How Victory Brewing Company Gathered over 230k Leads While Spreading the Word about Their New Brews

In a go-go world, trends and the news can change at the blink of an eye. Just think about all of the content your customers see, emails they receive and scrolling they do. With that in mind, you can imagine that it can take a few tries to break through the noise, and that’s where long-term marketing campaigns come into play.Victory Brewing Company knows it can take a bit of time for something good to catch on. After opening its doors in 1996, they have expanded to three taprooms, a production facility and distribution across 33 states and in nine countries. That success certainly didn’t happen overnight. In January, Victory Brewing Company launched a 10-month online contest to help promote the newly branded Monkey family of beers. This customer success story explores Victory Brewing Company’s contest over that multi-month period and shares their results.

Campaign Objectives

Victory Brewing Company is a craft brewery in Pennsylvania. At the beginning of 2020, they launched a marketing campaign focused on their Monkey family of beers: Golden Monkey, Sour Monkey and Twisted Monkey. This line of beers is a creative take on Belgium-style brews.

With their campaign, they wanted to not only promote the updated brand of these beers but help to bring a little laughter to their fans and fellow beer enthusiasts. Chris Sterbank, a representative for Victory Brewing Company, said their team sought to “drive engagement and contest entries, while also growing our @VictoryMonkeys social fanbase.”

The Solution

Victory Brewing Company chose to run a long-term contest to help promote their newly branded Monkey family of beers. Their “Let the Monkeys Out” sweepstakes gave folks the opportunity to win one of 21 prizes over a 10-month period. As both a play on their Monkey family brand and to meet their goal of spreading a little joy and laughter, the contest theme was comedy-related.

Giveaway on InstagramWith ShortStack’s landing page builder, Victory Brewing created a form to collect the entries for their sweepstakes. The form included name and email address, along with physical address, phone number and age. This information not only helped Victory Brewing with prize distribution, but it gave them valuable data for future marketing promotions.Furthermore, Victory Brewing gave folks the opportunity to submit entries by posting to Twitter and Instagram with their contest hashtags. On both platforms, entrants were asked to include the contest hashtags #VictoryMonkeys #Sweepstakes and to tag @VictoryBeer. They used the ShortStack feeds feature to collect all of the entries from Instagram and Twitter that fit these requirements. Allowing for entry via hashtag allowed for greater brand awareness and increased visibility of the contest among entrants’ followers.Each month, two prizes were awarded. This helped to keep people interested in the contest throughout the 10-month period. Each month was a separate entry period, with only entries from that month being eligible to win the month’s prizes.

Contest Details

Victory Brewing Company’s Let the Monkey’s Out Sweepstakes ran from January 20 to November 20, 2020. During this time, people could enter to win the grand prize, along with first and second prize drawings.

We promoted the campaign using social media, display, and a partnership with a comedian! We had to pivot some of our programming because of the pandemic, but we found creative alternatives such as live streaming.~Chris Sterbank | Victory Brewing Company

Twenty-one prizes were awarded throughout the entry period -- a single grand prize, 10 first prizes and 10 second prizes. Prizes consisted of the following:

• Second prize (valued at $25): A Victory Monkey Play Prize package, which included a t-shirt, card game and a barrel of monkeys game.
• First prize (valued at $300): A “Comedy Night In” package, which included a 12-month Netflix subscription and a Victory Monkey gift basket.
• Grand prize (valued at $2,500): A trip for two to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, NY. This included roundtrip airfare for two people and a two-night stay at a hotel.

Entries could be submitted via the sweepstakes landing page by submitting a form. After form submission, entrants received a confirmation email. In addition, hashtag posts to Instagram and Twitter that tagged @VictoryBeer and included the contest hashtags #VictoryMonkeys and #Sweepstakes were collected as entries.

Built with ShortStack's Simple Giveaway template[button size='medium' style='white' text='View and Create Your Own' icon='' icon_color='' link='http://m.shortstack.page/TkwWcM' target='_blank' color='' hover_color='' border_color='' hover_border_color='' background_color='' hover_background_color='' font_style='' font_weight='' text_align='' margin='0 0 10px']In conjunction with the sweepstakes, a 5-city ‘Let the Monkeys Out’ Comedy Tour was planned with headliner Mekki Leeper. However, the events ended up being postponed due to health and safety concerns related to COVID-19.

The Results

During the 10-month entry period, Victory Brewing Company collected 235,057 form entries. They also collected another 457 hashtag entries from Instagram and Twitter. Their contest landing page had 507,014 views. Of the nearly 235K autoresponders sent, 44,191 were opened – an open rate of about 19%.

Sterbank expressed, “We were very pleased with the results of the contest, and we were surprised with how responsive people were even though there's a lot happening in the world. We hope the Victory Monkeys provided some levity during these hard times.” Beyond leads, they also saw a boost in their followers on their Victory Monkeys Instagram account and visitors to their Victory Monkeys landing page.

Long-term contests can drive big results

When creating a marketing campaign, it’s important to keep your goals in mind. If you’re looking for quick engagement with your audience, then a comment to enter contest might be in order. Alternatively, if you want to give away a smaller prize to boost your mailing list numbers, then a one week sweepstakes might be the ticket. However, what if your goal is to promote something bigger, like a change in branding or a major update to your product offering?In this case, consider a long-term contest that you can run across several months. This is exactly the path Victory Brewing Company took with their Let the Monkeys Out Sweepstakes, and it certainly paid off with big-time results. Sterbank and the Victory Brewing Company have solid plans for their contest leads.

We are going to use the leads we gathered to provide quality content in the 2021 Monkey campaign. We now have an audience of die-hard Monkey fans that we can reach out to and connect with!~Chris Sterbank | Victory Brewing Company

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