This global peak period is THE time of year when every single brand must absolutely ramp up its marketing efforts.

In 2014, 28 million French consumers selected or bought their holiday gifts online. According to this study, 7 online shoppers (people who had made an online purchase in the past) out of 10 bought their presents online.

For the ridesharing site BlaBlaCar, the season is about holiday vacations, which means an increase in travel between cities. This was the perfect opportunity for this e-commerce site to boost its sales.

1 / Animating and engaging the community

Today, this highly successful brand has a large community of loyal ridesharers to spread the word about its service. In France alone, it has 700,000 Facebook fans, and nearly 3 million worldwide.



Interview with Alice Chasseriaud, Head of Global Communication, and Alexandra Mounoury, Community and Content Manager at BlaBlaCar

BlaBlaCar’s performance depends primarily on the size of its community and their engagement. It’s the community that keeps BlaBlaCar going: they exchange with each other, plan trips together, and get to know each other. They’re connected through their ridesharing experiences.

To galvanize this community, the brand must be attentive and responsive, especially as the holidays approach. It has to find original and engaging ways to animate its community of users in order to catch their attention and lead them to the sale.

To this end, BlaBlaCar naturally decided to launch a promotion to animate and reward its fans. With the BlaBla Christmas Game Advent Calendar embedded in its Facebook page, the brand was able to raise its profile throughout the month of December: Every day from the 1st through 24th, there was a new BlaBla Kit to be won.

To give their fans a high-quality experience, BlaBlaCar completely customized the visual design of the game to match its own graphic style guide. For companies that want greater flexibility in terms of customization, Kontest also gives you access to the game’s CSS editor. Plus, Kontest offers an additional option that allows companies to customize all of the game’s text elements, including traditional button text. For example, BlaBlaCar was able to use its own « BlaBla Language, » changing the « Enter » button to « BlaBla Play. »

Using Kontest’s soft gate feature, BlaBlaCar acquired 27,000 new Facebook fans over the course of the game. These are all leads that had already shown an interest in the service.

Pro tip: Offering options for sharing on social networks and by e-mail at the end of a game can significantly improve your game results. Sharing by e-mail, which gives the entrant additional chances to win, increases the number of entries by an average of 10%.

2 / Driving traffic to their site

Galvanizing a community is only the first step. BlaBlaCar needed to then redirect traffic to its own site, where the conversion would occur. By choosing the 24-day Advent Calendar, the brand gave entrants the chance to play and win prizes every day. By driving repeat traffic to the game, the company also drove repeat traffic to its site by including a hint in each question that linked to a specific page on its site.

For e-commerce sites like BlaBlaCar, using Kontest’s site Overlay feature can be a good way to retain visitors who abandon the site, particularly during the critical holiday period. It is not at all uncommon for visitors to leave such sites without converting. Perhaps they intend to come back later, or they change their minds. There are many reasons for abandonment, they’re hard to pinpoint and brands have virtually no data on these visitors.

To catch visitors’ attention, brands can now put their marketing promotions front and center using an Overlay. This is a simple pop-in invitation that launches automatically when the visitor is about to leave the site. It can be used to collect information on these visitors, enabling a company to offer them a more personalized experience in the future. In such a case, for example, BlaBlaCar might then send such users offers for specific destinations to which they travel regularly.

3 / Mobilizing their contacts

During the holidays, using a game to animate a community is just one way for brands to achieve their primary goal, which is to drive their leads to the purchase.

Once the data is collected through the game, it must be organized and mobilized with business goals in mind. With Kontest, you can now use the data you collect through your games with over 400 applications, thanks to the Zapier connector (the « IFTTT » of the pros). This is a major timesaver for marketers, and it means data can be mobilized more efficiently. A number of « recipes » are available, depending on your objectives. For example, you can automate the import of e-mail addresses collected into a Mailchimp list, or add contacts to a CRM database like Salesforce. There are other « recipes » that are a little more fun, like publishing the entries of a photo contest on a WordPress site.

