Driving Engagement With Contests: Be the Next Boaty McBoatface

By Aaron Agius

Over 7,000 names were submitted to the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) when it invited the public to christen a brand new 129-meter long icebreaker: a $300 million state-of-the-art polar research ship.

NERC asked for names that were inspirational, or ones that had historical significance; what it got was “RSS Boaty McBoatface,” suggested by former BBC presenter James Hand.

With the voting mechanism used for the contest, it quickly became the favorite among followers, getting over 120,000 votes, and it spread quickly to the corners of the internet through social media channels like Reddit. It even trumped more appropriate, traditional names like “RSS Henry Worsley,” after the British explorer who died in January attempting a solo mission across the Antarctic.

The event ended up being so popular, it even spawned copycats including Trainy McTrainface and Horsey McHorseface. Other brands jumped on the bandwagon to have some fun with it, like Royal Caribbean tweeting an invite to James Hand with an offer to name one of its ships “Boaty McBoatface of the Seas.”

NERC may not be your traditional for-profit organization looking to make a buck from commercial sales, but that doesn’t mean it hasn't benefited from all the engagement and publicity. Was it just a viral fluke? Or can you generate the same kind of engagement to become the next Boaty McBoatface?

Here are some tips that could help you:

1. Don’t just target your niche

It would have been super easy–and maybe even smart–for NERC to target only its specific audience to name the vessel. The organization could have sent a suggestion form or survey to people who work in environmental sciences and industry professionals to solicit names if it really wanted more historically or scientifically accurate names. Instead, it chose to poll the public, and that was the decision that spawned a storm of hilarious suggestions.

While your marketing should generally target a specific audience, it’s smart to look outside of your niche when you want more engagement from a contest, and end up promoting it to the public. This greatly improves the reach of your contests and gets you in front of people who align with your audience, or those who are members of your audience but were not immediately aware of your brand.

2. Target fan base growth

Every contest can be used as a point of further engagement, especially when you leverage your social channels. One way to boost engagement around contests is to drive likes and follows on specific social media platforms.

You don’t have to limit that to Facebook, either. Drive followers toward Instagram, Twitter, Periscope, and even Snapchat if you’re using it.

You’re guaranteed to see an increase in likes and followers as a byproduct of the sharing that entrants will do. For those social platforms that use a ranking algorithm for content in the feed (like Instagram and Facebook), that increased engagement will also help with your overall visibility among followers.

3. Crowdsourcing

Generic contests looking for follows, likes, and shares can do very well, but some of the most popular contests turned to the consumer or end user to provide content and promote engagement.

This can done in a variety of ways-- from photo, video, or essay contests, to product suggestions. Boaty McBoatface is just one example, but there are plenty of other contests in the past that have this same route: the Lay’s Potato Chips flavor suggestions and Papa John's specialty pizza recipe contest are two examples.

Getting your audience involved, especially with voting contests, is one of the best ways to boost engagement. People will naturally want to share whatever they create with their social circles. And like the case of Boaty McBoatface, you never know how far that could spread.

4. Add visual elements

Content that utilizes relevant images gets 94 percent views than content without relevant images, and visual content is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media. When you’re running a contest, take the time to create an amazing graphic to act as the featured image you want shared.

If you’re running a crowdsourced campaign, follow the lead of NERC, Lay’s, and Papa John’s. In each contest, the suggested names (or toppings) appeared in an image alongside the entry to create a visual element that matched the goals of the contest. Another approach you can take is marketing your contest with visual elements, from images to video.

Of course, the level of engagement that requires entrants to create and upload an image or video could potentially reduce the number of entries compared to a simple form email or instant sweepstakes, but it has tremendous potential to improve overall visibility if the contest spreads.

The greatest benefit here is that you’re capitalizing on person-to-person marketing. You create and leverage brand ambassadors among participants that can greatly improve reach.

5. Minimize the steps to enter

In order to maximize the engagement for your contest, you need to find a good balance between getting all the information you want from participants, and making entry into the contest easy.

Your contest goals will play a large part in that; if you’re just looking to increase followers and build visibility through shares, then participating is relatively simple. But on the flip side, if your goal is to grow your list, then participation would require clicking to a landing page, entering personal information, hitting submit, and perhaps even confirming an opt-in via email.

Think about the information you really want, in order to maximize initial engagement and limit the form. With conversion optimization in mind, you want to eliminate clutter that kills conversions.

However, if you do want more information from the participants, then try a multi-stage form. Ask for certain information (name and email) upfront for entrance into the contest, encourage people to share their entries in the contest, then offer up another form asking for more information in exchange for additional chances to win.

6. You don’t have to give away the world

It’s not necessary to offer a huge, high-value prize in your contest in hopes of getting engagement. What you offer just needs to be relevant to your audience to spark engagement. You can turn that engagement up a notch or three by adding elements that make an emotional connection that plays on humor and entertainment, or just by giving people the opportunity to be part of the story (or telling their own).

In the case of NERC and naming a $300 million dollar research vessel, there was no prize other than bragging rights that you got to name a ship…and look at the reach and engagement from that contest.

According to a CNN report, you should be careful with competitions on social media; I disagree. I think NERC may have known exactly what it was getting itself into when it set up the contest. Sometimes you have to throw a little caution to the wind and embrace the risk of crowdsourcing in order to get the most engagement from your contests.

People can be wild and unpredictable, but they’re also the driving force behind viral events. If you want your contest to be the next Boaty McBoatface, then you should embrace a little of that crazy.