Competitions are a great way to fin your brand new fans and offer something exciting to existing advocates of you business. However, running a promotional competition is far more complex than simply devising special offers for customers to avail of. It has to be promoted so that it continues to draw as much as audience attention as possible for the length of, and preferably after, its duration. Here are 5 tips for making your campaign a success.
Having Specific Objectives in Mind
It is always essential to have a specific objective in place when setting out a plan for your promotion. Once you know what you want to achieve you’ll find it easier to plan the entire scheme with a good level of precision. Your objectives should include maximising the results of the promotional competition as much as possible. For instance, if you end up with lots of contact details as a result of your campaign, these can be used for generating customer databases that can be used for marketing campaigns to be planned in future.
Keeping the Mechanics Simple
The simpler the mechanics, the easier it will be to generate a wider awareness about your business amongst your target demographic. It’s easy to get carried away with your won creativity and conceive a complex way of engaging customers, but in general you want to make it as easy as possible for people to join in.
Deciding upon a great prize would also be important. Not only should the prize be big enough to fight for, it should be meant for specific purposes and must be related to the business concept that is being promoted in some way or the other.
Making Use of Social Media
Thankfully, the prevalence of social media has made running a competetion a lot simpler these days. Prominent social media interfaces could be effectively used for publicising the promotional competition across the web. For instance, a well-crafted promotional video could be uploaded on YouTube, unique #hashtags could be placed on Twitter for widespread promotion and even a complete landing page could be dedicated on Facebook for entrants to submit their entries. This can help you spread the word without too much effort.
Using Competition Websites
There are some dedicated sites that cater specifically to competitions and deals. It would be great to have your promotional competition registered on one of these websites for ensuring optimum exposure.
Following up with Entrants Post Promotion
It would be equally important to keep in touch with entrants after the promotional completion has been over, even though they might not have been lucky enough to bring home the winning prize. Being in touch with the participants would ensure that these entrants feel valued and can transform into repeat customers in the years to come. They could also provide some good healthy feedback to the business.
Irrespective of the type of promotion that is being planned, all that is actually important is that it should fit in to the business type and the prospective audience it is designed to target. Something completely out of place is never likely to make a mark. It is advisable to run dummy competitions and review results at the outset, before finalising on an elaborate promotional competition that is likely to run through an extended period of time.
Darren Faulks writes on a marketing techniques of varying kinds, especially those than can be utilised by SMEs with a limited budget. For more helpful articles on running a business, visit Bedschamber.co.uk.