What is an incentive campaign and how it can help your company

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  It is normal that, at certain times, teams feel discouraged and do not achieve good results. Low sales season, tense organizational climate and lack of motivation are some factors that contribute to this negative result. To reverse this problem, many companies implement an incentive campaign.

Have you ever heard of this strategy? In this post, we will discover what an incentive campaign is, how to implement it and the main types of awards. Check out!

What is an incentive campaign?

The incentive campaign is a strategy to encourage better results from employees. The objective is to get teams to engage and recognize who achieved the best results. Therefore, it is necessary to plan and think about interesting awards for employees.

In this post, we will stick to the more traditional ones, which do not require this type of bureaucracy.

There are several types, but, basically, they all must follow the same structure to be created:

• Brainstorming : “brainstorming” is a technique for stimulating the creation of ideas in meetings. It enhances the creativity of participants because, although it has rules, it does not censor the imagination. Furthermore, many secondary ideas can be created from the first ones. For brainstorming to be successful, you and the participants need to gather many ideas in a predetermined amount of time;
• Planning: Any successful campaign requires a lot of planning. Theme, objective, individual and collective goals, strategies, prizes, deadlines and dates, for example, must be included in this file. It will be the basis for all actions, including the briefing;
• Briefing: this is the agenda of your incentive campaign, that is, the script with all the information to put the project into practice. Although it contains everything most important for the campaign to take place, the briefing needs to be simple. Try putting everything into listed topics;
• Definition of participants: it is very important that you define who can participate in the incentive campaign. If there are several sectors, it is important that each one has a distinct goal, so that competition is not unfair.

Even though an incentive campaign gives prizes and commissions, it must be thought of strategically, that is, designed to generate results in the short, medium and long term.

What to do to motivate employees?

Incentive campaigns are great ways to motivate employees and make the company more productive.

The incentive campaign, therefore, serves to motivate employees and make them work happier. Therefore, it is necessary to think about awards and bonuses that meet this objective. There are many types of awards and the company can choose the most appropriate for the situation.

Some examples of the most common bonuses chosen by companies are these:

• Scholarships (for the employee or their children);
• Debit cards with a good value entered;
• Travel with companions;
• sums of money;
• Computers;
• Televisions;
• Cell phones;
• Dinners;
• Tablets;
• Courses;
• Cars.

Of course, money is always a good idea, but having other types of awards is also important to value your employees. Rewarding a trip, for example, could be the opportunity the employee was waiting for to get to know a different place.

To find out which award is most interesting for your employees, it is essential that those responsible for the campaign draw up a profile of their salespeople. This way, your company will be able to offer more varied awards, but which are attractive to teams .

How can I make my incentive campaign a success?

Check out some tips on how to be successful in an incentive campaign.

Here are some tips for running an error-free incentive campaign:

Support the campaign until the end

The planning of the incentive campaign must be careful and very well done. Therefore, you must support the campaign ideas until the end. If something goes wrong, have a plan B — a second set of strategies that can reverse a bad outcome.

Create collective goals

Even if the objective is, for example, to reward the best salespeople, it is essential to motivate and recognize good group work. Having a collective goal allows everyone to be rewarded when it is achieved.

With individual and collective awards, the employee will make an effort to reach his own goal without feeling the need to maintain a very fierce competition with his colleagues . After all, in everyday life what matters is teamwork.

Engage the participants

Employees will not feel motivated to participate in the incentive campaign if the company does not involve them. In addition to attractive prizes consistent with what they want, it is important that they see other benefits, such as the opening of a new branch, the possibility of promotions and the creation of new positions.

Report on the progress of the campaign

Whether positive or negative, it is important that teams are aware of the outcome of the campaign. They can change their own strategies to reverse a bad situation. However, be careful when doing so not to give the impression of demanding or flattery.

The numbers or results from the last few weeks, for example, you can leave to reveal at a final event.

Hold a final event

A  final event can also be a motivation for your nurturing campaign. A party, dinner, lunch or  lecture with one of the company’s leaders can be the opportunity to unite employees with senior management. Furthermore, it is an opportunity to recognize those who have done exceptional work.

Get out of the ordinary and create a different event at the company. You can even hand out certificates, trophies or medals to the winners.

As you have seen, an incentive campaign can bring incredible results in seasons of low demand. Furthermore, it helps to raise employees’ self-esteem, unite teams and encourage healthy competition.