In this episode we speak with Travis Ketchum of Contest Domination. We discuss how to generate more leads by utilizing viral online contests. We take a look at how to create an offer and prize to ensure you get targeted leads for your business.
Travis Ketchum is the Founder & CEO of Contest Domination, a powerful contest platform. Travis is a performance marketing expert and entrepreneur.
EPISODE SUMMARY:
- Travis’ background – A little about Travis and how Contest Domination came to be.
- Capturing Leads – How using contests can help crack this hard nut.
- Customer Profiling – How to generate super qualified leads by planning before executing.
- Incentivise for Action– Create a compelling offer then reward those willing to perform the desired action.
THE FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Welcome to the brave new world of cost effective communications, tips, trips, and tricks, how-tos, why-tos, and what-no- to-dos, and using the power of web-based content marketing to easily promote whatever you’d like.
Welcome to the Multimedia Marketing Show with Jake Hower.
Jake: And Welcome back for another episode. I’m your host Jake Hower. You’re listening to The Multi Media Marketing Show. This is episode 21 and we are speaking to somebody who’s helping businesses and people on line generate more leads for their business.
Before I reveal who the guess is, I just want to thank everybody who I’ve have been in contact with over last week or so, and at all through the entire production show, so thank you very much for getting in contact. If you have got any queries, please hit me up an email jake@mshow.com or connect at any of the social media channels. I’d love to hear from you, and of course if you got the time head across our chains in later view for the show. Okay, so today’s guess is Travis Ketchum from Contest Domination.
Travis and his company have built a plot form which allows you to easily create and offer viral contests for lead generation in your company. So, in this episode, we look into a little bit about how Contest Domination can help you how it has helped some past people like Andrew Warner of Mixergy and how you can create and offer at a price which will ensure that you’re getting targeted leads to your company. You’re not just getting a bunch of people who are signing up just for the freebie. Okay, so let’s get stucked into this interview now. Make sure you stick around until the end of the show. We will provide data and also a very very special offer, so really awesome offer actually, so stick around to the end of the show to find out what that offer is around Contest Domination. So let’s get stuck in right now!
Segue: We’ll be right back with more of the Multimedia Marketing Show but first this suggestion.
Make sure that you don’t miss a single episode by subscribing to us via ITunes and don’t forget to like Jake on Facebook, follow him on Tweeter and sign up for email notifications at multimediamarketingshow.com. Then you’ll be the first to know when new episodes are available. Now, let’s get back to the Multimedia Marketing Show with Jake Hower.
Jake: Welcome back listeners. As we discussed at the top of the episode, we’ve got Travis Ketchum from Contest Domination on the call today. Travis how are you?
Travis: Hey I’m great Jake! Thanks for having me on.
Jake: Thank you for coming on. This is certainly an aspect which is a real sore point for just about everybody I know and that is obviously lead capturing. So we do all this work as content marketers to draw a traffic and one thing that everybody seems have a bit of a pain point regarding is how you convert that traffic into leads for your business , and that’s where your product is really, seems to be ticking all the boxes and working really effectively for that.
Travis: Yeah, that’s definitely been our focus. You know, its kind ‘a funny, we wouldn’t have been even started this company if someone else had just decided to focus on leads in a way that we do. So it built it out of our own need, as really why it started.
Jake: Yeah Fantastic! So Travis for our listeners out there the sort of rough outline of this episode is we’ll quickly have a look at Contest Domination and what it is, and look at some of the results. Some of your costumers are currently getting with it. Then I’d like to almost build case study that our listeners can almost go at get Contest Domination and implement for themselves in their own businesses. How does that sound?
Travis: Yeah. Sounds great!
Jake: Fantastic. Alright, let’s kick off then. Travis, why don’t you give our listeners a little bit about your history and what lead you to launching Contest Domination.
Travis: Sure, so, I’ll keep it kind ‘a brief but you know, like most people probably in your audience I’ve been kind ‘an entrepreneur since day one. You know, my first official business was started in high school where it’s actually drop shipping on EBay which you know, as an 18 year-old made like $60, 000 in just about two and a half months which really opened my eyes to how you can actually scale something up like this.