Once you’ve activated your recipes, it is easier to renew contact with leads and drive them towards a purchase.

4 / Measuring conversions

It is important to learn from each campaign in order to make improvements on subsequent campaigns. To do so, you must be able to measure the impact of your campaigns. Some of the KPIs you can evaluate are number of visits, entry rate and number of social shares. When your goal is to increase sales during the holidays, the indicator you’d want to monitor would be the number of sales conversions. During a promotion, companies are provided with analytics tracking code associated with their site, which they can paste into the game. This code provides stats that allow them to measure conversions.

But Kontest recently launched an even simpler tool for tracking conversions: all you have to do is add the code Kontest provides to the relevant conversion page of your site (home page if you’re tracking visits, confirmation purchase page, etc.). The data collected for each conversion is immediately available through the statistics tracking dashboard on the Kontest platform.

Having the results of their various campaigns allows companies to see which campaigns are most and least effective. As a result, they can adapt and improve their strategy and create campaigns that meet customers’ real needs.

A new mission: Organizing customer insight

After 5 years of operation, with a first funding round in 2014 and a strategic partnership with Hootsuite that same year, Kontest is embarking on a new phase as it expands into the data collection market. Until now, Kontest was positioned as the developer of a platform for creating and distributing multichannel marketing promotions. Since Kontest was launched, its clients have converted 13 million users into qualified leads through its platform.

Today, the company announced a strategic partnership with the Bime Analytics solution. This alliance with a French Business Intelligence leader allows Kontest and its platform to cross the bridge into Data Marketing.

Through this partnership, Kontest acquires the Audience Dashboard, a new tool that is now included in its new « Enterprise » plan, announced today. This dashboard collects a significant amount of valuable information, allowing users of Kontest marketing applications to organize and act on their customer insights in order to better manage their digital strategy throughout the year.

In addition, the Kontest interface now displays useful key indicators, such as average exposure time per game, changes in engagement rates from one campaign to another, and identification of influencers.

This project is the culmination of three years of collaboration between Laura Duhommet, Chief Data Officer at Kontest, and Nicolas Dugué, who holds a doctorate in theoretical computer science and specializes in social network studies.

Kontest becomes a Data Collection Platform

This solution complements the Data Management Platform (DMP), which advertisers already use extensively to manage data processing in Real-time Bidding (RTB). Kontest has created a new technological resource that sits upstream of the whole system. The platform will now provide support to marketing teams in their community animation, engagement and loyalizing activities, while enabling an intelligent use of personal data.

New features

Supports 400 Zapier APIs

Kontest is now compatible with Zapier, the most popular Marketing Automation platform on the market. This new feature will save Enterprise plan subscribers a lot of time. They’ll be able to easily link their promotional applications to their existing tools. There are about 400 apps using Zapier, including Mailchimp, Google Apps, Salesforce, Zendesk and Slack, and using all of them just got a lot easier. For example, by connecting Kontest to Mailchimp, you can now automatically add new entrants to a Mailchimp list.

Conversion tracker

Being able to measure the ROI on promotions is essential for us. Before, if you didn’t have the right tool or technical knowledge, it was very hard to know the number of actual conversions you had through the app. That’s why we created the « Conversion tracker. » It’s a simple tag linked to your promotional app that you can paste into the code of certain strategic pages of your website. This tag will grab relevant information about the conversion rate on your site as a result of the promotion, including visits, subscriptions and sales. If you paste this code into the payment validation page of your e-commerce site, for example, you’ll be able to measure the exact number of customers acquired through the app.

Overlay on site

We have created a brand new way to present our applications, the Overlay on site. This new incentive feature automatically tracks users who abandon the application. This will help increase the retention rate on your site and the conversion of visitors into qualified leads. It’s easy to install and, as with the Conversion tracker, all you have to do is paste a simple chunk of code on the page where you want the promotion to appear.

We have added these three capabilities and some other key features as part of the DCP:

See the new features »

An innovative game

We are launching this month a brand new game perfect for campaigns the Holidays season : the Skill Game.

