CityVoter Blog

This year marks the first KSL Local Salt Lake County AList contest. It saw great success throughout the 10 week competition with almost 31,500 votes! The Hair Salon and Wedding Cakes categories garnered the most votes and the American Bistro category was a very close race.

Louisville A-List received over 21,500 votes this year. There were 96 winners crowned out of more than 2,300 nominees so a big congratulations is in order for all of the winners!

The WISN Spring Fever and King5 Best of Northwest Escapes are fun contests with spring/summertime attractions and activities. Get in the mood for summer with On the Water categories such as Boat Tours and Water Ski Club as well as a Local Excursions section. The Spring Fever contest received almost 6,000 votes during the three week voting period. The Best of Northwest Escapes was a success with over 42,500 votes during the four week contest.

We have many more exciting contests that will kick off soon so stayed tuned!

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!

It’s a very busy and exciting time here at CityVoter! We are happy to announce that the ABC7 Bay Area A-List, KSL Local Salt Lake County AList and La Lista de Boston are all off to a great start.

We have run contests in San Francisco for a couple years now, but are thrilled to partner with ABC this year for the ABC7 Bay Area A-List. The contest currently has over 31,000 votes and quite a few hot contests happening including the Fine Jewelry and Chocolatier categories. We are also running a sweepstakes with mobile payment and rewards service, LevelUp where the winner will receive a Mac Book Air and $500 in LevelUp credit.

Both the Salt Lake County AList and La Lista de Boston are new additions to the CityVoter contests this year. The Salt Lake AList has really taken off with almost 15,000 votes, and we aren’t even half way through the contest yet! So far  Hair Salon and Bakery are two of the biggest categories as well as Wedding Photographer.

Additional contests will commence later in March, so stay tuned for more announcements!