If a campaign is difficult to interact with, the percentage chance of participation from an audience is likewise diminished.

For example, let’s take a look at the following two competitions and their internal mechanics. For the purpose of this exercise, we will examine a non-existent “Comedy Club/Show” brand.

Competition A asks for participants to be present on-site at the Comedy Club’s venue/event and fill in some paperwork with personal details including their name, email, mobile number, date of birth and a little more. Paper and pens have been provided and the participant is asked to fill in the form in exchange for their entry being put in to the draw to win a trip to the Maldives.

Competition B asks for participants online and off, to simply  “dob” their funniest friend in to a simple text input. Distributed via email, social, mobile and on-premise with a simple, intuitive engagement mechanism.

With an attached disclaimer (and no pretense towards dis-ingenuity), the two scenarios above do in fact different in mechanics as much as they do in the delivery of the message. The former lives within a lottery/game-of-luck world, whilst the latter decides to harness the power of creativity and human emotion to evoke a personal need for participation.

Yet even with that fact in mind and with a plethora of statistics to support it, the latter outperforms the former in nearly every aspect. Vanity metrics such as insights and page views are higher, sharing is significantly amongst the social circles of participants and general word-of-mouth (whether it be electronic or real-world) is most certainly higher.

All of this leads to enhanced customer database growth, greater brand visibility and a spike in the “warmth” receptors of an audience’s cognitive perception of a brand’s positioning in their social life. Whilst a portion of its success can be attributed towards the aforementioned mechanics, there is no denying that a simpler call-out for interaction lends itself to a better performing campaign.

Time and time again, data and statistics validate this assertion. There is very little subjectivity to the correlation drawn between the ease-of-interaction with a campaign and its associative engagement rates.