How to Create an Effective Contest Promotion
You’ve heard of the success of Contest Promotions, maybe you’ve even participated in some yourself – the human psyche is drawn to free things that we usually have to pay for. Great news – you can harness that pull to grow your business and your presence online. Here’s how:
Define your Terms and Pick your Prize
In order to create an effective contest or giveaway promotion, you first need to decide what you want to get out of it. More followers? Email signups? Shares? Visits to your site?
Whatever you want to get out of the contest, make it a requirement for entry. You can even combine them and give extra entries to people who share to certain social medias or to a certain number of people. Many people who run Instagram Giveaways offer an extra entry if followers share the giveaway post in their stories.
You also need to offer a prize that people would love to win – the more value you offer, the more people will be willing to give for a chance to win. You can stay in-house for your prize and offer one of your products or services for free, or you can choose to collaborate with other brands.
Collaboration is an excellent way to up the value of your prize and reach a wider audience – the brand (or brands) with whom you choose to collaborate will put a product or service (or both) of their choice into the pot and promote it to their audiences. A good practice is to look for brands that are compatible or complimentary to yours, so that your prize bundle will work as a cohesive group of products.
Write your Copy
One area in which many brands fall short in Giveaway contests is in their copy – in the words they use to communicate to the reader just what value they offer. Here are some things to make sure to include in your social media post or landing page:
- What’s the Prize?
Describe, in detail, exactly what the reader will get if they win and, most importantly, why they want to win it. Will the products solve a problem they have? Answer a Question? Enhance their life? - How much is the Prize Worth?
Putting a dollar value on each item can be a powerful persuasion tool, especially if the product or service you are offering is of high monetary value. Some prizes have low monetary value but high time or experience value, or something all together different. For example: if you offer a low-cost digital planner, you can put a number on how many trees it will help the reader save per year. - What do they have to do to enter?
Clearly lay out what they need to do to enter, and what kinds of actions will gain them extra entries. A bullet list is a useful tool for this kind of information.
Promote it
Once you have your prize, partners, and words written, all that is left to do is the promotion – and that can be done simply organically, if you and/or your partners have large enough audiences. If your organic audience is on the smaller side, boosting the post on social media for a few dollars a day can be a great way to push it forward.
Even if you do choose to pay for promotion, organic promotion is also vital. Here are some of the places you should be advertising:
- Your email list
- All of your Social Media Platforms
- On your website (if you have one)
There is also huge value to asking your audience to share it for you. A great way to do that is to require sharing for an entry or an additional entry to the contest.