Weekly Campaign Idea: Recipe Challenge

In today's post you'll learn what it takes to build and execute a recipe challenge Campaign. While this Campaign is specific to those in the restaurant industry, any business can take the lessons in this article and apply them to their next Campaign build.We also decided to mix things up a bit and interviewed the creator of today's Campaign to learn more about their concept, goals and strategy. Jared DiVincent, the creator of the King and Prince Seafood® Recipe Challenge campaign, was nice enough to answer our questions below. We also added some additional tips for marketers who are ready to engage with their social followers. Let's jump in.

Explain the concept of your app

King & Prince Seafood®, headquartered in Brunswick, Georgia, is kicking off a recipe challenge for restaurant owners, chefs and other foodservice professionals, giving them a chance to put their business on the map. To accomplish this, we developed a contest that allows entrants to show us how creative they can be with King & Prince Seafood® product. They are tasked with submitting their best seafood recipe that, once approved and posted, will be voted on by the public in order to determine the top three finalists. The top three recipes with the most votes by October 16th, 2015 will be recreated by the King & Prince Seafood® executive chefs, Chef Johnny Carino and Chef Brett Smith, to determine the Grand Prize Winner based on Flavor, Presentation and Originality!The winner will receive a Grand Prize valued at over $5,000 including free product for a year, a $1,000 American Express gift card, and a visit by Chef Johnny Carino to their restaurant or business for a complimentary consultation and menu analysis.

‍ShortStack Tip: Try to involve your audience on multiple levels. King & Prince Seafood® has multiple stages -- the entry stage and the voting stage -- so they're opening their Campaign to more participants and views. ShortStack's voting widget allows for anyone to vote on entries, whether they've participated in the competition or not.

What's the goal (preferably measurable) of the app?

The overall goals are to increase awareness of the many seafood products available at King & Prince Seafood® to key employees in the restaurant industry, to grow their archive of inspiring seafood recipes for their current clients, and to help a business in need by providing free product for a year, $1,000 and a private consultation from their chef(s).It was also important to design the contest app to match the existing brand and to present it in a simple way to encourage followers to enter without feeling overwhelmed or confused as to how to do so. Because this contest is more involved than most, we decided that a video of Chef Johnny Carino embedded into he contest app would be a creative way for him to personally invite potential entrants to participate without too much text. ShortStack's embedded app feature is a great way to present any contest to potential entrants that may not be on a specific social network on a custom website landing page.

‍ShortStack Tip: Having a specific target audience can result in higher participation in your Campaign. Many businesses think the larger the audience the more entries, and while this can be true, you ultimately want to be offering something exclusive or special to people who care about your brand and will remain loyal customers or followers long after your competition is over. We also love how King & Prince Seafood® recognized that their promotion might be a little more complicated to enter than usual so they included extra elements (such as a video) to help their entrants. The easier you can make it for people to enter your promotion the better.

How do you plan to promote the app?

The contest is primarily promoted on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter targeting industries and job titles however, King & Prince Seafood® also wanted non-facebook users to be able to enter online at a custom landing page, www.KPseafood.com/recipe-challenge. Because of this and Shortstack's new custom landing page and embed features we are directing all entrants to this landing page instead of installing a Facebook Tab.Additionally, with social share buttons on the landing page and each individual recipe entry posted it's a lot easier for entrants to vote daily and share their favorite recipes with others to earn more votes while taking advantage of the viral nature of social media.

‍ShortStack Tip:  The easiest way to assure that anyone can enter your promotion, whether they have a Facebook profile or not, is to publish your Campaign as a landing page and/or utilize ShortStack's embed features to place the Campaign on your website. As King & Prince Seafood® mentions above, they are using Facebook to promote their Campaign but driving all traffic back to their website embedded Campaign so that no one's participation is hindered by the social networks they are actively on.

Why did your marketing agency decide to use ShortStack?

When starting SocialCompass ( www.SocialCompassMarketing.com ) in June of 2012, I asked past work colleagues for an easier and more cost effective way to make Facebook Apps for my clients. More than half of the people I asked recommended ShortStack as THE solution! We have continued using ShortStack ever since because of the constant improvements that make it easy for us to create the contest, promotion or landing pages that our clients request while having the ability to customize code and match the contest design to our client's brand. This leaves us with more time for to create content, schedule posts, and manage targeted ad campaigns in order to promote the contest. With a little CSS knowledge, we believe ShortStack has little to no limitations in creating ANY contest either you or your clients can dream up!

‍ShortStack Tip: ShortStack continues to grow and strive to be a tool that marketers can use to build Facebook apps, marketing campaigns and landing pages. To get a private demo of ShortStack and see how we can help you execute your next Campaign visit https://www.shortstack.com/contact-sales/.