 Hello Aces, welcome back to module seven, lesson 4.1, creating a viral contest for your restaurant. In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to create a viral contest to explode in social media following. Now, why is that even more important? It is because the more followers that you have, that means more exposure. More exposure means more touch points. That means you get to touch your customers at different cycles of their customer journey. So if you do not understand what customers journey are, definitely go back to the previous modules to understand that. That is crucial for you to craft out the whole experience. Now that you're able to touch them at multiple touch points, that means you get more social proof. More people talking about you, more testimonials. That means you gain more credibility. And ultimately, what do you gain? You gain more trust. And what do I always say? Trust is the only reason why someone buys from you. And hence, you get more customers, okay? So that means more followers getting you more customers. You are able to convert them from just a person that stalks you on the phone to someone that actually comes and buys from you all the time. Now, Facebook and Instagram go with hack. And this is for those of you who are struggling to gain followers. Or for those of you who are just starting in this game, and that's the reason why we're gonna be covering the five steps in creating a viral contest. Now, how do you growth hack and gain 10 times the following? You run contests through social media. And as you can see right here, our contest has more than double, if not triple, our original post, right? As you can see here, more than double and triple. So imagine if you can stack these different contests over and over again. That's how you're gonna be able to explode your account with a lot more followers. And that's exactly what we did with our Instagram account, that we're able to grow that not overnight guys, but with time we're able to really explode that exponentially following what I'm about to share with you. Contests that you run on your platform to gain massive interest. So back to what running viral contest means on social media, the viral component comes when your contest is shared and spreads rapidly. That means that it is what people are wanting. Understanding your customers is key when you are setting up your viral contest because depending on your specific demographic, what goes, what is viral to them and what is worth sharing to them is very different from another demographic. I'll give you an example. If you're selling ice cream and you're telling people to share for a chance to win $10, that makes sense because as a high schooler I don't get much money and I don't get much allowance either. So if I get to share your product and automatically I get $10, that seems like a lot. That is a very different giveaway that we'll be doing for someone that winds and dines their other half or their family because people who have much higher disposable income would not see that $10 as something that is worthy for them to share. So just case in point, understanding who you serve to and really catering this whole contest to them is one of the key things you need to make sure you understand. The goal of these contests is for us to get massive exposure compared to traditional media forms such as running newspaper ads or radio ads and so on and so forth. This builds your own channel along the way and on top of that it also rewards your community which is the reason why we love running contests on social media and at the end of the day understand one thing, you're not just running contests as your sole strategy. You need to be able to stack them on top of each other as I was sharing with you in my other modules. So definitely make sure that you're not just running social media viral contests and these are some of the contests that we have ran before. These were when we were just starting off as you can see in 2018, 2019. As you can see, we started off with only 600 comments, 500 likes, but within a year's time, guys, we're able to see what? Three times the result of this and the comments and the likes and everything just blew off and exponentially increased as a result of us just running a few of these campaigns over the course of the year. Now, the five steps to create your very own viral contest. We're gonna cover the basic of how you're gonna be able to do that and then in the next lesson, we're gonna cover the advanced strategies. First off, decide your objective. Understand that you're running a contest whether it's for awareness or for revenue or for profit because the objective really shapes the contest and how it is being done and the rules of engagement and whether how it looks like because for example, if you were to run a contest to tag all your friends to win something, that is much more for awareness. That's for the viral factor. So you're not gonna have a lot more buys or sales within your restaurant. That is a very different contest that you're running than buy for a chance to win. Buying something to enter for a chance to win for something would increase your revenue and your profits but it does not have the same kind of awareness because not a lot of people will come in through the doors to buy something just for them for a chance to win. So understanding the objective is key when you're determining the whole contest. Next up, now that you understand, hey, I wanna increase awareness because my door's just open. I wanna make sure that this hits the ground running and people know about us which is the reason why you don't mind just running it for the sake of getting your word out there. Now it is time to decide the rules on the offer depending and actually aligning that to your objectives. It must be super easy guys. Understand for one thing, this must be in grade five level. Once again, I repeat, even a grade five should understand how this whole process works, okay? Because if you have too much friction, if it is too difficult to understand, people will not enter and it defeats the whole purpose of you running a viral contest. Full proof test is will you actually enter through the contest or do you like the item being gifted? If you don't like it, then why would you expect someone that you're giving it to would enjoy it, would like it? So definitely ask yourself and be super honest with yourself. Don't just create something for the sake of creating it. Offer should be relevant to your target audience. So if you were to give me a pair of Yeezys, right? Probably not the best choice because I don't wear Yeezys. I'm not that demographic but if you're appealing to high schoolers or the people that enjoy pop culture, then yes, those are the ones that pair of Yeezys would be a really, really great choice. Don't give away an iPhone when it doesn't make sense, when it's not relevant specifically to your customer demographic. You don't want to overshoot it. You don't wanna just give out money for the sake of money. And that's the reason why you need to choose something specifically for your demographic. Once again, it's like you buying a gift to your