And then I graduated from college about from 3 years ago, was an Account Manager at different companies and then I decided, I was tired of building everyone else’s list and I want to build my own because every example I’ve ever been through, the residual value was always on the list, and so I knew that the one of the ways to get a quick response that would kind of have exponential growth in a short amount of time is to run a contest because everyone loves to enter contest. And so about a year and some change ago, I started looking at all those different contest platforms and I was totally blown away that no one focused on just rewarding people for the actual “You care about us” as a business for just getting more lead, they all rewarded likes and follows and things in that nature but no one really gave them points just for driving you cold hard leads. And so, you know that kind ‘a developer gathered together in a small launch, took off more that I’ve ever expected and we’ve just reiterating from there.
Jake: Yeah that’s fantastic. I guess when you initiated the launch, right was it Word press plug in?
Travis: Yeah that’s correct. It’s a very very simple Word press plug in, you know, I spent a couple thousand dollars to get it developed, some of that was even on a credit card kind ‘a thing, and yes a very simple Word press plug in essentially the way it worked where people would enter their name and email, they will get one point into the contest and then for every person they referred to also enter the contest gave them 10 additional points, and that’s it!
Jake: Okay, fantastic! So what is the product now? What does Contest Domination look like right now?
Travis: Yes it has really grown into something much more matured these days. Now, it’s a hosted platform instead of being a Word press plug in. And we went that route because then we can have greater control over the environment. We could have a greater degree of confidence in the kind of experience that our users are going to get. We knew that at scale we could buy a very very fast server right like on shared host so there’s always delays and things that were hurting their conversion rates and so we just knew we could have a lot more control and offer a lot better features more consistently as a hosted offering. And so we actually rewrote the app from the ground up, it’s called the same thing, some of the elements look the same but it’s a completely different animal.
Jake: It’s interesting the difference between a Word press plug in and a hosted platform and for me as a business signer and someone who uses these systems, the real benefit for me is the fact that I have so many different websites, so with different themes and I always find with a lot of plug ins I get so many different conflicts and the other thing I find that with hosted platforms is that you generally, you’re not dealing with that and as a result the focus for the products can generally be hundred percent on providing the best user experience and as you say, working on speed and conversion, that really helps also.
Travis: Absolutely and you know, the other cool part to is that it gives us the 10,000 field view for what to work in for what niches in real time so that we can learn about the different things that are working for people and try to share in generalities, you know what people could be doing so that a new cost when coming on has a lot more insight and help because we can actually provide that information because we can see it ourselves so that they just have the leaps and bounds ahead of someone who are just flying in trying to install a piece of software and figuring out what to do next. It’s a lot different experience.
Jake: Yes absolutely. So what is a typical use case for Contest Domination?
Travis: I kind ‘a define that in two different ways because there’s a typical media CreAction that people want to do and then there’s a typical use case for what works really really well. So if you want me to outline those I’d be happy to.
Jake: Yeah that would be fantastic.
Travis: Yeah so the Media Creation for a lot of people was I wan going to give away an Ipad and hope a lot of people enter it and then I’ll market to those leads. And while that can get you a lot of leads people often times gets you the wrong kind of leads. Now the typical things that work out really well are people that are giving away experiences and you know, high end events and you, know true scarcity that’s related to what they actually want to sell potential costumers because they don’t get a lot of leads on their door that are interested on what they are all about as a company and so those people who are usually not only getting way more leads but they get a much much larger viral coefficient but whoever comes on the door are super qualified.
Jake: Yeah , and I think that’s probably the most important thing and talking about, there, the fact that you’re looking for contextual relevant leads.
Travis: Absolutely, I don’t know about you but I would rather have a hundred super qualified leads than a million unqualified leads in my system.
Jake: Yeah. I know some of your costumers include Andrew Warner of Mixergy, how has Contest Domination helped Andrew?
Travis: Yes! So with Andrew his on information business really, so he’s main revenue driver is selling access to Mixergy premium because anyone who is a Mixergy fan probably noticed, I believe it’s like 45 or 60 days or something. His old interviews locked up and unless you’re a Mixergy premium member you can’t view them. He has specialized courses, etc and so back in the early days he had sold a lifetime access to that. There’s a one time fee, and now everything is I believe, a quarterly or yearly, and so what we did with him is we gave away three lifetime access passes to Mixergy premium, you know which is great because A – They weren’t even sold anymore so although our value aside there’s that kind of cool scarcity and B – It gave his biggest rating fans a great incentive to go talk about how much they love him. In fact we saw a number of people that went to the system and go to the public on social who were saying “I’ve never promoted anything on here before but I have to say that I’ve been following Andrew Warner for years. Amazing content, love his stuff. You really are doing yourself a disservice by not checking this out.”
