work well thanks to organic reach and engagement. It’s very important to reach back whenever customers reach out to you. Engaging in a conversation with your customers shows them that you’re listening.
If you belong to the food or fashion and beauty niches, Pinterest is a great place for your Mother’s Day contest, and history has shown that tips and how-tos are the most commonly searched items on this platform.
The concept of a Pinterest contest is either to ask your audience to pin your post or deals from your company on their board, or to pin other images that represent their idea of the best Mother’s Day. Alternatively, and this is for the more creative ones – create a pin which they would tie to your brand. It’s also a good idea to include Facebook and Instagram follows and likes as optional and bonus entries for your contest.
Quizzes
Quizzes have a huge potential of going viral across social media, especially on Facebook. You can create a single quiz or even a bundle of 3 to 5 themed ones.
Here’s what you can do: ask contestants to enter your quiz in exchange for a chance to win prizes for their moms. Asking something like, “Which celebrity mom is your mother?” will create engagement on social networks because quizzes are fun, very popular, and easy to share. Adding a prize as a bonus can encourage contestants and people in their community to engage even more. Doing so will boost your database, and you can use this information to narrow down potential customers and market to specific groups of users.
Bonus Tip – Partnering Up with Influencers
Creating alliances with bloggers and influencers in your niche can also drive value to your contest. If you find influential people who can promote your contest and expose your brand to a wider audience, it can help you spread the word even more effectively. The right people for you are the ones that embody your target customer. However, you need to be careful with this strategy because it could affect the quality of your contests entrants and collected data.
Contest Rules
As you know, the legal aspect of organising any contest needs to be taken seriously. The U.S. laws and regulations regulate how these type of promotional campaigns have to be conducted, and many states have individual considerations when it comes to this. You need to be clear and straightforward with your contest rules to continue to conduct your campaign within the legal framework. It’s important to avoid any issues that will result in financial penalties and repercussions.
By setting clear rules, you also avoid any type of confusion among entrants. This makes it easier to manage the submitted content as well as the entire campaign. Since this is a contest where all the submitted entries will be evaluated based on a set of judging criteria, you must clearly articulate this criteria to entrants. Choosing winners based on contribution and other clearly stated judging criteria will allow you to maintain trust between your brand and your entrants.
Also remember that different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest do not have identical policies regarding organising contests.
PromoSimple has composed a Contest Rules template for you to implement into your next campaign. You can download the PDF document here.
Final Words
A Mother’s Day contest is a great way to engage and interact with your consumers and fans. Connecting your brand to the values this holiday celebrates, like motherhood and motherly bonds, will contribute to a positive association your end users have with your brand.
There are many benefits your company may reap from a well-organized contest campaign. Apart from building your email list, contests create a buzz around your brand, help you conduct market research, and provide valuable insight from the people loyal to your company. They foster long-lasting customer relationships and enable an authentic customer experience. As an added bonus, you receive invaluable content that can be used to enhance your marketing strategy in future.