The principle is very simple: the participant must hit the target with a shot -you choose how many times it should be done -while avoiding a moving obstacle in order to participate in a draw.

This original game is guaranteed to amuse young and old alike. The participant is challenged and must pay attention to the accuracy of their shots, reach the minimum number of shots and avoid the obstacle which he must anticipate all movements. Totally immersed in the world created by your brand, entrants will enjoy this game and have fun. With this new advergame, brands are able to give their fans an unique experience, more interactive and less intrusive than a traditional advertising campaign or emailing.

To access the draw, the player meet a challenge : to reach the number of shots required to be qualified. The presence of an obstacle makes the game even more addictive! It is possible to change the visual of the game while it is online. The game can evolve over time in terms of the visual environment but also to levels of difficulty.

This kind of game can also become viral since it can be shared via social networks or email.

Totally customizable

With this game, the possibilities in terms of customization are endless for brands. It is therefore possible to integrate visual elements of a communication campaign predefined or to imagine a game in accordance with the season (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter …).

The presence or absence of the moving obstacle is configurable, as well as the weight and speed of the projectile. Both elements will make it possible to vary the level of difficulty of the game. They also help to ensure greater realism in staging the game.

This type of game is timely, what better than a fun game to celebrate Christmas ?

Here is an example of very fun game designed specifically for the holiday season at: the goal is to help Santa to distribute gifts in the chimneys while avoiding the evil leprechaun.

Play « Santa Delivery » Skill Game

For all occasions, a Skill Game will provide an unique and fun communication. Give it a try now !

Try the Skill Game

A recent study showed that companies that make big investment in user experience obtain a return that was three times higher on average. A great user experience will win the trust of the user. This will have a positive effect on the number of participations of a promotional application and on the sales of an ecommerce website. To improve the web surfing comfort, brands need to work on : interface clarity, the simplicity of the use, the responsiveness of the interactions and the quality of contents.

« Focus on the user, the rest will follow. »
Extract from the Google Manifest

Google offers tools to improve the user experience

To stick to the current trends in web design, Google recently introduced the Material Design: a visual language thought to maximize the ease of navigation and simplify the handling of applications. To be as intuitive as possible, it is directly inspired by materials such as paper and ink, it thus refers to the actual sensations of touch. The Material Design by Google also incorporates the latest technology to unify the experience across platforms and devices (computer, tablet or smartphone).

Material Design is based on four principles :

Google ©

The last Material Design innovations for everyone

To give the brands the opportunity to follow best practices of Material Design in their marketing campaigns, we chose the Polymer™ technology. Developed by Google, it allows us to apply the rules of Material Design to our promotional applications.

With this new Polymer™ technology, the user experience of the entrants is more optimized than ever.

« The attractive design and the intuitive navigation of our applications have been thought to increase the commitment of each prospect in order to facilitate the conversion into qualified contacts. Brands can thus expect better return from their promotional campaigns. « 

Jacinthe Busson, co-founder and COO, Kontest

Finally, keep in mind that design is not everything! When defining the contents of the promotion it is important to simplify the navigation stages. Indeed, we recommend brands to limit the number of questions in the quiz and in the form. We have noticed that entrants spend only 3 minutes on average on a promotion.

Examples of applications to give inspirations

We have released 6 new applications in the Polymer™ Collection : a Quiz, an Instant Win, a Sweepstake and three Calendars. These applications are available for brands who want to activate their communities by the end of the year.

These are 4 examples of opportunities :

A Quiz for the Chocolate Fair.

An Instant Win for the Route du Rhum.

A Sweepstake for Halloween.

A Calendar to wait until Christmas.

Learn more about the Polymer Collection »

*source : 2013 Watermark Consulting Study

• more than 40 millions of users
• 5 Vines are shared every second on Twitter

(Sources : Vine Août 2013 and Infographic TAMBA)

Brands are going to be using Vine more and more

Why? Those Vines are shared 4 times more than similar videos on usual social networks. The 6 seconds limitation on Vine incentivize creativity and innovation. Brands benefit from the power of Vine’s network, and also of Twitter and Facebook’s -where the videos are mostly published. Vine is also a good way to reach early adopters.

