How to combine social media with a contest to successfully promote a new product

Marketing a new mobile app — when the product doesn’t yet exist — could have been a tricky proposition. But where there’s a will there’s a way.

14 days after lifting the embargo on MatchDayApp, a ‘coming soon’ mobile guide for travelling football fans, it has collected almost 750 Facebook Likes and over 1,000 Twitter followers. [UPDATE after 3 months: Facebook Likes are at almost 1,750k; Twitter is 2,600 followers]. Chat about the new app is being shared around its target market: football fans that travel to follow their team. Awareness is growing well, based on this launch programme:

Traditional marketing: distribution of flyers at key end-of-season and playoff games
A blog with valuable infomation on stadia, upcoming games and where to drink and eat when following your team
A systematic approach to building Twitter and Facebook communities

At the the centre of all activity lay a contest to win an iPhone 4S — a major draw for the target demographic.

Launch marketing was based around the steady production of content aimed at the end-user and was published on the MatchDayApp blog. This was promoted around the web with a particular emphasis on Twitter and Facebook. Since the product is not yet launched, the objectives were:

To gain a level of awareness and
To connect with people who may contribute to the app’s content and usefulness.

With the Olympics and — more importantly — the Euros in Poland and Ukraine just around the corner, this will prove to be an interesting summer for MatchDayApp. The app is due to launch at the start of the domestic season in August.