Why You Should Use Contests as a Marketing Tool To Generate Leads For Your Business

Competitions are a great way to challenge oneself and others also. Also, holding such competition is an awesome way to promote your brand and also for customer engagement. As per a survey, 52 percent of consumers are motivated to stay connected with a brand by contests or being asked for their input about current or new products. Thanks to social media which gives one of the most effective and lucrative ways to interact with our customers. Hence, startups can use this strategy to gain more attraction in less budget.

In addition, contests enable you to engage your audience because in contests you and your customers both interact with each other which ultimately deepen the connection. If you want to increase your audience base as well as get content for your business then user-generated content (UGC) Promotion like photo and video contests can be the best option to just do that. Here is the reason why to use contests as a marketing tool.

Some of The Reasons Which Made the Companies Decide to Run Competitions As a Marketing Strategy:

1. Generate leads and sales
2. Drive traffic online and offline
3. Increase brand equity
4. Engage and delight customers
5. Grow fan base, generate opt-ins and subscribers
6. Gain user data and insight
7. Collect consumer-generated content

This allows the brand to recognize and reward loyal customers (as well as those all-important new ones). Ultimately, competitions can be a quick, low-cost incentive to encourage your customers to do some of your marketing for you.

Now There are Two Types of Promotion:

The 2 common types of promotions include

1. Sweepstakes (chance-based promotion) - When conducting sweepstakes, it keeps the call to action clear and the forms easy to fill out.
2. Contest (skill-based promotion) - For contests, there may be a public voting or closed judging or a combination of both. In this method be sure that the criteria for winning are clearly articulated and readily available.

In either model, consider rewarding participants with coupons, discounts or smaller prizes to reward their time and effort, if even they don’t win the grand prize.

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Promotional Law Basics

Running promotions involves adhering to laws and the guidelines of individual channels/ social media network. Promotion containing all 3 (prize, chance, and consideration) is deemed to be an illegal lottery. Either eliminate chance or consideration. To keep everything legal, you’ll also need to disclaim the platform that you’re on, stating that they don’t sponsor the contest. This will be found in the terms of service of whichever platform you’re posting on. If you’re going to do anything related to kids, make sure you have something saying that the legal guardian is the one that’s entering because there are some legalities around that. Also, clear out all the rules and regulations related to the contest, making it transparent for the participant.

For Example:

Facebook promotion guidelines include the following Don’ts:

1. Administer a promotion directly on your Page or use Facebook features as an entry or voting mechanism.
2. Automatically enter someone for Liking, posting a photo or comment.
3. Use a like button for voting.
4. Use Facebook channels to notify the winners.
5. For Twitter, the 140 character limit can make disclosure of material and policy items challenging. Make sure to host the information on your website and link to it often.

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How To Run a Successful Social Media Contest To Get The Desired Result?

Begin with the end

The first rule of running any marketing campaign is to know what you want. So start planning to establish a clear goal before to achieve the highest engagement. It can be anything from trying to get newsletter subscription, expose certain products, gain brand loyalty, more fans, followers on social media or increased traffic to your site and blog. Then, work on the prototype where you have decided to increase the marketing, especially using the contest as a method.

Select the type of content

Integrate your brand messages into the contest – whether it’s adding product information that may catch people’s attention into the contest itself or throwing other posts to your Facebook page with interesting information about your brand.

Choose the right platform

Based on the goal, find where your target audience hangs out. You can promote your content across all social media platforms; however, choose the primary platform as the place you’ll collect data.

Have Clear Contest Rules

For example, if the contest is for the number of Facebook likes a photo receives, make sure to specify that multiple votes from the same IP address will be discounted. And if you’d like to reuse images submitted as part of a contest, be sure to clearly state that in the contest rules as well. It will save you a lot of time afterwards!

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How Long Should You Run Your Contest?

Typically a contest should run for at least 2 weeks but not more than a month. Entries started to tail off at the 12-day mark, before picking up again right before the end of the contest.

What to Give Away?

The general idea here is to give away something that is valuable enough for most people in your market to stand up and take notice. For some markets, this might be an item in the INR 10,000 - INR 15,000 range, and for others, it might be as small as INR 2500. You can also give away something that a large percentage of your market will want. Don't make it something obscure. You want the item to be inherently valuable and also broadly desired, to maximize the reach of your content.

Executing the Competition

Moderate submission entries, many platforms have built-in options for moderation. Make sure to approve all images for photo contests before they get posted, in case there is inappropriate material. You can drive heaps of wild engagement with a social media contest. It just takes a bit of planning and execution to make it a smashing success.

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Conclusion

Contests are really helpful in generating a huge number of leads and bring success if executed properly and keeping the public in mind. Comment below, if you have used contests as a method for marketing at any point of time in your brand promotion and how much success it has become in terms of the promotion of your brand in the public eye.