Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://podcast.jakehower.com/episode/using-contests-to-drive-qualified-leads-with-travis-ketchum

Today's guest is Travis Ketchum from Contest Domination.

Travis and his company have built a platform 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's helped some past people like Andrew Warner at

Mixergy and how you can create.

An offer and a prize, 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.

So let's get stuck into this interview.

Travis, how are

you?

Hey, I'm great, Jake.

Thanks

for having me on.

Thank you for coming on.

I know this is certainly an aspect, which is a real sore point for just about.

Everybody I know, and that's obviously lead capturing.

So we do all this work as content marketers to drive traffic.

And one thing that everybody seems to 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.

Yeah, that's definitely been our focus.

It's funny.

We wouldn't have even.

Started this company.

If someone else had just decided to focus on leads in the way that we do.

So it built it out of our own need is really why it started.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

So Travis, for our listeners out there, rough outline of this episode is

we'll quickly have a look at a contest domination and what it is, and look at

some of the results, some of your your customers are currently getting with

it, then I'd like to almost build a case study that our listeners can almost go

out, get contest domination and implement for themselves in their own businesses.

How does that sound?

Yeah, that sounds great.

All right let's kick off then Travis, why don't you give our listeners a

little bit about your history and what led you to launching contest domination?

Sure.

So I'll keep it kind of brief, but like most people

probably in your audience, I've been an entrepreneur since day one.

My first official business was started eBay.

Which, as an 18 year old made like 60 grand and 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 3 years ago was an account manager

at a couple different companies.

And then I decided I was tired of building everyone else's list and

wanted to build my own because every example I'd ever been through the

residual value was always in the list.

And so I knew that 1 of the ways to get a quick response that would have

exponential growth in a short amount of time is to run a contest because

everyone loves to enter contests.

And so about a year and some change ago, I started looking at all

these different contest platforms and I was totally blown away that.

No one focused on just rewarding people for the action that you care about as the

business, which is getting more leads.

They all rewarded likes and follows and things of that nature, but no

one really gave them points just for driving you cold, hard leads.

And kind of developer got it together, did a small launch.

Took off way more than I ever expected.

And we've just been iterating from

there.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

I guess when you initially launched it was a WordPress

plugin.

Yeah, that's correct.

It was a very simple WordPress plugin.

I only spent a couple thousand dollars to get it developed.

Some of that was even on a credit card kind of thing.

And yeah, just very simple word, WordPress plugin, essentially the way it worked is

people would enter their name and email they would 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.

Okay,

fantastic.

So what is the product now?

What does contest domination look like right

now?

Yes, it's really grown into something much more mature these days.

Now it's a hosted platform instead of being a WordPress plugin.

And we went that route because then we could have greater

control over the environment.

We could have a greater degree of confidence in the kind of experience

that our user was going to get.

We knew that at scale, we could buy a very fast server, right?

That a lot of people were on shared hosts.

So there's all these delays and things that were hurting their.

Their conversion rates.

And so we just knew we could have a lot more control and offer a

lot 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.

It's interesting the difference between a WordPress

plugin and a hosted platform.

And so from me as a business owner and someone who uses these systems,

the real benefit for me is the fact that I have so many different

websites all with different themes.

And I always find with.

A lot of plugins, I get so many different conflicts.

And the other thing I find that with hosted platforms is that you're generally

not, you're not dealing with that.

And as a result, the focus for the products can generally be

a hundred percent on providing the best user experience.

And as you say, working on speed and conversion, that really helps also.

Absolutely.

And the other cool part too, is it gives us the 10, 000 foot view.

For what's working 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, what people could be doing.

So that a new customer 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 their leaps and bounds ahead of where someone just flying in.

Trying to install a piece of software and figuring out what to do next.

It's a lot of different experience.

Yeah, absolutely.

So what's a typical use case for contest domination?

So there's I can't define that in two different ways

because there's a typical knee jerk reaction to what people want to do.

And then there's a typical use case for what works really well.

So if you want me to outline those, I'd be happy to.

Yeah, that'd be fantastic.

Yeah.

So the knee jerk reaction for a lot of people is I'm just going

to give away an iPad and hope that a lot of people enter it.

And then I'll market to those leads.

And while that can get you a lot of leads, a lot of times it gets

you the wrong kind of leads.

Now, the typical things that work out really well are people that are

giving away experiences and high end.

