Your fans are now Powder Magazine’s fans.

For just under two months resorts have been sending, in any way possible, their fans to Powder Magazine’s like-gated, “Ski Town Throwdown” contest. You told your fans to vote but, only if they clicked “like” first, could they do so.

It was brilliant.

Give Them a Reason to Talk
That’s the idea behind influencer marketing. Identify people with large audiences in the markets you want to reach and give them a reason to talk.

In this case, however, those “people” were brands and the motivation was the distinction of being the “best ski town”. Well, not really the “best”, just the most voted for. In any case, it was the only carrot resorts needed to do things like this:

Resorts could only get closer to the carrot by sharing their fans. Yet the carrot was only a title voted on by those fans. Think about that for a second. A perfect storm of engagement.

$0.05 a Fan?
Powder used the OfferPop “Tug of War” app for their promotion which ran for about two months. At $1,250 a month for the 50-100k fan tier level they quickly hit, the cost was around $2,500.

So, 52,000+ new fans at a cost of $2,500 = $0.05 a fan. Not bad at all.

That’s the power behind giving people/brands with reach a reason to talk about you. And, as Powder proved, it doesn’t always have to be B2C either.

So, who will turn the tables on Powder and do the “Best Gear/Clothing/Mag Throwdown”?

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.