Did the Contest improve Sales?
I'm curious about this. I'm betting that the money spent on the contest was probably quite effective advertising. Winning $1800 worth of welding equipment is big stuff to those of us who use your equipment, but pretty small potatos when considering the cost of advertising, especially since you net cost is something less than $1800.
A neighbour of mine, Ray Addington, was the President of Kelly Douglas, a company that owns several Canadian grocery chains. Several years ago we were working together to battle a natural gas underground storage proposal that was being pushed on the community. In order to raise public awareness of the issue, we decided to hold a town hall meeting and use his mailout grocery flyers to advertise the meeting. He included info about the meeting on two issues of the 27,000 weekly flyers that his company sent out in our general area.
On the day of the meeting, other than our core group of about 35 residents, only 3 new faces showed up. These three new people were all oil and gas company reps who were paid to shut down our opposition. They likely would have been at the meeting even without the flyer campaign.
I think after that meeting Ray made some changes to his very expensive ($175,000 per year)weekly flyer advertising program. Clearly it was not very effective!
Free welding equipment now and then seems like a much better use of advertising dollars than Ray's flyer campaign. It's great that somebody actually gets something out of it rather than just more paper for the recycling bin.
Glen
