How To Use A Contest As Part Of Your Marketing

Everyone likes to feel like a winner — and if you work in marketing, you have a wonderful opportunity to let people actually become one.

Besides sending out discount offers or running ads about special promotions, one of the most time-tested and effective ways to generateb interest among your customers is to run a contest.

Sometimes the prize will be big, like a new car. In other cases it might be as simple as a smartphone case or gift card. Whatever you give out for a contest, just announcing one can spark a level of excitement similar to launching a new product or hosting a special event.

As with any kind of marketing initiative, contests only really work insofar as they can align with a specific business objective. This could include attracting new customers to a particular product or service, encouraging your existing customers to send more business your way or even just growing your audience.

Contests also require thoughtful planning and careful execution. After all, if you’re offering up a prize that people will want, you’re creating some expectations among your target market. If you don’t meet those expectations, the contest could do more harm to your brand than good.

Make sure you’ve covered off everything on this checklist before you launch your first contest as part of a marketing strategy, or before you get your next contest off the ground:

1. Make entering easy, but capture the data you need

Unlike a more general contest that’s simply run for the fun of it, marketing departments need to qualify their audience, especially if it’s a contest being run by a B2B brand.

Depending on your target customer, entering the contest may need to involve providing more than just contact information. Think about whether you can reasonably ask for people to gauge their interest in a particular product, or whether they might opt in to receive ongoing marketing communications from your brand.

Although no one wants to fill out a long questionnaire just to enter a contest, don’t overlook the chance to learn more about those entering and how you might use that data later to make your marketing even more relevant.

2. Pick a prize that’s worth it — to them, and to you

Everyone might love to win the latest tech gadget, but if the cost of buying one is more than what you’ll get in business from running the contest, it might not be the best choice.

Start from within, looking at either free items from your own product or service portfolio, or even part of a packaged deal.

A hair salon could run a contest to win a gift pack of shampoos and conditioners. A B2B brand could run a contest offering free access to one of its applications for a month.

Some contests are as simple as a coupon code to buy something they’d like for themselves on a major e-commerce site. The better you can align the prize with your brand, though, the more memorable the contest will be to your customers and prospects.

3. Create a sense of urgency that encourages engagement

There’s a certain magic in phrases like, “Only available for a limited time.”

You might run a contest that takes place over a number of weeks. If you’re running a contest in conjunction with an event, it might be better to begin and end it in a single day.

Depending on the window you’re giving people to enter, think about how you’ll use the various marketing channels at your disposal to maximize your return on investment.

Social media can be a great means to reach many people at once, particularly for contests that don’t last very long. If you have more runway, email or even online ads might be the best channel to heighten awareness among your target audience.

4. Look beyond the moment people enter the contest

Hopefully you’ve set up your contest so that you’re capturing data you can use for marketing purposes afterwards. Even as the contest is underway, however, there are things you can track and analyze in real time.

After people enter the contest, for example, keep an eye on traffic and engagement patterns across your digital properties, like your website.

Did people look around at more of your product pages after learning about your brand through the contest, or browse through customer reviews? Did you get any new followers on your social media accounts, or signups to your email newsletter?

Consider how you might use tools like chatbots to strike up a conversation of sorts with people after they’ve entered your contest. Use social listening tools to assess sentiment about your brand on social.

Keep doing all this after you’ve gone through all the entry data to see if you can develop even richer insights and tactics to try next time.

5. Double-check the rules (and obey them)

You will make up a lot of the rules yourself if you’re the brand running a contest. There may be other rules you need to think about, though.

Depending on where you’re based, you may need to restrict what kind of information you collect, or even who can be eligible. In Canada, for example, there are laws in provinces like Quebec governing contests which might be much different than those in Ontario or Vancouver.

If you’re promoting your contest through third party websites or platforms, they will have additional rules that cover everything from how long you can run your contest to the way you promote them. What’s okay on Instagram, for instance, might not be okay on Twitter or Linkedin.

Once your contest comes to an end, keep the celebration going long after you’ve handed out the prizes. Analyze and report back to the team on what the contest did in terms of activating your fans, conducting audience research or even lowering some of your marking costs in other areas. That way, no matter who emerged victorious in your contest, your brand will feel like a winner, too.