Promote Your Art or Photo Gallery by Organizing an Open Photo Contest
The artistic road is paved by leaving personal footprints on the world, inspiring people to do great things, and unleashing creativity. To make a meaningful impact, artists and photographers often look to diverse strategies for introducing their creations to the community. One of the greatest ways to promote your art is launching an open photo contest and, thus, creating a centralized platform for an art/photography showcase.
Why should you organize a photo contest?
Photo contests are now the centerpiece of visual showcase campaigns due to multiple reasons. First, with the development of smart digital platforms, it’s possible to manage contests online in a flexible and convenient mode. Secondly, contests to leverage visual materials are characterized by high virality which means that you can reach a large online community by simply submitting a photo. Plus, the improvements of smartphone cameras allow creating quite impressive and sophisticated visual materials.
How to promote your art/photo gallery by organizing an open photo contest
An excellent strategy for promoting your artistic creations is leveraging creativity on a large scale. Developing an open space for locating photos or art works is a great attention catcher focused on the large target audience of art lovers. Let’s discuss how to set up an online contest to promote your art/photo gallery step by step:
- Define the objective. Think of your role in this promotional campaign. Let’s say you focus on portrait photography and would like to promote your collections of this art segment. Thus, it would be smart to narrow your outreach and launch a photo contest for portrait artists and photographers.
- Create a value offer. To encourage abundant art contributions, you have to reveal a value for the contest that you create. As an option, set up a system of public voting and offer a lucrative prize to the winner like a financial reward, the showcase of a winning picture in the centerpiece of your gallery, a partnership, etc.
- Choose the right platform. Launching an open photo contest means being ready to process any number of submissions. To automate the process, look for an easy-to-use online platform that can help you simplify things. With the feature of automated Submission Collecting from Judgify, you can easily view, track, and filter all the contest entrants, customize submissions, and check submission statuses. Apart from submission, check whether your chosen contest management system supports public voting and reporting if these features resonate with your strategy.
- Set the rules. Provide understandable guidelines for participation in the contest and make sure that no one misses out. Discuss each detail from photo formats to the color scheme, and be clear in terms of providing all relevant deadlines. You can learn more about how to set up successful contest rules here.
- Go social. Leverage social media platforms to make the contents of your contest pandemic. For instance, consider aligning the contest website with social media and encouraging shares, or allowing users to upload the photos directly from their social media accounts. You can also promote additional Instagram contests or Pinterest campaigns to attract attention to the contest and build the audience of voters.
- Make a winner announcement buzzy. Once the winner is picked, post the announcement on your website, across the social media platform and in a newsletter to wrap up the contest on a ringing note.
- Evaluate the results. To improve your work in the future and understand which channels can bring you good traffic, evaluate the contest outcomes. This will not only help you set up a more successful contest in future, ut also open up the most effective medium for your art promotion.
Where you can run an open photo contest?
There are two basic platforms used to create photo contest: social media and photo contest sites. Making the right choice depends on the goals that you wish to pursue in the campaign. Traffic generation and virality is in most cases associated with social media platforms; while catering to a specific audience group and showcasing your own gallery is related to branded website contests.
Tips for running a successful photo contest
To elevate your artistic promotion strategy, we’ve collected several working tips for your contest campaign:
- Choose the platform that allows entry moderation. If you want to present your art/photo gallery in the best light, you have to avoid any frauds or cheating. With the moderation module available on your platform, you’ll stay professional.
- Choose the relevant prize. Promoting art requires attracting relevant expertise. By choosing the right prize, you protect yourself from random submissions of prize hunters that might distort the idea of your contest.
- Choose a convenient public voting system. Your contest entrants need some feedback. To establish an easy-to-use evaluation system, choose the platforms that offer a public voting feature.
The insights into the successful open photo contest
To satisfy your creative urges, check out two bright examples of how to set up a photo contest online:
To revive the power of black and white photography, Black Box Gallery has recently launched an open photo contest for contemporary photographers who create luminous and well crafted imagery in “shades of gray.” Participation requires paying a small fee and offered a cash prize to a winner.
This annual photography contest focuses on visuals representing social issues and human values. The contestants upload their photos to the official website and have the option to upload either singles or photo stories. The winner gets a $1,000 cash prize along with a trophy.
Art is created to empower the world. Building open platforms for artistic creations is a great strategy for an art/photo gallery promotion. If you’d like to set up an online contest with a reliable start-to-finish assistant, get started with Judgify for free!