How we reached half a million people in $3 through a Contest

The hardest thing in a bootstrapped start-up is reaching out to your audience and telling them about yourself. You can’t use expensive marketing tactics and all you have is passion and unlimited zeal to succeed and bring significant change in lives of people.

With so many talks and suggestions around growth hacking techniques, and with the experience of last few strategies that bombed, we realized it’s not only about the resources, but the Timing and Intent that matters a lot. You can burn millions on campaigns, but if the timing is not good and customers are not connecting with your product it won’t work. Also the connection between your product category and the time should be equally matched.

             

The biggest advantage being a start-up is you can try anything 
(ethical obviously), since you have no downside as you are already
at bottom, but if that works you might catch some light.

With all the campaign failures in past, we planned a Contest. The idea was simple, Fathers have always given all they can and will always do that, it’s just that they never express themselves. Getting to know their side of story and sharing that was the main idea.

Homesake stands for Bringing Affordable art and decor right to your home and that is why Family and everything related to home is important for us, both from product and positioning aspect. A contest around the same theme to have better engagement and gamifying it as much as possible to bring out active participation.

And so our Journey begun:

CONTENT:

Words have the power to bring changes and influence everyone, and no marketer can ignore this power. For an effective campaign, on a topic as emotional as father’s day, we required kick-ass content, good graphics and quick yet flawless execution. A good content also sets the mood of campaign.

Our small team was already over occupied with existing tasks. Involving them on something new would put us back by a week.

So we decided to crowd-source the content, and which platform can offer us better content than Quora.

With more than 3.4 million daily users, it was an ideal choice. So we surveyed few questions like beautiful father moments, hardest things being a dad, being father. The most striking feature was that all the content was from fathers who have actually experienced  those moments, and  it added value and emotions to our whole concept.

 

In the end, we had to shortlist a few answers, as we had more than 300 answers to choose from.

Graphics:

Good content with poor graphics is sure to bomb in the digital age. Now again we were at the drawing board, as we wanted graphics to do justice to the content, and make a strong connect with the audience at same time.

For this, we explored Canva. Now the best thing about canva is any newbie can work and experiment with graphics, try different themes, layouts and fonts and that is just what we did. Their design school and blog has some really good designs and suggestions. After three hours of trials and denials, we finalized one theme and quickly re-produced the final posts.

 

 ( These didn’t make the final cut 🙂 )

Now we were equipped with arms & ammunition and ready for the big day. A Good content sets the right mood for the Contest.

The Beginning:

We pitched and posted our content, a night before Father’s day. The idea was not to miss out the early morning crowd and also give us a small kick-start. We had almost zero engagement till then.

Early morning, we again started inviting people to participate in our contest on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Now, on facebook to get initial traction, we used fb ads with a one day budget of 3 USD (200 INR) targeting young and online shoppers. The idea was to start getting a few entries. In about half an hour it started increasing and due to regular shares and posts by contributors, we were able to reach more than 10K people in less than 10 hours.

 The most important feature was a personal note of Thank You and encouragement.

 

  This led to more shares, and re-engagement from users through comments and likes and as a result, better engagement. Personal notes and motivations work really well. Also, the participant commented or liked the same, which led to increased engagement. Facebook algorithm responded quickly to the increase in engagement.

On twitter, our strategy was to gamify the whole contest, and that is why after initial entries and traction, we created a leader board.

This led to increased activity as those who were on the leader board tried to maintain their position, and motivated the participants lagging behind. This led to enormous increase in re-tweets, and mentions. In 3 hours our reach was more than 1 Lakh people.

 

 

 

Now our only task was maintaining that momentum.

Last hour is always the busiest hour for active participants , but getting more and new entries is always a challenge as the contest is about to end. So we introduced a small incentive for last minute participants as well. Small gifts and incentives really work well, and in our case, the effect was phenomenal.

Though it can’t be classified as a growth hack, but it was our first baby step towards it and gave us a motivation to keep on perusing our dream of changing the Home Decor industry.

As a start-up we learned, that growth never happens overnight but it’s a combination of these small hacks and some failures. 🙂

Find us on twitter at @Homesake_india