Annual Photo Contest Example: Miss Diving Specials Case Study

Randi Jensen
Randi Jensen
The photo contest Miss Diving Specials has become an annual recurring marketing action for the website Diving Specials that helps them obtain user-generated content and email addresses for their marketing purposes.

For the fourth year in a row, the diving deals website Diving Specials has successfully run their annual photo contest Miss Diving Specials. Women from all over the world enter the competition for a chance to win a diving cruise by submitting a photo of themselves related to scuba diving. The contest is a great marketing tool for Diving Specials.

The company behind the annual photo contest

Miss_Diving_Specials_logo

Diving Specials is the leading platform for worldwide scuba dive vacation deals. After a short free sign-up, divers have access to exclusive deals on the best dive resorts and liveaboards. Diving Specials features more than 30 exciting dive destinations like Galapagos, Cocos Island, Socorro, Maldives, Red Sea, Palau & many more.

The goal of the photo contest campaign

The company organizes the annual campaign with two main goals in mind:

  1. User-generated content: The participants of the annual photo contest share their scubadiving images for a chance to win attractive prizes and gain recognition in the diving world. They agree to the commercial usage of the images they submit.
  2. New leads: Each participant and voter fills out a registration form, making them new prospects for the organizing brand.

‘Miss Diving Specials’ has become an annual recurring action, running for five years in a row. This annual photo contest example generates thousands of visits every year, with almost 130,000 page views for the 2016 edition.

annual photo contest example from Miss Diving Specials

The Solution

The Miss Diving Specials is an annual photo contest where scuba girls can participate by simply registering and uploading an image and collecting votes. Participants from all over the world can enter the competition. The prize is always an amazing 7 nights luxury dive cruise for 2 onboard. Every year the winner gets to visit one of the luxurious liveaboard dive boats, in places like Indonesia, Palau, or Raja Ampat.

The organizers promoted the contest on social media as well as through a newsletter sent to the company’s existing database. Diving Specials used the collected images from participants to actively promote the contest; this took place especially on Facebook and Instagram, as well as on Snapchat where they actively posted during the contest period.

After submitting their entries, the contest participants shared their entries on social media in order to obtain more votes. This greatly helps the contest to go viral and get more visibility. The participant with the highest number of votes was the lucky winner of this annual photo competition.

photo contest miss diving specials

The Outcome

The annual photo contest received 252 valid entries in 2017, which is 92 more than the previous year, from all over the world. All pictures received almost 18,000 votes in total. The contest site had 53,301 visits and 127,367 page views and was shared 1907 times, mostly on Facebook. In total, Diving Specials social network profiles gained 273 new followers directly from the contest site.

In order to vote, the users had to verify their email address so that the contest organizer could collect email addresses of those that voted.

Map of where the entries in Miss Diving Specials 2017 came from
Map of where the entries in Miss Diving Specials 2017 came from

Testimonial

We are using Easypromos for the third time! It’s easy to use and has a great design. The core message is that it’s an amazing marketing campaign and gives us an extra boost in new email addresses to use for our newsletters. This year we could generate 17k new emails! The most convincing fact of why we used Easypromos again is the fraud prevention! Voting contests are fun, but it became common that some girls would buy fake votes to win. Easypromos actively supports the discovery of fraud!

– Dr. Sarah Schuebl – CEO and Founder Diving Specials GmbH