And then we saw the traffic from those users, cold traffic but never has emailed us before, enter the contest, find out what’s all about and a matter of hours later post on his Facebook wall saying “Because of this user of yours that I trust told me you’re so awesome I had to check you out but I couldn’t wait to see if I won so went ahead and signed up for an annual subscription. And I love it ! You know if this kind of inferred credibility right because it’s not , it wasn’t him telling everyone in the world how cool he is. It was his fan telling the world how cool he is, and they were redirecting people to someone’s who’s relevant to what he sell. So it’s likes count the perfect storm, getting qualified leads who were just primed and eager to buy.
Jake: Yeah , yeah, that’s fantastic. I think at this point , can you take us through the product, like how our listeners would go about in terms of using natural system. So if we look at this first and then what we might do is put in a little bit of case study and a take our listeners out there through the process of potentially how you come up with an offer and then roll it out in your own business .
Travis: Sure. I mean the actual use of the part is very simple and straight forward. There’s just a couple of blanks to fill in like what do you want to call it, what’s the description, what email provider do you want that lead you go to, you know , some of our plans offer go to Webinars as well so you can register for a webinar.
The technical side is actually very straight forward . In fact most of our users complete , you know, what surrounds a pretty powerful contest in like 15 minutes or less because it’s more than just a squeeze page, there’s other social aspects to it so they can complete all of that very very quickly.
Now, as far as picking the price which is really the major hurdle , right, I can use two examples, one of them I like to use because it’s kind of obscure and so it really kind ‘a exemplifies how contest can work for any niche. I was talking to a costumer who’s company sells flax seed oil, and you might be thinking, flax seed oil, how do you get people crazy about flax seed oil? Well the thing you could think about is really what does your ideal costumer profile really really love, and what kind of experience can you offer that would be laser targeted to your ideal profile? And then do a follow-up of what you have actually have to sell.
So in this particular case I asked the user “who’s your ideal costumer? “And he jokingly told me it’s “Hippi Moms”, and I was like “Ok, great! So what does hippi moms really really love? And he said to be honest, like 60% or more of their costumer base is really into yoga. And so the experience that you he wants to use for the contest was private yoga session with a notable instructor in his geographical area , and so he has all this moms entering to be part of this yoga experience , and then he can be follow it up with a health auto responder that included flax seed oil , and he did great. You can do a great job with it. And so it’s just understanding the wants and needs of your ideal costumer profile, and then incentivizing that kind of experience to give them the auto list and then following up your stuff because you know what’s laser targeted .
Jake: Some of our past guess have spoken about their planning involved in working at who you audio costumer is and that really, it resonates pretty much sure about everything we do and how important it is who actually have that costumer profile. Because essential what you’re looking to do is reward an outcome I guess.
Travis: Yeah I mean what you want to do is you want to capture the attention of you ideal costumer. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your part of the capture that have their attention but after you have their attention it’s easier to tell about your products.
Jake: Sure, alright! Lets put in a little bit of a case study and go through it here. I’ve got a service which I’ve just launched where we offer custom caricatures for people. We got a fantastic illustration team here, and it’s a really easy process. They just go through and then select the package that they want at, place an order and within 48 hours they’ll have their custom caricature by a stuff of a photo that they sent us. How would I go about creating a contest and try to capture more leads to this particular service?
Travis: Well you know, one thing the creators did, do you have like any higher in package of that service?
Jake: Well, we do and one thing that hasn’t been wrote at just yet but certainly will be is Bulk Packs. So we are talking packs of 5 and packs of ten.
Travis: Okay, so what might be interesting is in your case specially if your, you know if you connect, give more information about the idle user but you know one thing could say, you know get a costumed caricature for your entire team.” So as you said, if you want to maybe focus on people like in the start up world, like the text start up world for instance, you could say, you know, enter to win a caricature for your entire team and then everyone who enters, just send them an automatic follow up that says hey, you saved 20% on getting one today and if you win we’ll refund all of your money.
Jake: Alright! Okay , okay, so in my case the product itself was probably an expanded the product itself is probably really good prize all to anticipate.
Travis: Yeah, I mean with that you mean I give a crazy explosion of leads for that but the people who come thru are obviously going to qualify great so you will get a bump. It will cause you almost nothing to do, and it gives you a good ability and a warm intro to follow up with those users that you ‘d know are interested in your services and give them a discount incentive to take action today.
Jake: Yeah, ok, right. So then I would sign up for Contest Domination, how easy is it to choose a particular landing page?