Events and, true scarcity that's related to what they actually want

to sell a potential customer because then they get a lot of leads in the

door that are interested in what they're all about as a company.

And so those people are usually not only getting way more leads,

they get a lot much larger.

Viral coefficient, but everyone who comes in the door is super qualified.

Yeah.

And I think that's probably the most important thing you're talking about.

There is the fact that you're looking for contextual relevant leads.

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.

Yeah.

Oh, I know some of your customers include Andrew Warner over at Mixergy.

How has contest domination helped Andrew?

Yeah.

So with Andrew, he's an information.

Business really so his main revenue driver is selling access to mixer G premium.

Cause anyone who is a mixer G fan probably noticed that after I

believe it's like 45 or 60 days or something, his old interviews lock up.

And unless you're a mixer G premium member, you can't view them.

He has some specialized courses, et cetera.

And so back in the early days, he had sold a lifetime access

to that was a 1 time fee.

And now everything is either, I believe quarterly or yearly.

And so what we did with him is we gave away three lifetime access passes to

Mixergy premium, which, which was great because a, those aren't even sold anymore.

So all dollar value aside, there's that kind of cool scarcity and B it gave his

biggest raving fans a great incentive to go talk about how much they love him.

In fact, we saw a number of people that went through the system.

Hey, because it's all public on social, we're saying I've never promoted anything

on here before, but I have to say, I've been following Andrew Warner for years.

Amazing content.

Love his stuff.

You really be doing yourself a disservice by not checking this out.

And then we saw the traffic from those users cold traffic that never been

on his email list before enter the contest, find out what it's all about.

And that matter of hours later, post on his Facebook while 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 I went ahead and signed up for an annual subscription and I love it.

So you saw it says, it's 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 fans telling the world how cool he is.

And they were redirecting people to something that was

relevant to what he had to sell.

So it was like the perfect storm.

I'm getting qualified leads who are just primed and eager to buy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's fantastic.

I think at this point, can you take us through the products, like how

our listeners would go about in terms of using the actual system?

So if we look at this first, and then what we might do is put in a little

bit of a case study and take our listener out there through the process

of potentially how you come up with an offer and then roll it out in your own

business.

Sure.

The actual use of the product is very simple and straightforward.

There's just a couple of blanks to fill in.

What do you want to call it?

What's the description?

What email provider do you want to, the lead to go to some of our

plans offer go to webinar as well.

So you wouldn't even register for a webinar.

So the technical side is actually very straightforward.

In fact, most of our users complete what surmounts to a pretty powerful contest

in 15 minutes or less because it's more than just a normal squeeze page, right?

There's other social aspects to it.

So they can complete all of that very quickly.

Now, as far as picking the prize, which is really.

The major hurdle, right?

I can use 2 examples.

1 of them.

I like to use because it's obscure.

And so it really exemplifies how contest can work for any niche.

I was talking to a customer who.

His company sells flaxseed oil, and you might be thinking flaxseed oil, how do

you get people crazy about flaxseed oil?

The thing that you can think about is really what does your ideal customer

profile 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

with what you actually have to sell.

So in this particular case, I asked the user, who's your ideal customer?

And he jokingly told me it's hippie moms.

I was like, okay, great.

So what does a hippie mom really love?

And he goes to be honest, like 60% or more of their customer base.

He's really into yoga, and so the experience that he wanted to

use for his contest was private yoga sessions with a notable

instructor in his geographical area.

And so he had all of these moms entering to be part of this yoga experience, and

then it could follow it up with the health autoresponder that included flaxseed oil.

And he did a great, he did a great job with it.

So it's just understanding the wants and needs of your ideal customer profile.

And then incentivizing that kind of experience to get

them to opt into your list.

And then following up with your stuff, because it's laser targeted.

Some of our past guests have spoken about the planning involved in

working out who your ideal customer is.

And that just, it really, it resonates pretty much through just about everything

we do and how important it is to actually have that customer profile.

Because essentially, I guess what you're looking to do is reward an outcome, yeah.

What you're wanting to do is you want to capture the attention.

Of your ideal customer, it doesn't necessarily have to be your product

that captures their attention, but after you have their attention, it's

easier to tell them about your product.

Sure.

All right, let's put in a little bit of a case study and go through it here.

Now, I've got a service, which I've just.

Launched where we offer custom caricatures for people.

We've got a fantastic illustration team here, and it's a really easy process.

They just go through and select a package that they want and place an

order and within 48 hours, they'll have their own custom caricature

based off a photo that they send us.

