Why brands should also run their online competitions on LinkedIn

Online contests are a guaranteed way to cut through the marketing noise and connect with users by offering an enticing prize attached to a fun experience. The contest format, or the prize giveaway, has been used and repeated with great success by numerous brands operating in a B2C space. They make highly shareable pieces of contest that perform well with users across all the major social media platforms, but what about if you’re marketing in the B2B space?

LinkedIn is known as the social media platform for professionals, so if your marketing strategy is aiming to get visibility among a B2B audience, then you should really be optimising your online contest, prize giveaway, and promotional strategy to specifically target LinkedIn users.

The advantages of a competition on LinkedIn

Unlike other social networks, LinkedIn has a very specific type of user, behaving in a very specific type of way. The content creation and the algorithm of this platform give it interesting competitive advantages for running and promoting contests over other social media platforms. For this reason, the duration of contests can be a little longer than on other social networks.

Increased visibility of your company

Through a post on your page, your contest will allow you to draw attention to your brand and your product among interested users. The online contest is still a relatively novel concept on LinkedIn compared to other social networks like Instagram and Facebook, where contests have seen quicker and more broad uptake.

For this reason, by just creating a contest, you’re standing out from the typical LinkedIn content even more so than you would on TikTok or Twitter.

Generate leads

Participants in your game can provide valuable personal data, which can help you generate many qualified leads.

The word qualified can’t be emphasised enough here. Instagram and Facebook may be many things to many people, but LinkedIn is a place where people go to make professional connections, look for jobs, evaluate businesses or employers they may work with, and generally be professional. Someone’s LinkedIn profile and their Instagram or Facebook profile will typically be completely different, in tone, in content, and in the way they interact.

If users are engaging with your content on LinkedIn, they either already work in, or will be aspiring to work in your niche (or a related or relevant niche), and even if they’re at the start of their career and aren’t a qualified lead then, they could be in the future, so making a positive connection now, however small it may seem at the time, could yield value in the long term.

Community engagement

Various types of online contests and competitions are very popular on social media for businesses because they can help engage your page’s followers by encouraging them to participate and leave a comment. This type of event on LinkedIn is a great way to get a higher than average participation rate among users.

As previously mentioned, online contests in the context of LinkedIn still carry a relative novelty factor, so while a big advantage of the online contest for marketing purposes is a proven ability to cut through the marketing noise to connect with users, this effect is heightened on LinkedIn.

Additionally, LinkedIn naturally favours relevant and purposeful communities of people on LinkedIn’s Groups feature, making it easier to target relevant users who will likely respond to your contest or competition.

Content creation

The strategy of creating content and posts must be at the heart of your efforts to optimise your contest’s performance on LinkedIn, as well as across any other social media sites you may be focusing on. Publishing content regularly is the best way to increase the engagement of your subscribers and participants, and publishing regular content that promotes your contest will help it reach more users, and ultimately give it the best chance of success.

On LinkedIn, you have various options available, from sharing videos and more traditional posts that read like blog posts, to including more visual content formats like carousels. A healthy mix of post-types will help you reach the maximum number of people likely to enter, and allow you to appeal to different personas and learning styles who might all be within your target audience.

Improve employer brand

Competitions can improve the perception of your employer brand by showing that you are innovative, have a sense of fun, and allow you to demonstrate your expertise in a given field.

Remember, any people looking for a position with a company will likely check Glassdoor and LinkedIn to try and get a feel for its culture and see what kind of vibe it gives off.

You want to come off as a market leader, you want to come off as promoting a good work-life balance, and generally, come across as a great place to work. Being active with contests and competitions can be a very effective piece of the marketing content puzzle when it comes to communicating these qualities to users and potential future applicants.

Use online contests to ensure your visibility to your B2B market

Attract new customers via inbound marketing

By increasing your visibility through inbound marketing, which in the most straightforward terms involves creating content that adds value to the user experience and encourages them to visit your content, you can reach qualified leads. As a result, this allows you to expand your customer base.

While online contests have been more widely used in the context of D2C marketing, it’s important to remember that whether your target user is an individual at their leisure, who might be more appropriately reached and converted through WhatsApp or Instagram, or an individual representing a company you’re targeting on Instagram, they’re still people. They’re still susceptible to the mechanisms of gamification, and still motivated to try and win and compete. For this reason creating your own contest or prize giveaway is just as valid a marketing solution in B2B as it is in B2C.

Improve your online reputation

By showcasing your products and testimonials, business competitions can create engagement and improve your brand’s reputation in the long term. This is especially important in a B2B setting on LinkedIn, as it’s where professionals gather. A well curated and accurate presence on LinkedIn is an essential step when it comes to being recognised as a leader in your industry.

Strengthen professional relationships

By communicating regularly with your existing customers, you can strengthen your relationships with them and encourage them to continue to choose you as their supplier. LinkedIn is the ideal social network for nurturing business relationships, as ultimately, this is what LinkedIn was founded for.

Boost sales

By increasing your visibility, you can increase the likelihood of receiving enquiries about your products and services.

This is a fairly basic bit of marketing, but in a B2B sense, it’s often far more difficult. D2C businesses have the playgrounds of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but B2B marketing tends to rely more on emailing lists and SEO campaigns. LinkedIn allows businesses to connect and appeal to individuals of influence and decision makers within businesses.

Encourage innovation

By being visible on all types of social networks, from content-led social networks like Instagram and TikTok, to messaging-based networks like WhatsApp and SnapChat, you can be more easily in touch with the latest trends and ideas in your market, which can help you innovate and stay competitive. Linkedin is “the place to be” to stay on top of innovation.

How can you also engage LinkedIn’s B2C audience to effectively promote your competition?

First of all, you need to create a professional profile and a company page. Make sure they are regularly updated and well filled in. To optimise the reach of your contest, consider publishing content a few weeks before so that the algorithm makes your profiles more visible. In addition, remember to publish your competition on both your individual professional page as well as your business or brand’s LinkedIn profile.

Do not hesitate to make a post per day with a different approach to your game, in order to continue to promote it over several days. It is also possible to use sponsored ads for more visibility.

In addition, it is highly recommended that you join relevant groups that target your market, and participate in discussions to spread your game. LinkedIn, like all social networks, is about communities growing and interacting around particular niches – being an active member, as an individual and as a business, is essential to make the most out of this platform.

Top 5 ideas for contests to run on LinkedIn

1. A Personality Test or a Product Recommendation Quiz are great ways to engage with your community and gather information, while still keeping a link with the B2B world and your product.
2. Instant win games are more suited to a direct marketing strategy, as they allow you to reward and retain your subscribers.
3. Ranked points games allow you to stimulate competition and challenge. There are several variations of this format available to customise on the Drimify Platform: Memory Cards, Pacman, and word games among others, as well as various sports game engines.
4. The Word Search and Crossword games are ideal brain teasers for revealing your company’s values to a specific audience.
5. A discovery journey-style game is based on the use of the Dynamic Path™ to introduce the product range, the company, and to tell a compelling story to the audience through the course of the experience.

Our expert advice: The audience on LinkedIn is both a B2B and a B2C market, so the impact can be double. Regardless of your aims, all people are susceptible to the excitement and intrigue you can create through a well-planned contest or prize giveaway.

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