Some brands use Vine to create promotional ads and to communicate about their products or solutions in an original way. Calvin Klein has launched a Vine campaign only a week after the app release.

Since the lights are still out… http://t.co/fUkoWhAG #SB47

— Calvin Klein (@CalvinKlein) 4 Février 2013

Some other brands try to connect with their community through creative challenges. Take a look at these 5 contests using Vine technology.

1 / « Les petites histoires » by La Redoute

La Redoute claims to be the first brand to team up with Vine for a contest campaign in France. The brand has launched a contest called « les petites histoires »(the little stories) in partnership with Daily ELLE. Their idea was simple : entrants had to film their favourite object in a Vine and post it with the hashtag #lespetiteshistoires. They had a chance to win decorative objects exposed in the TV spots.

#lespetiteshistoires de shopping à La Redoute ! #vine http://t.co/paDg7IdnEy

— La Redoute (@LaRedouteFr) 15 Mars 2013

La Redoute also produced TV spots to promote this campaign

La Redoute chose a simple theme to allow everyone to participate. With this game, the brand has paved the way to many other creative contests

2 / The Tribeca #6SECFILMS

Entertainment companies are also present on Vine. In 2013, the Tribeca film festival organized a 6 seconds movie contest in partnership with Vine.

What is better than a Vine to produce your first movie ? To participate and try to win $600 (so $100 the second!), users should post a Vine with the hashtag #6SECFILMS. The jury, composed by leading figures of cinema as Adam Goldberg or Penny Marshall, was in charge of choosing the winners in each categories #DRAMA #COMEDY #GENRE #ANIMATION. The effect was immediate: the contest was such a success that they did it again a year later! In 2014, more than 500 Vine users have entered the contest.

Call for entries! Click here to learn how to enter the #TFF2013 #6SECFILMS competition: http://t.co/XJGRklDTro https://t.co/tkTO8oS1qP

— TribecaFilm Festival (@TribecaFilmFest) 29 Mars 2013

One of the 2014 winners @YellDesign for his video « The Wrap Dancer »:

The Wrap Dancer (by @yelldesign) #6secfilms #animation https://t.co/XpCivoR9Eh

— yelldesign (@yelldesign) 6 Mars 2014

3 / Tagada invented Air pony

Tagada, a candy sold by Haribo, also tested Vine with its Air Pony project. A funny operation that sticks perfectly with their image.

What is AirPony? FCINQ Agency created this quirky concept that needs Vine or Instagram. You will understand better with this little video:

This operation was launched in every TAGADA social network and on a promotional website created for the occasion: airponeytagada.fr. Candy’s fan have the possibility to share their videos generated from Vine and Instagram through Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #Airponey + #TAGADA. Tagada offered prizes that really stuck with the theme : the first prize was a country holiday to ride a (real) pony.

The campaign was a great success: hundreds of funny videos have quickly invaded their social media. An operation that was cost effective for the brand.

Huuuuu @TagadaOfficiel #Airponey #TAGADA https://t.co/8Z9AMcKQg2 @alexmasson2

— STJOHN’S (@AgenceSTJOHNS) 11 Décembre 2013

Attention à la chute. RT @AudreyThurin #airponey #tagada https://t.co/PmhFw7gedA

— kevin clech (@kclech) 11 Décembre 2013

4 / Romantics Vine of Cavendish Hotels

Cavendish hotels have launched in February 2013 a special Valentine’s Day contest. They have asked their fans to create the best #ValentineVine, the most romantic video won a week-end for two in a Cavendish Hotel. Using an innovative tool like Vine during this period was very smart . The winner had made a really creative video:

Reuniting long lost sole mates #Valentinevine @cavendish_hotel http://t.co/Ngru2ptn

— Chris Lovell (@CjLovell) 11 Février 2013

5 / Disney and the magic Vines

Disney Parks have asked their fans to show their « Disney side ». Everyday a new Vine won $1.000 and the big winner won a stay at Disney Parks + $10.000 to create a Vine Disney campaign. Vine allows the creation of incredible videos with the minimum of expenses, it was the perfect tool to re-invent Disney’s magic. Fans have become real ambassadors of the brand.

