How to Organise a Photo Contest Online

Thanks to the “Instagram life” hype, people have learned to do business, promote products, and become the go-to experts in various fields using photos. While Instagram definitely is the king of photo contests, it’s only one of the many channels out there that you can utilize to make an impact through visuals. This article will clear up the ways you can profit from photo contests as well as give you instructions on how to set one up for yourself.

What is a photo contest?

Although the concept of a photo contest is pretty understandable, the landscape of such events is so huge that you might want to dive deeper into it. According to the guru of social media marketing, Jeff Bullas, it was the improvement of smartphone cameras that breathed new life into photo competitions. The opportunity to make high-quality photos whenever and wherever you go made photo contests fully mobile. As a result, campaigns like sweepstakes, UGC contests, one-day contests, and peer review contests gained immense popularity. As different from one another as they all are, online photo contests are all based on simple techniques of photo upload, voting, tagging, commenting, and more.

Why you should organise a photo contest online

Making investments in photography is easy. The difficult part is determining the value that photo-related campaigns can bring to you or your business. Do you know what the most challenging task is? Taking the right actions to gain this value. If you think you’re ready to walk down this path, check out the potential profits you can gain:

• You’ll interact with your community. If you or your business already have a base of fans, you should keep them tuned to you 24/7. Photo contests give online communities a voice. This means that people who engage with your activity or business feel they can impact your decisions, get your recommendations, or help you reach your goals. In other words, your fans should know they are valued. Photo contests are excellent tools for accomplishing this.
• You’ll expand your community. You’ve probably seen countless “tag-a-friend-win-a-prize” types of photo contests. Since such online activities don’t require much effort on the part of users since it’s usually just vote or upload a photo in one click, you can feel free to ask people about helping you gain new audiences.
• You can launch a new product. If you create something new that you want people to know about, you should find a way to tell them about it. Photo contests are excellent tools for building a product promotion campaign. Let’s say you own a fashion store and you’ve recently designed a new collection of scarves. In this case, you can set up a contest that encourages client engagement and rewards winners with the scarves you promote. Apart from gaining publicity, your product will also be spread across new households. That’s a win–win!
• You’ll establish partnerships. If there are audience segments in your niche you haven’t reached yet, you can do this through cross-promotions. With photo contests, you can advertise not only your business but also your photo competition. Negotiate cross-marketing campaigns with the key players in your industry, and capture new profits through photos.

How to organise a photo contest online

When organising a photo contest online, you have to focus on client experiences first. This can mean a lot of different things, but the point here is to build a campaign that can catch the attention of your target persona and encourage engagement. Check out the basic steps you should consider taking:

Choose a platform

If an Instagram account is not enough for you to reach your business goals, we have some good news: there are plenty of contest management platforms with superpowers. Here are the major features you can benefit from when you choose contest management software:

• Management of multiple entry categories
• Configurable submission forms
• Multiple photo upload options
• Social media sharing capabilities
• Public voting module

Set up the rules

The rules of any contest are created for two purposes: 1) to define the terms of participation and 2) to establish clear metrics. The common mistake many event planners make is separating these two points when they should focus on aligning them instead. Based on your previous performance or statistics, define the strategy for reaching your goals. For instance, if you know that it takes 5,000 visits to generate 50 leads for you on average, develop a strategy for hitting 10,000 visits with your photo contest if your goal is to get 100 new leads. Simple calculations can lead you to the right path. Once you have the metrics, structure the rules accordingly. Decide how long the contest should run, what the participation conditions are, what the mechanism of photo upload is, etc. At the last stage, put the rules into plain words to make them easy to follow.

Establish criteria for judging a photo contest

Whether it’s a board of industry experts or just random users voting for photos, they should be acquainted with the list of evaluation criteria. Depending on your objectives, the following criteria can be applied:

• Visual design
• Color and lighting
• Originality of a concept
• Humor
• Unique message delivery
• Commercial appeal
• Inspiration
• Specific social impact
• And more

It’s a good idea to provide short explanations of all criteria to ensure that both entrants and judges understand what they actually mean.

Choose and reward winners

If you use a contest management platform, you don’t have to be bothered about the calculation of scores. It will be done for you. To make the process seamless, ensure the system you use can process multiple voting streams as well as enable personalised notifications on results announcements for all entrants. To generate some post-event buzz, you can make a public announcement on social media, set up a live streaming session, or encourage additional activity by sharing the winning photos across multiple platforms.

Photo contest ideas

From promoting an art gallery to selling services through photo activities, there are hundreds of photo contest ideas that can be truly inspiring. Check out these three juicy themes that can be added to your photo contest toolkit:

• Attendance-focused photo competitions. If foot traffic means a lot to your business or you’re doing some cross-promotion, you can benefit from photo contests that encourage users to take photos in specific locations. From a local store to specific tourist attractions, the location should be chosen based on what you want to promote. Here’s a good example of such a contest that resulted from cooperation between Canon and some of Samarang’s local organisations:
• Peer review photo contests. To maximize engagement, encourage your audience to take an active part in the evaluation of each other’s submissions. This can be the right scenario for professional communities of people working in the same niche because the critique can be considered objective.
• Professional weekly contests. Photo competitions can be used with the goal of educating your audience. Viewbug’s Cover Photo Contest is an excellent example of a weekly online event that helps young photographers hone their skills and gain public recognition.

Why you should use Judgify

Judgify is an awards management system that combines effective tools for managing contest applications, judging processes, public voting, and online event analytics. Flexible in terms of criteria management, photo upload settings, and customised voting, Judgify is the right choice for managing photo contests of any size.

Conclusion

The ideas on how to organise online photo contests may differ, but it’s always about making a photo activity the channel for reaching your business goals. With a bit of planning and alignment tools for managng contest, you can set up photo contests that win you new clients, boost engagement, and generate useful connections.