6 Reasons Why You Need to Run a Best of Your City or Reader's Choice Contest

Any publisher that has been around digital for long enough has seen or tried to run a best of their city/county/town or reader’s choice award. The benefits of running these contests are huge. Best of and reader’s choice contests are sources of pride for local business; they ignite people around their favorite places, and most importantly create more awareness and traffic online for your publication. Businesses frequently feature best of the city awards for many years in marketing materials, signage, and on their website. This means more eyeballs seeing your logo and name out in the community and online.

1. Invigorating the Community

Before we dig into the details of why a best of the city or reader’s choice contest will be good for your publication, we should take a look at the greater scope of what a contest accomplishes. Once the competition is announced, businesses will be trying to win. They will rally members of the community for votes and help spread the word about local business. Reminding people about local business once a year is a nice boost to the local economy that your publication can help provide. This is one of the many factors that we are thinking about when we talk about building communities online.

There are many ways to execute a best of contest and we will explore some of the most successful strategies and the benefits of implementing them. You may think that these contests are too much work and not enough return, but that is just not true when executed properly. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons you need to be doing a best of or reader’s choice.

1. Traffic

Best of the city contests drive huge amounts of traffic to your site. By making reader’s vote online, you are sending them directly to your website. This will help grow your traffic overall. You can also creatively feature content on your site so when they arrive to vote they will want to stay. Chances are if they are coming to vote for a local business, they will also be interested in other local news and features so make sure they see what else you have going on.

1. Social Shares

You need social shares. Best of contests get you social shares. A LOT of social shares. Make voting pages very easy to share. Allow people to easily vote. Once they are done voting, sharing it with their friends and family on social media should be extremely simple with the click of a button. People like to look cool, smart and useful when sharing things on social media. Participating in a best of contest is something that can accomplish all of these things. This makes best of contests ideal for getting social shares for your publication. Of course businesses also have quite a stake in winning the contest so they will almost always promote their voting link on social media multiple times to their followers.

1. Audience Building

People are dying to get the latest community news and information but there isn’t always an apparent way to get the information. The need for a connection to “Main Street” has never died, even though physical Main Streets are becoming harder and harder to find. We believe that most local publications have the opportunity and duty to fill this void. Best of contests are a great step in the right direction toward recreating this community. People that might not have found your publication online are now instantly connected with it and many will want to stay in touch to get the latest local news and lifestyle information.

1. Email List Building

Building your email list should be one of your primary goals when conducting a best of contest. We have previously covered how to create an email newsletter that doesn’t suck. Building that list is extremely important to create an ongoing flow of traffic to your site. By capturing reader’s emails through a best of contest you can give one-time visitors a chance to receive your emails on a regular basis in order to convert them into loyal followers. This can create hundreds of new newsletter subscribers which means more loyal reader's.

1. Business Engagement

This is one of the most obvious benefits of running a best of contest. You will be exciting and engaging local business owners. Many will try to compete to be the winner in their category. You can create many categories in order to engage as much of the local business community as possible. Some will promote harder than others but most will actively try to get votes online meaning more traffic for your publication. You may also require businesses that compete to fill out an entry in your business directory in order to get votes. This adds content to your site and cements your publication as a valuable community resource. We have found that business owners can also become the most loyal reader's of local publications because they have a stake in the community.

After the contest has wrapped you also have a huge amount of content ideas that you can execute. The most obvious is a complete best of the city or reader’s choice guide. You can also do ongoing roundups of the top 5 businesses in each category such as “Top 5 Steakhouses in Your Town”. These are all valuable and shareable pieces of content that will keep traffic flowing in. You can also choose to connect with winners to do more detailed profiles. Approaching winners to be featured as advertisers can also a great way to create revenue.

Moving Forward

Now that you know what the benefits are for running a best of contest, we hope you will choose to conduct one soon. Start thinking about the next steps you need to take to plan out your contest. What time of the year would you like to start? How many categories will there be? What are your goals for new visitors and emails that you want to collect? These are all important things to think of ahead of time to be able to judge if your contest was a success.

A best of contest does take some detailed planning to go smoothly but we hope we have shown the benefits are most definitely worth it. Creating a contest is also mostly a one-time investment that becomes much easier over time, because it is just a matter of replicating the contest every year. Keep your eyes out for a future blog post on the actual tactics to use when executing the contest.

To get more details on how the Locable Publisher Network will help you quickly and efficiently set up your own best of or reader’s choice contest check out the 1-minute video below or apply now to the Locable Publisher Network.

Have you ran a best of or reader’s choice contest? What were the results and would you do it again?