What Is Contest Marketing?
Contests have a way of lighting up people's interest. Audiences like the excitement of a game, whether it's competitive and participatory or based on the luck of the draw. Your audiences could enjoy online giveaways, email-based contests, contests based on social media interactions, and in-person drawings during a special event.
When you run a contest, it has these basic components:
- Encouraging shoppers to give contact information or promote the brand on online channels to enter the contest.
- Your brand and the entering shoppers interact throughout the length of the contest via online and promotional messages.
- Giving away branded merchandise or other rewards through public and in-person channels to drum up more excitement.
- Let both winners and participants walk away with a positive experience and familiarity with your brand.
Contests provide an excellent opportunity to engage with new and current customers and give them another positive experience with your brand. Other core benefits of using contest marketing include the following.
Improves Brand Awareness
Online contests give your audiences something to talk about and share. Amplify your brand by posting periodic messages about your contest so your audiences can share them, reply to them, and generate their own messages with your hashtags. This activity immediately boosts your social media channel's prominence, so you frequently reach more feeds.
If your customers are sharing messages and creating new ones, this can also put an expanded circle of shoppers in contact with your brand. With a well-run contest, not only are you getting new connections, but your audience will see your brand several times; these touchpoints are essential for driving brand familiarity and bringing consumers closer to a sale.
Boosts Engagement
The engagement of running a contest is so powerful for brands. Every social media platform has its own algorithm that assesses how much audiences care about your posts to decide how prominent they should become. If you have low engagement levels, your posts might not reach all of your subscribers, and views will continue to dwindle. But a sudden boost (or regular, ongoing increases) in engagement tells the algorithm that what you're doing is exciting and worth presenting to an expanded audience.
Social media platforms are ideal for engaging contests: they're public, there are very few barriers to entry, and you can produce a continuous stream of messages. However, they're far from the only option. In-store contents, in-person giveaways, and radio contests are still popular — and everyone remembers McDonald's Monopoly contests.
Expands Your Audience
Fun contests can draw in return customers to increase their level of engagement and number of transactions with your brand. However, contest marketing really shines in getting new consumers to join your audience and subscription base. Simply having a relatively easy contest to enter and offering tempting prices can help you see a surge in new traffic. Like contests based on referrals, other mechanisms also allow you to expand your audience through word-of-mouth marketing.
Gather Customer Information With Ease
The goal of any contest isn't necessarily to make more sales, although that may turn out to be a perk. While the end result of long-term marketing strategies should be an increase in revenue and lifelong customers, a contest is relatively "top of funnel" — it's a strategy for teaching shoppers more about your brand and learning more about them in turn.
Suppose the barrier to entry is as simple as subscribing to your email lists or following your social media channel. In that case, you can gather valuable information about your leads without inconveniencing or ostracizing your target markets. After all, how can you tell them they've won or give them their prizes without contact information?
You can also use other contest-based mechanisms for your contest, such as answering polls, filling out a survey, or even giving points for interaction with different aspects of your app. All of these means give you a lot of ways to enrich your customer profiles for better lead scoring and more targeted ads down the line.
Build Your Contest Marketing Strategy With WNEM Marketing
There are multiple benefits of contest marketing, especially if you broadcast the news about your contest as loudly as possible. At WNEM Marketing, we have the tools and the expertise to put your next contest in front of your target markets. Work with a media partner to promote your contest through broadcast media, online digital marketing campaigns, and more.
