Enjoy this week’s guest post from Communications & Outreach Officer, Megan Torgerson, and learn about increasing brand awareness through a video voting campaign.
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This fall Business Impact NW celebrated its fourth annual IMPACT Pitch Competition providing businesses with a positive social impact an opportunity to work on their business strategy and ultimately vie for the chance to win $30,000 in cash prizes. Seventy-four businesses applied (approximately half came from our pool of clients, with the other 50% from community partners). After the initial application and a financial feasibility round, twenty-one contestants moved to a third video voting round encouraging small business owners to get in the habit of regularly engaging their audiences on social media.
The Who and What
Friends, family, clients and the general public were invited to vote on their favorite businesses’ videos each day during the video voting round. By design, this round also drives a ton of traffic to Business Impact NW’s site – 110,000 page views in the month of August to be exact. The analytics show that these viewers are also clicking through to other pages on our site to learn more about additional Business Impact NW’s programs and services.
“The IMPACT Pitch competition has increased Business Impact NW’s brand awareness significantly over the years,” said Managing Director & COO, Danielle Moser. “Choosing to embed the video voting mechanism on our website, rather…
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For the competition we went with the Video Contest WordPress Plugin which offers voter protection, a responsive design, flexibility regarding the competition’s terms and conditions, and the capacity to track votes via IP address or login creation, to limit the number of votes.
Results
As the competition has grown, so has the number of votes. The first year Business Impact NW ran the competition, we had to boost our hosting capacity to handle the flood of website visits. “We never would have dreamed that we would have so many visitors to our website that the traffic would actually crash it. Now, after upgrading our hosting capacity, not only will our site not crash no matter what kind of events and traffic we bring to it, we also know that we can host all kinds of contests, events, and social marketing to our site without worrying that it might take us offline,” Danielle recalled.
The video voting round has also proven useful for increasing brand awareness to the small businesses competing in the competition. “We had a good time promoting it on the round of voting for the video and that definitely attracted a lot of attention for us. People got really excited about what we were doing. Not just people in the direct Rocky Butte community, but other people across the US…that was really encouraging for us to see. People who, maybe, we don’t know that well really stepped up and encouraged us during that voting time,” said Bryan Atkinson, co-owner and sales and marketing lead at Rocky Butte Coffee Roasters, the small business that won the Best Veteran Small Business award at IMPACT Pitch this fall.
Business Impact NW looks forward to its fifth annual IMPACT Pitch in October 2020. For a sneak peek at the live pitch competition experience, view the 2019 IMPACT Pitch video.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Megan is Business Impact NW’s Communications & Outreach Officer and a candidate for Seattle University’s Arts Leadership MFA program. She holds a BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Montana and is passionate about storytelling of all forms, nature and cultivating community by elevating our unique stories. Megan grew up on a farm and ranch in Montana and is especially inspired by empowering small business owners from underserved rural communities.
You can stay in contact with Business Impact NW on Facebook and Twitter @businssimpactnw.
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