Travis: Its pretty simple, we just have a few options in there right now but we’ll be adding about 20 more options and a week or so so probably by that time there will be quite a few more options but it’s as simple as picking from a drop down.
Jake: Ok, fantastic, and then I’ll go through and put my offer, connect my email service provider? How do I really set , do I get a link or can I implement in my Word press install?
Travis: So there is a couple different options here. You know of course all pages get their own Context.IO link. That is the kind ‘a base option. All our paid option also have one click installation to Facebook and we give you a link that actually does a mobile detection for you there as well so if you’d rather keep sending the traffic to a Facebook tab with the like gate option, etcetera. If we give you link to do that because as you may or may not know and your listener may or may not know, Facebook apps don’t work on mobile and so we give you a link that doesn’t fancy detection so we can tell from the desktop go ahead and send them through the app page if they’re on a mobile device , we can still show them the contest without the light gate.
And then for the pro-plus packages you can do we call domain mapping, so you can actually have you know like, a contest.yourdomain.com via the URL that people are going to and sharing , and then all the levels have embed codes. So if you’d rather start the experience on your site, we give you some simple embed codes, you just copy and paste into a side bar or into a blog post, etcetera, and then they end up on our show page for you cause that’s all tried and tested but there are several different avenues, they are just simple copy and paste.
Jake: Yeah, ok! So we’ve got all of that set up. I think the most important aspect is to get it in front of as many people as possible . Few are experiencing what your costumers have experienced. What is the best process to follow to get it in front of many people as you can?
Travis: Sure, so you know, if you have any kind of audience at all ,and it doesn’t have to be a lot. I mean when I launched my first contest I only had a couple of hundred people in my email list, but if you have anyone that likes you at all, some people are kind of worried why should I email my current customers. Well we want to get new costumers, what they don’t realize is that it is a very high viral coefficient, so the easy start, the easy way to kick it off is to just let your existing audience already know about the contest. Right, mail it to them, let them engage with that because they’re going to be your biggest fans, they already know about you, they love you, and so they’re going to share like crazy.
So you’re going to get a very nice easy bump just by doing now. Now another common practice that people like to do is by Facebook add because you can send the Facebook traffic to the Facebook tab which a lot of times results in cheaper clicks and so cheaper overall cost of user acquisition. But you can do things as far as you know, solo emails ,you can partner with people that might want to contribute to the prizes and then they might want to announce it on their blog that their prize is part of your package. Of course standard blogging, any paid the advertising of course is a no brainer.
Jake: Yeah, absolutely, that sounds really fantastic. Now one thing I’d be interested in, a contest that something should be running all the time?
Travis: So there’s different schools of thought on that, there definitely is the potential like any marketing for your audience to have burn out. Now that just mean you can’t hit your existing audience with every single contest you do if you’re doing once all the time but that being said it’s a great fun way to engage with cold traffic who may not know you yet.
So, you know, we go typically on a monthly subscription model and that allows unlimited contest, unlimited simultaneous contest, etcetera, but we find that most of our customers typically run one contest per quarter because that’s enough time for them to kind ‘a collect themselves, plan the campaign, start it, promote it, stop it, pick a winner, and let everyone kind ‘a enjoy the fruits of their labor in that particular contest before they start regrouping for the next campaign.
Jake: Sure, sure, alright, fantastic! Okay so one thing mentioned a little bit earlier where you were talking about integration, we go to Webinar. Can you explain a little a bit on that and how you go you actually use a contest to drive a Webinar registration leads.
Travis: Definitely, so you know, I can just give it best probably to an example, James Wedmore uses us for his webinar registrations and what he does is he sets it up where it says on the page , the page copy says “Register for my Webinar and also enter to win, something in this awesome contest”, usually for him the prizes – one on one consulting, maybe it’s a go pro- video camera because he does YouTube marketing, things that are related to his niches but you have to be present on the webinar to win and that’s one of his stipulations and what people end up doing is they hit this page, they enter their name and information which simultaneously ask them to write a responder in what they choose for the for the webinar and as soon as they, you know, click submit, they’re presented with that page, “Great, you have one unconfirmed entry” which will only be confirmed after you double up 10. And then you can earn ten more entries into this contest by referring your friends.
Well the thing is all those friends who are heading up that “sales page” are there for the webinar information, they’re there to try to win a camera. It’s a very very warm traffic and people have huge incentive to promote their friends to go sign up for the Webinar and then they all have the incentives to be live in the webinar.