Our #DisneySideContest Grand Prize Winner, E-Dubz: I woke up on the #DisneySide of the bed today! https://t.co/CbW3W29Bxy

— Disney Parks (@DisneyParks) 8 Novembre 2013

And you, have you thought of creating a Vine or an Instagram contest?

Pinterest is a place full of inspiration for all users and a self-service window for brands. On Pinterest, the most important is the visual content! Brands have to take care of the presentation of their products/services to generate pins and repins.

How to interact with your audience on Pinterest?

Express your interest

Showing great pictures is essential, but it is not enough. To create engagement with your brand you have to interact with your audience. You could easily do it by liking, posting a comment, pining or repining targeted user content. They will see how interested you are and they will go see your board to pin in return their favourite content. It’s a win-win!

Try the Pinterest Contest

You also could launch a Pinterest Contest: try the new Kontest app, the Pinterest contest.
Ask your audience to participate by submitting their favourite pin and choose a vote system to determine the winner.

During the Fashion Week ask your audience to pin looks of the next season!

Try our fake contest Pin your style »

Or celebrate the gastronomy – on September the 26, 27 and 28 in France – by opening a Pinterest Contest of the best culinary pic!

Warning! You have to follow all Pinterest guidelines…

Pinterest promotion guidelines

You can’t create a Pinterest contest without reading first the Pinterest Guidelines for promotion. There are a lot of rules that you have to follow to avoid Pinterest sanctions.

• To start, be careful not to suggest that Pinterest endorse or is the sponsor of your contest. As on Facebook, you are responsible for the rules, terms and conditions of your promotion.

• You can’t ask your entrants to pin contents from a board, a brand, a site or a specific selection: they are free to pin the content of their choice. Nevertheless, you can guide their selection by picking a precise theme. Gathering pins from multiple sources is what makes Pinterest so interesting.

• It is strictly forbidden to ask your entrants to pin your contest rules to participate. These are considered spammy content.

• You can’t run a sweepstake where each pin, board, like or follow represents an entry. Pinterest wants to prevent spammy behaviors. Choose a simple mechanism to make it easy for people to participate.

• You can’t consider comments as entries and it is also forbidden to vote with a pin, a board or a Pinterest Like. Once again, Pinterest considers this action to be spammy.

• Don’t ask your entrants to post a minimum number of Pins: one is enough!

• To finish, you can’t name your promotion « Pin it to win it ».

Once all these rules respected, you are finally ready to create your first Pinterest contest. Let’s go!

Learn more about Pinterest Contest »

Not because of mosquito bites… But because of the app of the month: the Scratchcard Game!

The scratchcard game

If you are looking for a simple and funny game to animate your community during summer, we are releasing this July the Scratchcard Game.

This improved version of the Instant Win will enable you to add some interactivity to your games. With this simple game play mechanic you will be able to collect relevant data to use within your future marketing campaigns.

Find more about the Scratchcard Game »

A game at your image

The Scratchcard game will allow you to :

• take advantage of the multichannel feature to offer a funny and interactive game experience to your audience.

• use your creativity by entirely customizing your game: the background, the overlay and the coin picture!

• surprise your audience by hiding prizes behind the picture to scratch.

• create a game that looks like you : choose themes and textures that reflect your brand image. If you work for cosmetics, such as in the exemple above, you could ask users to remove the make up to find out whether they are winning or loosing.

  This summer, why don’t you ask your fans to dig up treasures hidden under the beach sand for exemple?

• determine your winning times for each prize and generate some traffic in your stores during these time frames.
  Learn more about winning times »

It’s your turn to create your own Scratchcard game!

It’s nice and warm, we all enjoy the first days of summer… It’s the perfect time to make some improvements on the Kontest platform! A few weeks ago, we launched a new version of our showcase website, aiming to improve your navigation. Today, we present you major changes on the admin interface: brand new design, new features and more support at each stage.

