Temperatures are dropping, football is underway, and pumpkin spice everything is hitting the shelves—which means it’s time to excite your audience for fall with some seasonal campaigns! We’ve harvested some of our team’s favorite autumn-themed contest suggestions and shared them below. Whether you’d like to run a sweepstakes, UGC, or bracket, partner with a local sponsor and give one of these promotions a try to boost engagement all season long!
Autumn Sweepstakes
From football to Halloween and Thanksgiving, the possibilities for fall-themed sweepstakes are practically endless! Partner with a local haunted house, corn maze, or pumpkin patch to give away a night of spooky—or not-so-spooky—fun. You could even use our canned Fall Festival Fun Sweepstakes template; all you need is a sponsor to provide a prize, and we’ve supplied the rest for you! You can also excite your sports fans with giveaways for football tickets, tailgate goodies, and other game day gear.
In honor of Veteran’s Day, run a sweepstakes with a custom registration field that requires each participant to enter a local business owned and operated by a veteran. When you select the winning entry, award the member with a gift card or prize pack and provide their nominated business with a week of free advertising online and on-air! This is a great way to thank your local veterans for their service while also boosting contest traffic.
For Thanksgiving, local grocers and supermarkets make excellent sponsors for a Turkey Day Giveaway contest. Partner with one of these businesses to offer up a catered holiday meal, or approach local retailers and department stores to give away the hottest holiday wish list items in a Black Friday Blitz contest.
Fall UGC contests
Ramp up audience engagement even higher with interactive user-generated content (UGC) contests! Running a Halloween costume contest with UGC is an excellent way to boost audience participation. Encourage members to submit photos of themselves, their children, or their pets for a chance to win a prize pack of Halloween goodies. Depending on your target demographic, you can run this type of contest in a variety of categories, such as funniest or scariest costume, best duo, or cutest kid’s costume. Secure a party supply or novelty store as a sponsor and offer a gift card to one random participant to entice members to vote for their favorite photo. You could run a similar contest for football fans, encouraging your audience to submit a photo of their best game day getup for a chance to be crowned the ultimate fan!
Seasonal Voting Brackets
Spice things up this fall with a Chili Cook-off Champion bracket! Ask your audience to submit their best chili recipe for a elimination-style bracket and let members vote for their favorites in each round until a winner is determined. To maximize engagement, team up with several businesses from your community to host a chili cook-off event so your audience can sample the competing recipes before voting!
If your community hosts an annual Thanksgiving parade, get involved by hosting a Most Festive Float bracket contest. Have an intern or member of your promotions team take photos of each float and upload them into a voting bracket. Then invite your audience to pick their favorite, and award a prize to the winning entry!
Use one or all of these ideas this fall to create unique, exciting promotions that will keep your audience engaged throughout the season!
Looking for more easy campaign ideas? Download our free Campaign Concepts Guides for more contest suggestions, target advertisers, and more!