Jake: Right. Okay, this is sounding fantastic. Previously, we had Lewis Howes on the show talking about Webinars and using Webinars to sell , and to follow up with that we’ve had James Wedmore talking about moving people through a funnel so this is certainly very much on topic and both of these use cases at things we implement here at our shows. So for our listeners, this is absolutely gold. Tell me where is Contest Domination going? Where do you see you be going in a next six to twelve months?
Travis: Sure, so in the next six to twelve months, one thing that we have in Beta right now is actually an agency plan , which is focused on agencies that do client work so that the idea of having multiple client dashboards that you know, have single sign on experience. The ability to have account manager roles so every agency account has unlimited account manager roles. The entire team can get in there and make it work for you.
So that’s one of the major features for Contest Domination . But for us as a company in the next twelve months , we see Contest Domination as one of four kind of tenth poles to the way that we approach lead generation, and they will all kind ‘a compliment each other. So the B is called something else, but your log from Contest Domination will also get you under the other apps.
Jake: Right! Okay , so you are focusing on the lead generation or traffic generation for these other services.
Travis: Yeah, we’ve been always very very motivated to give people an easy clearer way to get performance over their marketing, and now was the incentive for creating Contest Domination the first base, like I said, it wasn’t apparently clear what the ____ was. It wasn’t clear what the conversion rates were, what the actual viral affect had on a contest both as it is , and I think there is other complimentary ways of marketing, right, because contest, you know, while someone can do very well with contest, it’s usually not the only way they want to approach getting new costumers , and so our kind of hope that flesh out that full experience.
Jake: This is great. I absolutely love this! Personally as a businessman, I’m pretty tight up with the time and one thing I guess with the size of my company right now is I can’t afford a full time developer , and so having platforms about Contest Domination and a few others out there, really enables me to quickly get this offers to market so I can actually start having leads, focusing more on my own business. So I think this is fantastic, this is really great! . Now Travis, you’re about to launch I guess you could say this, the second version of Contest Domination, I believe.
Travis: Yes, so , the second version has been publicly available for four or five moths but the first integration we did after re- writing the entire thing was very developer driven so the last four five months we’ve been obsessing about trying to improve customer experience to add more auto responder options, you know integration options just really trying to make the system as robust, feature rich and still easy to use as possible.
So now, we have more or less accomplish that and picked up costumers along the way . We want to do something kind ‘a special, and so on April 16th actually, for 7 days, we’re doing this big launch where instead paying a monthly subscription , as kind of a thank you to everyone who has helped us to get where we are, we are offering all levels for a very very inexpensive one time fee.
Jake: That’s fantastic! So this episode of course will be going live just before then. So if you are listening to this on or before April 16th head across the sight, there will be some links in the show notes to this particular offer. If you’re listening after, of course, I would still recommend heading across checking at Contest Domination. You’ve got a free registration or a trial period?
Travis: Yes, we actually have a free account that you can get in and see kind ‘a how it works, we actually launched contest that also integrates into your auto respondering, as you could see it has the integrations. Those are all paid accounts starting at 30 bucks a month, but we have 60-day-money-back guarantee. So for some reason you use it and you just don’t really feel like we held a bargain to try to kick you as many leads as possible from a software stand point, we will happily refund your money, so it’s very very low risk.
Jake: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Travis, it’s been a nice short episode. I guess what I really appreciate from that is the phase that we haven’t needed to go any longer because you’ve made the platform so easy to use and so simple yet it’s so powerful and I really appreciate that.
Travis: We’ll thanks’ for having me on. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you and to be in front of your audience.
Jake: Sure, so where can our listeners go to find a little bit more about you?
Travis: Yes, actually just do a Google search and you’ll see a number of other interviews that go more in depth about who I am but they can go to thecollegestartup.com, that’s my personal blog where I have information about me and some of my kind of marketing case studies, and then of course contestdomiantion.com itself is another good place to find information about what we’re doing.
Jake: Travis thank you very much for coming on. Good luck with the launch and I’m sure certainly for our listeners out there all be implementing Webinar contests and also the contest around the caricatures so I’ll be reporting and producing a video for that in about a month’s times, so you’ll certainly hear about the results that I’m getting but you’ve got all the case studies across contestdomination.com to take to look at, and of course I’d suggest going in and trying that. So Travis thanks very much for coming on the show and we certainly really appreciate it and our listeners I’m sure will get a lot on this.
Travis: Great, thanks Jake!