Acquire and Engage Your Community

How to build a successful campaign on Award Pool

How can Award Pool help brands and content creators to acquire and engage users? Many tools can help grow your user numbers but Award Pool goes deeper to help you create community.  We help you to acquire users that want to be involved with your brand, invite their friends and give feedback and support. Think of it as the difference between a porcelain dog you add to your collection vs an active, walking, barking puppy.

Before you start planning out a  park for your community of loyal puppies, let’s plan first the goal of your campaign. When you decide to engage your fans and are ready to develop a campaign on Award Pool, first, you need to build a strategy.

The Campaign

Start by creating your campaign, this is your goal, your intent, your raison d'être. Perhaps your campaign goal is to create a community of users to test a new product or get potential clients to dig deeper into your brand. Perhaps you are a content creator and you want to sell art, get people to download an album, promote a new book. Maybe it’s as simple as finding a new and interesting way to engage a community that you already have. Think about the purpose behind your campaign because this will help you define your challenges.

The Challenges

Once you have a campaign idea, you will create different challenges under that campaign. For example, if you look at the widget on the Award Pool website, you will see that we have several challenges at any given time. Introducing Award Pool is a challenge that we keep live at all times, it is designed to get visitors to dig deeper into our company, our team, and our product.

Other challenges that you see on the Award Pool homepage in our widget as timely. They are live for a week or a month at a time to showcase different features, contests, and events.  Female Powerhouses was a challenge created specifically in March to honour International Women's Day and showcase some amazing women in their respective fields. Go Green, Sustainable January ran for a month to introduce our carbon offset feature and partners.

Acquire

First, let's get started with how your first challenge can help acquire users. When you start to build out your challenge, you will need to select actions. Some common actions that help acquire more users include:

• Sign up for a newsletter
• Invite a friend
• Follow a social account (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube)
• Encourage re-tweets, shares with points
• Join a community or group (Telegram, Discord, Reddit)
• Enter a secret code and get points. That code could be provided at an event, conference, or during purchase.

These actions help to get more eyes on your brand whether that is joining social platforms, signing up for your newsletters or groups, or inviting friends to join. These actions give your community a chance to invite and interact with their friends and like-minded individuals to help build an authentic and viral community.

Engage

Now you need to consider how to engage that community. The following actions are intended to give your community a deeper dive into your brand and to share their opinions and thoughts to give them a sense of ownership.

• Hashtag challenges for your socials. Create hashtags that contribute to strengthening brand awareness or the message of your campaign
• URL links to company pages and pertinent information
• Links to merchandise and company stores
• Links to blog posts
• Links to videos
• Create integrations with actions important to your users - jog 5K and prove it, complete a course and prove it etc.
• Q&A - ask questions about the content you are directing them to
• Polls - get your community to vote on things that define your brand. New mascot? New feature? New flavour? New colour?
• Offer NFT badges for completing certain tasks
• Complete in-game actions with our gaming overlay

Point Values

You have created your actions, now you need to assign points to each of those actions. First, we recommend visiting some of the Award Pool challenges and seeing how point values are assigned. Read our article on Monetization for help in defining point value and price.

Promote

Now that you have created the challenge, make sure to promote it. Promote it as you would any other online marketing campaign. Some ideas include:

• Send an email to current subscribers/email lists
• Promote on your social media accounts. Tweet about it. Mention it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
• Send out a press release
• Consider hiring some influencers to talk about your campaign
• If you are attending a conference, hand out a QR code that links directly to your campaign

Ongoing Engagement

You have spent a lot of time building your Award Pool campaign and mapping a new course for engaging your community. Now, you need to keep that momentum going.

Plan out new challenges that you can integrate into your campaign widget. We recommend planning out how you can continue to engage your audience on either a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis with new challenges. You have the community listening, so be sure to entice them to come back, often, and complete actions for more points and new NFT rewards.