A more ergonomic and intuitive interface

At Kontest, we’re listening to your feedback and are always striving to be better and meet our customers needs. We changed the ergonomic design of the admin page with a sleek and clear design to enhance your comfort during the creation and management of your contests.

Also, we upgraded the interface with « Tips » to guide you throughout the creation of your game and redirect you, if needed, to our Help Center. For an even faster display of parameters and statistics of your game, we optimized the speed of loading pages.

Take a look at our new interface »

New features

Here is a non-exhaustive list of new features:

White labeled statistics, to share with your coworkers and clients

You will now be able to share your stats with your collaborators using a dedicated URL:

Choosing dates for your Instant Win

Now, when using the Instant Win app, you will be able to choose dates and times for each win. You can use this feature if you are a shop owner for instance and want to choose the winning dates of your prizes to generate traffic to your shop.

Adding an image when the results are displayed

You can offer a better brand experience to your customers : you will be able to associate images with the results of our Personality Test and Knowledge Test.

Those features will help you to effectively create more personalized and engaging contests to animate your community throughout the summer.

You will find a transparent and comprehensible model with a fixed price, that can be adjusted to meet the needs of your campaign no matter how many fans or entrants you have. No strings attached so you can plan your marketing strategy as you wish all year long.

See all features »

Standard Plan

The Standard plan is now at 49$ + 9$ per day. We lowered this price so that all of you can afford the standard features of our platform. You will have access to a large range of promotional applications. You now have the possibility to customize the text, the design and the url of your app. And you can also offer a real brand experience to your customers with the possibility to add rich media to your questions and/or prizes. The mandatory fan gate on your Facebook application will allow you to get more fans.

Premium Plan

It is time to test our Premium offer. With only 99$ + 29$ per day, you will have access to our 24 applications and all their features: white label, customized optin, social sharing, form, design and CSS. You can monitor in real-time the performance of your application thanks to 30 KPIs.

We have developed a new feature: the mandatory fan gate on mobile devices. A necessary feature to optimize your marketing campaign in all channels.

We apply these new prices from now on to all new promotions.

Our customer relation team is available for any questions.

Get in touch.

Instagram, it’s 150 millions of users per month in the world and nearly 55 millions photos shared everyday (sept. 2013). According to the Global Web Index Report of January 2014, Instagram’s growth is faster than Facebook and Twitter. Its success is due to the nature of the content: capturing, leveraging and sharing the beauty of the moment through photos and videos with the ability to add filters.

Brands begin to have a presence on Instagram and they don’t hesitate to use this network to affirm their visual identity. Nevertheless, most of them keep on using Instagram as a simple display case…

The Instagram Contest

This contest links the Instagram network power to the functionalities of the classic Photo contest. It will enable you to animate your audience on Instagram, but also on the other networks thanks to the multichannel function (Facebook, web and mobile devices).

How does it works?

• The entrants must connect to their Instagram account to play. You can choose the participation mode: photo upload, video upload or both. If you have a consistent number of followers on Instagram, don’t hesitate to promote your game on your account. This application could enable you to transform these followers into qualified contacts. You will then have the possibility to get in touch with them via emailing campaigns or targeted advertising.

• In the Instagram contest, as in the Twitter game, you can use a key hashtag, that you can make mandatory or not, to use. If it is mandatory, only the images with the key hashtag would be displayed. Choose wisely your hashtag to take a full advantage of the viral potential of Instagram.

• You will then have to choose how to pick the winners: audience vote or jury choice.

Summer is coming! Why don’t you propose to your clients an Instagram contest of the best holiday picture? Or create a contest of the best soccer goal video to celebrate the World Cup ?

Mother’s day is a great opportunity for you to test the Instagram Contest. Try our Mother’s Day Contest now (demo)!

Test our Instagram Contest »

To know more about the Instagram Contest, don’t hesitate to go on our Help page.

See you next month for another new app!