How would I go about creating a contest and try to capture more

leads for this particular service?

One thing that can be mentioned, do you have any like

higher end package of that service?

We do one thing that's hasn't been rolled out just yet,

but certainly will be is bulk packs.

So we're talking packs of 5 and packs of

10.

Okay.

So what might be interesting is in your case, especially if you're, if you can

give me more information about the ideal user, one thing you could do is say.

Get a custom character for your entire team.

So if you wanted to baby, focus on people like in the startup world, right?

The tech startup world, for instance, you could say, enter to win a custom character

for your entire team and then everyone who enters just send them an automatic

follow up that says, hey, save 20%.

On getting one today, and if you win, we'll refund all of your

money, right?

Okay.

Okay.

So in my case, the product itself is probably an expanded product itself

is probably a really good price.

I would

anticipate.

Yeah.

With that, you may not get a crazy explosion of leads to that, but

the people who do come through are obviously going to be qualified, right?

So you will get a bump.

It costs you And it gives you a good ability and a warm intro to follow up

with those users that, are interested in your services and give them a

discount incentive to take action today.

Yeah.

Okay.

So then I would sign up for contest domination.

How easy is it to choose a particular landing page?

It's pretty simple.

We just have a few options in there right now, but we will be adding.

About 20 more options in a week or so.

So probably by the time this airs, there'll be quite a few

more options, but it's as simple as picking from a drop down.

Okay, fantastic.

And then I go through, put in my offer, connect my email service provider.

How do I roll this out?

Do I get a link or can I implement it in my WordPress install or?

So there's a

couple of different options here.

Of course, all pages get their own contest.

io.

Link, so that's the kind of the base option.

All of our paid options also have 1 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 a

light gate options, et cetera, if we give you a link to do that, because

as you may or may not know, and your listeners may or may not know, The

Facebook apps don't work on mobile.

And so we give you a link that doesn't fancy detection.

So we can tell if they're on the desktop, go ahead and send

them through to the app page.

If they're on a mobile device, we can still show them the contest

just without the light gate.

And then for the pro plus packages, you can do what we call domain mapping.

So you can actually have, like contest dot your domain dot com be the URL

that people are going to and sharing and then all levels have embed code.

If you'd rather start the experience on your site, we give you some simple

embed code that you can just copy and paste into a sidebar or into a blog

post, et cetera, and then they end up on our share page for you because

that's all dialed in and tested.

But there's several different avenues.

It's just as simple as copy and paste.

Yeah.

Okay.

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 from your experience and your customer's experience.

What's the best process to follow to get it in front of as many people as you can?

Sure.

If you have any kind of audience at all, and it doesn't have to be a lot.

When I launched my first contest, I only had a couple

hundred people on my email list.

But if you have anyone that likes you at all, some people are worried why

should I email my current customers?

We are want to get new customers.

What they don't realize is there's a very high viral coefficient.

So the easy start easy way to kick it off.

It's to just let your existing audience already know about the contest, right?

Mail it to them, let them engage with it because they're

going to be your biggest fans.

They already know about you.

They love you.

And so they're going to share it like crazy.

So you're going to get a very nice, easy bump just by doing that.

Now, another common practice to let people like to do is by Facebook ads,

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, 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

advertising, of course, is a no brainer.

Yeah, absolutely.

That sounds really fantastic.

Now, one thing that I'd be interested in a contest, something that

should be running all the time.

So there's different schools of thought on that.

There definitely is the potential of any marketing for

your audience to have burnout.

Now that just means you can't hit your existing audience with

every single contest you do.

If you're doing ones all the time.

But that being said, it's a great fun way to engage with cold

traffic who may not know you yet.

We go typically on a monthly subscription model and, that allows

for unlimited contests, unlimited simultaneous contests, et cetera.

But we find that most of our customers typically run.

One contest per quarter, because that's enough time for them to collect

themselves, plan the campaign, start it, promote it, stop it, pick a winner and let

everyone enjoy the fruits of their labor of that particular contest before they

start regrouping for the next campaign.

Sure.

Sure.

All right.

Fantastic.

Okay.

So one thing you mentioned a little bit earlier you're talking about

integration with go to webinar.

Can you expand a little bit on that?

And how you actually use a contest to drive webinar registration leads?

Definitely.

I can just give it best probably through 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 copy says register for my webinar and also be entered to

win something in this awesome contest.

