The Idea
The idea wasn’t new, but the execution engages their audience year after year! WMBF-TV puts on their Best of the Grand Strand each year, and both their viewers and local businesses clamor to participate.
The Execution
WMBF-TV follows many of the best practices of Best Of’s to the letter. They run a 3 phase ballot with a nomination phase, voting phase, and winners phase. They create tiered packages to sell to local businesses for each phase. Their registration form is clean with low barrier to entry, and their newsletter opt-in is included to boost list growth with their massive Best Of audience.
Over the years, the WMBF-TV team has learned that advertisers who purchase marketing packages are typically 60% more likely to win within their category. The team utilizes this statistic to their advantage while pitching and also crafts their sales packages to include multi-media advertising offerings to provide even more value to their advertisers. Not only does the advertiser receive recognition within the ballot, they also receive commercial spots that are seen by WMBF-TV’s giant viewing audience.
And they don’t stop selling when the ballot has ended. The WMBT-TV team crafted winners packages that include local lifestyle segments that are aired on their show, Grand Strand Today. This not only provides even more brand awareness for their winners, but also extends their Best Of the Grand Strand brand year-round.
The Results
Because of the WMBF-TV team’s tenacity, they saw a revenue of $282,000, which was a 14% YOY growth from the previous year. They also pulled in 3,500 new opt-ins for their newsletter and 3,300 new opt-ins for their promotions audience, proving that your Best Of can be your biggest opt-in driver of the year!
The WMBF-TV stated that they “100% could not run this huge project without the Second Street platform“, which just goes to show the heights you can reach with a true, valued partnership!
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Matt is a Customer Success Manger at Second Street. He works with our partners to help them succeed with engagement campaigns, and is also our in-house expert on running successful ballot programs.