other half. You don't just buy random gifts. You buy something that is very personalized, something that is catered to your personal half. Same thing with creating a contest, right? Create something and buy something that is deemed as attractive for your demographic. For awareness, you wanna focus on the shareability of this whole campaign to gain maximum exposure. So for example, for the rules, you may wanna do something like tag a friend for an entry. It's unlimited. Share the contest for five bonus entries. And it is still working out like a charm in today's age. It is the most effective for your contest going viral if you're just going for awareness. Because tagging your friends, now your friends tag another five friends, it just goes down like a pyramid like that. If you are gaining and actually creating these contests for profit's sake, then pair it with an in-store purchase for a chance to win contest, right? For example, with our Nespresso campaign, you need to be able to come and purchase our signature item, which is this one, for a chance to win five entry to win the Nespresso machine. And this became a really, really good profit-generating campaign for us because people loved our product. And on top of that, we just gave them a reason to come and buy from us for their chance to win something that they enjoy as well. So that automatically just became a no-brainer for our customer, less friction. However, with this specific campaign and this specific rule, it is the least effective to go viral. Why is that the case? It is because it has highest amount of friction. People need to come in and purchase from you in order for them to actually enter to win. That's the reason why, depending on the objectives, the rules change and the effects would change as well. Next up is to decide on the duration of this whole campaign and the schedule. As you can see right here, we need to identify the start time end time. I would typically go for a one week to two week long campaign. Anything more than that, I would say that there's no scarcity. What the scarcity mean? It doesn't push people to take advantage. There's no deadline. And majority of the people out there are procrastinators. They don't take action until the very end, which is the reason why we need to give it enough time for people to hear it over and over again, at least twice. They need to at least see this offer out there. Now we give them a deadline and then they'll take action, which is the reason why I think typically one to two weeks of a launch period is a really good timeframe for people who have the intent and will be purchasing from you. Anything longer, people are not gonna come, people are not gonna come. Schedule, think about your timeline, guys. We need to understand when can all the creatives be completed? And when do we actually launch our contest? So understanding when we're doing the announcement and making sure that we work backwards. For some of you that don't understand how to work backwards and how do you plan a proper campaign and launch it properly, go back to module 6.3 and you can learn how to work backwards. Definitely check it out because it is a very, very powerful way of crafting your own campaign. Next up, step number four is to make sure you always track your performance because what doesn't get tracked doesn't get measured and you won't get results, which is the reason why you need to understand what are the KPIs to show for because you need to understand whether your campaign is successful or not. What does KPI stands for? It stands for Key Performance Indicator and for those of you who don't know what this is, definitely go back to module 6.3. That's where we covered this in detail of how you can set your KPIs. For example, some of the KPIs would be number of likes, number of shares, tags, comments, or even number of new customers purchasing your item or the profit generated throughout the period of your contest. Once again, if you don't know how to set up your proper KPIs and OKRs, definitely check out module 6.4. That's where we cover it in detail and use this to track your own campaign. This is just to showcase to you how many people put our hashtag and also how many people liked it, how many people viewed it. This became our Key Performance Indicator to see how successful our campaign is. Step number five, now it is time to rinse and repeat. These campaigns are not meant to be done once and done with. You need to continually do it all the time. So then that way you stay relevant because there are so many restaurants out there, so many different competitors. If you don't keep doing these different campaigns, then you're not gonna become relevant in your customer's mind. And if they forget about you, they just won't buy from you. Doesn't mean they don't like you, it's just that you're not as relevant, which is the reason why staying relevant and rinsing and repeating, I recommend doing at least one campaign every quarter. So in a year, you'd be doing minimum of four different campaigns. You should always, always wrap up a report to showcase the performance so then that way you can improve for the next time. Always ask yourself, what have you done well? You need to celebrate the little wins and then you need to ask yourself what needs improvement. So for example, with our Nespresso campaign, what we've done really well on are the different, our flavor, our new product was really, really good. People, everyone loved it and on top of that the photo shoot was amazing. Working with the Nespresso team was really good as well. What needs improvement? I would say to actually do more marketing. I feel like that with the items that we were able to have and the assets that we have and giving away to Nespresso machines, I think that if we were to reach more influencers and reach more media outlets, the response would be exponentially as much and as effective. What will we do better next time? I think it's just to make sure that we invest more in our campaign. So by us identifying these components, now we know what to improve on, let's say three months from today or four months from today. Include the KPIs that you set out from the very beginning and see how you did because once again, if you don't put a goal, you'll never attain it. It's just like if you shoot for the moon, you shoot for the stars and you land on the moon and you're still good. Now it is your turn to create your own viral contest. Come up with an idea, look for inspiration with what other people are doing or worse comes to worse. If you don't know who to look for, go on our Instagram to check out what we have been doing, either 720 Sweets or Wilson Kay Lee. You're gonna see that I continuously run different campaigns. So then that way you can learn from that. In the link below, you can download the worksheet and follow along to create your very own viral contest. So in this lesson, you've just learned how to create your own viral contest with five simple steps. In the next lesson, what we're gonna cover are the four advanced strategies that you can use to really amplify the results for your campaigns. I'll see you guys in the next lesson.