CityVoter Blog

The Cape Cod A-List saw great success this year with over 10,000 votes, which makes it our most successful Cape contest to date. One business that also saw great success during this year’s contest is Uptown Dog Cape Cod. They previously won in the 2009 contest, but this year they blew the competition away in the Pet Store category by garnering almost 50% of the votes.

Uptown Dog Cape Cod was very engaged throughout the whole contest, and was active about their nomination on Facebook. They created a Voter Deal in contest and promoted it on their social networks. While Voter Deals are a great incentive to get your customers to vote, it’s also great to see a business reward their customers after they have already won. They created a post that displayed their winner’s certificate and thanked everyone for voting for them with a special “Celebratory Sale”. The limited time sale was a great way to get their customers reengaged after the contest was over and to show appreciation of their support.

On a side note, we couldn’t help but notice that Uptown Dog Cape Cod has a Doggie Birthday Club. If you/your pet becomes a member of this club, your furry friend will receive a special birthday treat during their birthday month! CityVoter is a pet friendly office and we love dogs, so it is always great to see businesses that celebrate dogs as well.

How do you celebrate your success after the contests? Let us know in the comments!

Each spring we run the Best of Northwest Escapes contest which showcases local getaways and excursions and features many great businesses. One local business that has consistently been at the top is Campbell’s Resort on Lake Chelan. In 2011, they won BEST Resort and Girls Weekend Destination. In this year’s contest, they received four impressive awards including 2^nd in BEST Guys Weekend Destination, 2^nd BEST Resort, 2^nd BEST Honeymoon Destination and 5^th BEST Beach.

One of the features of our revamped Business Center is the ability to highlight top voters on a business’ fan page. With Campbell’s social media during the contest we were able to see this feature in action! The personal note in each of their posts to thank the individual voter and remind others to vote is a really nice touch and makes the post stand out more. This is a great way to show customers that you appreciate their votes by thanking them and in turn inspire others to vote for your business.

To celebrate their win in 2011, Campbell’s created a ‘Best Girls Get-Away Package’.  The package featured a lakeside guestroom, spa treatments and local wine. We can’t wait to see what they what they will do this year!

Have you used the tools in our Business Center? Let us know your experience in the comments!

Images via Campbell’s Resort

It can be difficult for local businesses to find the right ingredients for success, but Sift Cupcake & Dessert Bar makes it all look easy. Andrea noticed a niche market for fun, whimsical cupcakes in the wine country while planning her wedding, and from that Sift Cupcake & Dessert Bar was born. They are a four time winner on the A-List including this year’s BEST Cupcake award on the ABC7 Bay Area A-List.

So what is their biggest success tip? Focus on customers! They have always been their number one priority at Sift Cupcake & Dessert Bar. They want their customers to experience the WOW factor each time they enter one of the locations. Sift is constantly coming up with new ways to do this whether its with sweet treats or special offers. This year marks the second year that Sift Cupcake & Dessert Bar created a special offer on the A-List in the form of a voter deal, and have seen great success both times. They posted about the deal the last week of the contest and saw a huge surge in votes and a significant amount of deals were purchased consistently the last week of the contest. The main driver of votes and deals purchased during the last week of the contest was Facebook . Sift highlighted the post so it took up the whole width of their timeline and posted about the contest and deal several times throughout the last week. Highlighting the post made it eye catching and it worked well and had a lot of visibility- just look at the number of comments, likes and shares!

Not only are voter deals a great way to thank your customers, but they also provide a big incentive. At Sift, they understand that it is difficult to mobilize even your most loyal customers to get out and vote. “People spend a lot of time online, yet it’s hard to motivate people to go to a new site or to take the time to vote…we understand, people are busy!” Creating a voter deal helped them overcome this obstacle.

A large part of the success that Sift Cupcake & Dessert Bar saw during the contest can be attributed to their social media. Sift is extremely popular on social media and harnessed their followers and voter deal to promote the contest. Their marketing team consistently posts once a day on Facebook for their almost 9,300 fans to see. They also have a Twitter and Pinterest account. Sift does a good job incorporating all of their social networks and even has a Pinterest tab on Facebook to drive more traffic to their Pinterest account.

Have you created a voter deal for your business? If so, what have you done to market that deal? Let us know in the comments!