The 7-step guide to running a successful online contest

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Online contests represent a symbiotic and exciting part of the relationship between a business and their customers. In a perfect world, a well executed contest that’s been thoroughly considered and planned will deliver on the business’s predetermined objectives, while delivering an exciting experience for their target customers, rewarding a couple of them with a big-ticket prize, and potentially offering all entrants a purchasing incentive like a promotional code or some other perk as a thank you for taking part.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. Market fluctuations, technological advances, competitor activities, and imperfect intelligence to predict customer behaviour adds an element of uncertainty to every aspect of business.

However, if you follow this simple 7-step process, you’ll have far greater odds of launching a successful online contest.

Why do businesses use online contests?

An online contest or competition can serve a business in many ways. You could be running a contest as part of a giveaway to promote a new product or service, you could be creating a contest as part of a campaign to grow your email contacts list or newsletter signups, or you could create a contest to grow your social media communities and interactions across the likes of Facebook and Instagram.

The online contest format, whether it’s a Quiz, or a Photo or Video Contest, or an Instant Win game, creates a branded experience for your target audience where they’re encouraged to perform certain actions and interact with your content in order to win a prize.

The 7 steps to contest success

If you want to run a successful online contest, following these 7 steps will set you up for the best chance of success.

1. Set a business objective for your contest

“If you’re going to lead people, you have to have somewhere to go,” said the Motorcycle Boy to Rusty James in the 1983 Coppola movie Rumble Fish; by the same token, if you’re going to make an online contest to support your business goals, you need a tangible objective for the contest to serve that can be measured and assessed. This process starts with the goal, you’re not just looking for a way to entertain and reward people haphazardly.

You goals and uses for online contests could be one or some combination of the following:

• A way to source user-generated content (UGC)
• A means to distribute incentives that will promote sales
• A way to add value to a loyalty programme
• A vehicle through which to grow your email subscribers list
• A way of gaining social media followers
• As part of a broader campaign to increase brand awareness
• To help launch a product or service
• To facilitate market research
• To direct traffic to a strategic page

It could equally be something else, but knowing what your business objective is comes first, as it can inform what sort of contest you create, and can help inform your marketing campaign and promotional strategy, whether you want to focus and adapt it more to WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, and so on and so forth.

2. Decide on a prize

If you’re gonna go fishing, you’ve got to bait the hook. Why are people going to enter your online contest? What’s the incentive?

You need to choose an appropriate prize that’s big enough to motivate people to enter, but not so big that your contest stops making financial sense. It needs to be something people want or need, but not something that’s so ostentatious it’ll bankrupt you. The idea is that the prize attracts a sufficient number of people to enter, and generates enough leads, or converts enough email subscribers to justify the cost of the giveaway.

3. Make your contest

This might sound daunting, but by using a games creation platform like Drimify, it’s never been easier to make effective, sophisticated online contests to engage your audience. The platform has a range of tried-and-tested game engines that can be customised to your brand’s graphic design, copy, and messaging, as well as various tweaks to tailor it to your precise marketing objectives. Be sure to think through the rules, make them clear in your content, and consult any local regulations pertaining to giveaways and contests and address these when writing your terms and conditions.

For example, let’s suppose you’re looking to make a contest for your eCommerce site specialising in retailing premium sneakers or trainers, and your objectives are to support a marketing campaign promoting a brand new, limited edition range of hi-top basketball shoes, and boost your subscriber list, and you’ve got a couple of pairs to give away. You could easily make an instant win game like a Spin the Wheel or a Wheel of Fortune, customising the graphics on the wheels or the carousels to flick through different shoe designs. If players spin and land on the limited edition design, they win one of the exclusive pairs.

You can choose where to include a contact form in the experience, what contact details to ask for, and include a box to tick to opt-in to marketing. You can also set a limit on the number of wins, so if you had say, 5 pairs of the shoe to give away, only 5 spins will result in players winning the grand prize. You could also include a marketing video pop-up advertising the new product on an intermediate screen, and send all players a promotional discount for the new shoe as a thank you for participating, further incentivising purchasing and sales.

4. Integrate contest promotion into your marketing strategy

This is very important. If you build a kick-ass marketing contest but nobody knows about it, nobody’s going to play, nobody’s going to win, and you’ll just be left sitting on your hands wondering why you bothered.

The more planning you put into promoting and marketing your online contest the better the chance it’ll have to perform and help you deliver on your objectives. A good way to promote it would be to make a short, humorous video, possibly with a charismatic member of your team running through a short version of the rules or the concept. This will give you a highly engaging and shareable bit of media to promote your game across social media platforms and landing pages.

If you can include links to it in your team’s email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, and your brand’s social media bios, you’ll be giving your contest the best chance of getting a lot of traction.

5. Launch and run your contest

This is where the fun begins… launch your contest, promote your contest, pin posts, promote posts, breathe wind into the sails of your contest to set and correct its course. If it’s a Photo or Video Contest, repurpose some of the UGC to post further, differentiated posts on your social media pages reminding people to get their entries in.

You’ve got to support it, maintain it, pick a winner, and shout about it. Once the contest is done, it’s not over. You’ve got to deliver on the prizes to the winners, and make a big show of how you’ve rewarded your audience. People who didn’t enter might be left with FOMO when they see a picture of the winner being given their prize, and it can encourage other members of your audience to keep your contest in mind for when you run another contest – more on that in step 7…

6. Assess the KPIs and ROI of your contest

Games you make on the Drimify platform give you various key performance indicators (KPIs) which you can use to help measure the success of your games. You can look at participation rates and engagement rates to spot if there were any areas of your contest that could have been improved, such as an intermediate screen that people maybe didn’t engage with and left the experience, or if you’ve run a couple of campaigns and changed where you place the contact form, you might learn that it works better placed before or after the experience depending on your audience.

You can use statistics you’ll find on your Drimify dashboard, in conjunction with your social media analytics, as well as point of sale analytics like the number of promotional codes redeemed, to help determine your contest’s return on investment (ROI).

7. Rinse and repeat, learn and improve

You don’t pick up a tennis racket and win the US Open, and unless you’re 7-feet tall and super athletic, you’re not going to pick up a basketball for the first time and go dunk it in a regulation hoop – nothing worth doing is easy, you’ve got to practise, and to make and run a successful online contest is no different.

You’ll learn more about what works for your audience in terms of an online contest by using them year round, and incorporating them into different marketing campaigns. While the Drimify games creation platform gives you the tools to quickly and easily make a game that could deliver significant returns at the first time of asking, realistically, you’ll still just be scratching the surface of what’s possible. Given the potential of online contests to deliver across numerous marketing objectives, they’re a digital tool that warrants practice and patience to master over time.

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