New contest aims to drive social engagement and in-store traffic as well as feel-good stories about the everyday heros in people’s lives.
By Erin Rigik, Senior Editor
CST Brands and Corner Store, this week, launched its #SHAREAHERO Sweepstakes, a 360-degree campaign that encourages customers to share stories about the heros that have touched their lives.
The contest kicked off June 2, and will run for 100 days, during which 100 winners—one winner per day—will receive a $100 Corner Store gift card.
To enter, customers must post a selfie of themselves pointing to a Coke can on a Corner Store display to either the contest Website, www.shareahero.com, or via Instagram or Twitter using the hashtag #shareahero. Customers can enter three times a day—once on each platform—and each photo entry continues to have a chance to win everyday for the rest of the contest.
While Coke is not a sponsor of the program, Share A Hero does play off of the popular Share A Coke campaign. Originally, the contest was going to be limited to military heros, but Corner Store decided to widen the audience to also include the everyday heros in peoples lives, including moms, dads, firemen, teachers, neighbors and so on.
“We have been working on a Go Campaign for the last few months and decided we wanted to focus on sharing and sharing with heroes. Once our conversation started, it became obvious that everyone’s definition of a hero is different and we needed to give everyone a chance to name their hero,” Judy Gleason, brand manager for CST Brands told CSD. “At the same time Coca Cola was coming out with the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign and the idea began to develop into a campaign using the bottles with names and nicknames as a back drop for a selfie in our stores. Our goals are really about driving more customers into the stores to capture their image on the backdrop multiple times during the ‘100 days of summer.’”
Another goal of the contest is to encourage customers via social media to visit a Corner Store to check out the #shareahero display. “We are also inviting customers at the gas pumps to come in to learn how to win $100 per day at the #shareahero display in the store. Many of our in store promotions are priced to encourage an additional purchase so customers can ‘share’ what they buy,” Gleason said. “We also have our Children’s Miracle Network (CMN) campaign during June and that is a great way for our customers to share as well. It is our 20th year with CMN and we have raised over $20 million. The children that CMN helps are also heroes as are their caregivers.”
“We wanted to give people the opportunity to share feel-good stories, while also driving social engagement on multiple platforms and driving in-store traffic via the contest,” Jared Sturtevant, supervisor of digital marketing for CST Brands Inc. told CSD. “We plan to share some of these hero stories via social media. We hope it will increase the number of people interacting with us on social media and going into our stores, taking these photos and talking about the contest and the brand.”
He noted the contest is expected to appeal to Millennials—often called the “selfie generation”—both for the selfies and the philanthropic bend to the contest.
Just two days into the contest and Instagram posts are taking the lead with twice the number of entries as Twitter, but the bulk of the photos are being uploaded on the microsite. Two posts about the contest on Facebook had garnered nearly 1,000 combined likes at presstime, and the cover image had also drawn 1,000 likes. As the company begins to more fully market the contest, consumer engagement is expected to increase.
Contest winners are contacted via email if they enter on the Website or through the social media site where they uploaded their photo. Winners have 72 hours to respond.
CST Brands partnered with Contest Factory, which is determining the winners via an electronic drawing around midnight each day.
CST Brand employees are also encouraged to enter the contest and to share it via social media.
“Between Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Fathers Day and Labor Day, the summer months offer great opportunities to honor our heroes. We are very excited and honored to be able to offer this opportunity for our customers to honor their heroes and enter for a chance to win $100 a day for 100 days,” Gleason said.