Contest Marketing
What is Contest Marketing?
Contest marketing involves using giveaways and sweepstakes to reach a specific marketing goal. Using contest marketing can give your audience a positive experience and create an affinity for your brand or product, while boosting your brand’s awareness, social media following and more!
How To Boost Your Brand With Giveaways
There are many different forms of competitions and giveaways you can use, depending on what you are wanting to achieve and who your target audience is.
Social Media Engagement & Growth
Competitions can be great for gaining social media growth and engagement over a short period of time. By running a competition targeted at page likes or follows, you are gaining an audience for future campaigns and reaching potential future customers.
Social media competitions can be done in many ways, from simply sharing a photo and asking people to comment, to partnering with an influencer or other brand and expanding your reach further.
To get the most out of a social media competition and reach more people, you can also put some budget behind this through an ad campaign. This can help give your competition an extra push and reach a wider audience and in turn get better results.
Lead Generation
Email marketing can be a great way to share offers and remind people of your business, however creating a contact list can be a long-winded task and can take up a lot of your valuable time.
Competitions can be a great way to gain the data you need and save you time.
Whether you’re a new business needing to start email marketing or an established brand who needs to update a current contact list, a lead generation competition may be for you!
There are many ways to run lead generation competitions. From a social media form, to directing people to a landing page. The option you choose will depend on your own brand and who your target audience is, but it could really give your contact list the refresh it needs.
Brand Awareness & Reach
For new brands, building brand awareness is an important part of starting out, and competitions can be useful to help with this. You can build and reach a wider audience using contest marketing in many ways. We have listed just a few ideas below:
- Asking users to share a competition on social media for extra entries
- Asking users to tag a friend/ multiple friends in the comments
- Asking users to refer a friend by sharing a link
- Asking users to follow your social media page
By giving users an incentive such as the chance to win a prize, they will be more likely to participate and share your brand to their followers and friends.
Website Traffic
If you have a website, building website traffic is highly important to help your SEO and overall search ranking. Competitions can also be useful for this! Whether you set up a landing page on your site, or ask people to visit your site as part of a competition entry, it can be a successful way to increase the number of people visiting your site.
Multiple Goals
You may not have one set goal for your brand, if this is so you can still use contest marketing to achieve multiple objectives!
One great way to do this is through a website designed to run competitions. An example of one of these that we use at Evolution is Gleam.
Gleam is a site made for running competitions, giveaways and sweepstakes. It enables you to choose ways for users to enter. These include; social media page likes, visiting a website and more. These types of competitions can also be great for lead generation and building a contact list for future marketing.
We have included an example of a recent competition done through Gleam, showing a few benefits we gained from this strategy.
Conclusion
If you haven’t tried a competition as a part of your marketing strategy yet, it’s time to give it a try! Competitions have so many benefits from rand awareness to social media engagement and can add a bit of fun to your brand.