And usually for him, the prize is, one on one consulting,

maybe it's a GoPro video camera.

Cause he does YouTube marketing things that are related to his niche, but you

have to be present on the webinar to win.

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 adds them to your autoresponder and

registers them for the webinar.

And then as soon as they, they click submit, they're presented

with that page of great.

You have one unconfirmed entry, which will only be confirmed after you double opt in.

And then you can earn 10 more entries into this contest by referring your friends.

The thing is all those friends that are hitting that quote sales

page opt in page are there for.

The webinar information they're there to try to win a camera it's very warm

traffic and these people have a huge incentive to promote their friends

to go sign up for the webinar and then they all have an incentive to

actually be alive on the webinar.

Okay this is sounding fantastic previously we've had louis

sales on the show talking about webinars and using webinars to sell and to follow

up that we've had james wedmore on talking about moving people through your

funnel so this is certainly very much on topic and both of these use cases.

Things that we implement here at the show.

So for our listeners, this is absolute gold.

Tell me where is contest domination going?

Where do you see you going in the next sort of six to 12 months?

Sure.

So in the next six to 12 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 the idea of having multiple client dashboards that, have a single sign

on kind of experience, excuse me, the ability to have account manager roles.

Every agency account has unlimited account manager roles.

So your entire team can get in there and make it work for you.

So that's 1, kind of 1 of the major feature pushes for contest

domination, but for us as a company in the next 6 to 12 months.

We see contest domination as one of four kind of tentpoles to the way

that we approach lead generation.

And they will all kind of compliment each other.

So they'll be called something else, but your login from contest domination

will also get you into the other apps.

Okay.

So you're focusing on the lead generation or traffic generation

for these other services.

Yeah.

We've always been very motivated to give people an easy, clear way.

To get performance out of their marketing, and that was the incentive for creating

contest domination in the first place.

Like I said, it wasn't apparently clear what the ROI was.

And it wasn't apparently clear what the conversion rates were, what the

actual viral effect had on a contest.

But with ours, it is, and I think there's other complimentary

ways of marketing, right?

Because contest, while someone can do very well with contests, it's

usually not the only way they want to approach getting new customers.

And so our.

Kind of hope is to flesh out that full experience.

Oh, this is great.

I absolutely love this.

So I know personally as a business and I'm pretty tied up for time.

And one thing I guess with the size of my company right now is that I

can't afford a full time developer.

And so having platforms like contest domination, like a few others out

there, it really enables me to quickly.

Get these offers to market so I can actually start driving leads and

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 the second version

of contest domination, I believe.

Yeah.

So the second version has been publicly available for four or five months, but

the first iteration of it, since we did have to rewrite the entire thing.

Was very developer driven.

So the last 4 or 5 months we've been obsessing about trying to improve

customer experience to add more autoresponder options, integration

options, just really trying to make the system as robust feature rich

and still easy to use as possible.

And so now we've more or less accomplished that and picked up

a lot of customers along the way.

We wanted to do something special.

And so on April 16th, actually for seven days we're doing this big

launch where instead of paying a monthly subscription as a thank

you to everyone who's helped us.

Get to where we are, we're offering all of our levels for

a very inexpensive one time fee.

That's fantastic.

So this episode, of course, we'll be going live just before then.

So if you're listening to this on or before April 16th,

head across to the site.

There'll be some links in the show notes to this particular offer.

If you're listening after, of course, I would still recommend heading across

and checking out contest domination.

You've got a free registration or a trial period.

Yeah.

So we actually have a free account.

That you can get in and see how it works to actually launch a contest that also

integrates into your autoresponder.

It has the integrations.

Those are all paid accounts starting at 30 bucks a month, but we have

a 60 day money back guarantee.

So for some reason you use it and you just really don't feel like

we held up our end of the bargain to try to get you as many leads as

possible from a software standpoint, we will happily refund your money.

So it's very low risk.

Yeah, that's fantastic,

Travis.

It's been a nice short episode.

I guess what I really appreciate from that is the fact 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.

Thanks for having me on.

It's been a pleasure to talk with you and to be in front of your

audience.

Yeah, sure.

So where can our listeners go to find out a little bit more

about you?

Yeah.

If actually if you just do a Google search, you'll see a number of other

interviews that go more in depth about who I am, but they can go to.

The college startup.

com.

It's my personal blog where I have information about me and some of

my kind of marketing case studies.

And then of course, contest domination.

com itself is another good place to find out information about what we're doing.