WPSD-TV Saw 10-Fold ROI 60 Days After Summit

I came back from the 2014 Promotions Summit with lots of promotion ideas that my team was immediately able to execute. The whole Promotions Summit felt like an A-HA moment to me! I appreciated the different perspectives that came through in the panel discussions, and I was incredibly inspired by all of the case studies that were presented.

In fact, we generated a ten-fold return on our investment with just one promotion – a Christmas in July Facebook contest featuring multiple advertisers. The promotion brought in $10,000, and the idea came straight from a case study presented at the Promotions Summit.

Before I attended the Summit, WPSD didn’t really have a promotions plan. When I went and saw what my peers in the media industry were able to do with promotions, it made me realize we needed one.

When I got back, I sat down with my team and asked, “What do we want next year to look like with regards to promotions?”

We decided we wanted to run one big contest and 2 two-week advertiser contests each month, in addition to major sports contests like the college basketball tournament bracket and a football pick’em. We also built out a line-by-line budget detailing our promotions revenue goals for 2015. In addition to the overall revenue goal, we had sub-goals for each type of promotion (sponsored and advertiser contests, big sports pick’ems, our deals platform, ecommerce theme weeks and cards, and so on), which is helping us stay focused on a wide variety of promotions.

We started going to weekly sales meetings, where we report on any promotions that are currently running or coming up soon, highlight past successes, and collect ideas from our Account Executives for future promotions and advertisers to target. Attending sales meetings is a great way to get everyone on the team excited about promotions.

Having a plan and a goal lets us work farther out, which in turn gives our creative services team and our clients have more lead time, so we can have more conversations about what we want to accomplish with each promotion and how to effectively use the data we collect.

At the end of 2014, we won awards for our promotions program, but we wouldn’t be where we are if I hadn’t been at the Promotions Summit. The speakers were great, the ideas were awesome, and I might as well put on my Second Street cheerleader uniform right now.

The Promotions Summit was the best thing I did last year from a professional standpoint, and I just think people are crazy if they don’t go this year.