The duration of online competitions and other key principles

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A competition, by its very definition, has to come to an end. It needs a closing date. It is a finite piece of content that at some point will close for entries, and must crown a winner, or winners, to deliver on its initial promise. Choosing an appropriate duration for your competition is a fairly major factor in it being successful. If the duration of your online contest is too short, you’ll limit how many entries you can get. If the duration is too long, participants could get bored, and if people see how long the duration is, they may get complacent, and not feel any sense of urgency to enter.

In this article, we’ll talk about the guidelines for the ideal duration of online competitions, as well as other key principles for running effective contest campaigns.

The ideal strategy for all your competitions

Whatever type of competition you wish to organise, this type of interactive content is an excellent way to create engagement with your community, promote your brand, develop your reputation, and attract new customers. However, in order to make a competition successful in the long term, it is important to put in place an effective and sustainable strategy

First of all, it is recommended to plan a duration of at least 2 to 6 weeks for the competition, unless the event associated with it dictates otherwise. This relatively long duration will create a significant impact with participants, facilitating the opportunity for more engagements from your audience: customers, users, or subscribers.

It is also advisable to make the contest last by proposing a mechanism or condition that encourages participants to return regularly to the contest page, or bring more users to the contest page through calls to action (CTAs). For example, you could multiply a participant’s chances of winning by playing several times, create a calendar of contests in the run-up to an event, or ask players to leave a comment, share their result in a story, or tag a friend.

Planning your marketing campaign in advance and integrating the promotion of your contests also helps to optimise the visibility of your online competitions on social networks. It is essential to promote them on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or TikTok, and on all the platforms where your audience is located. Finally, it is important to respect the rules you put in place regarding the setting up of the contest, especially in terms of fulfilling prize promises, announcing draws, and communicating results to the winners.

Here are our 5 fundamental principles for running a successful competition over the long term:

Encourage participation and commitment

You need to choose the type of contest you are going to create, and it needs to be relevant to your brand, to your audience, and to your prize. Quizzes, media contests, tests, brain teasers. or games of chance… the choices are endless. If you want to promote your products, your services, your values, and your brand image, it is important to set up engaging but appropriate game mechanics.

There are many contest ideas that emphasise competitiveness and work very well for delivering maximum user engagement. Fostering competition among your audience can increase qualified entries as it offers a meritocratic method of winning a prize, and can generate greater commitment from users, particularly in something like a Quiz in a specialist niche, or in a media contest, where there is some social cache to winning. In addition to users having increased concentration levels and more presence in the competition, they will also have more focus for your branded messaging.

Conversely, the aim of your competition may be to maximise participation, qualified or not, to put eyes on a brand and potentially encourage purchasing through promotional codes to all participants in addition to a grand prize. In this scenario, you’re looking for the maximum number of entries. This is where an instant win game mechanic like a Spin the Wheel or a Scratch Card can offer participants instant gratification, and doesn’t ask too much of them to participate.

Have an adapted prize

To ensure the success of your online competition, it is obviously important to carefully define the gift or prizes that will be awarded to the winners. The prize must be in line with the objective of the competition, and with the target audience, and must naturally arouse the interest of users to motivate them to become participants.

It should also be noted that you must be very clear as to how the gifts and prizes will be awarded to the winners, and in particular, specify whether this is done by a random prize draw, by points achieved, or a prize draw for the top 10 on the leaderboard. Come the closing date, what you’ve set out will need to be honoured.

Choose the right communication channels

For a successful marketing campaign, it is essential to choose the right communication channels. This is true for a campaign promoting anything, and a campaign promoting an online contest is no different. Social networks such as Instagram and Facebook are popular channels for promoting online competitions. Via your company page or account, you can communicate with your followers and invite them to participate. By reaching out to your online community as a starting point, you can launch your online competition campaign on the right foot.

Each like and comment tells the algorithm that people are interested in the post, pushing the platform to show it to even more users, and increasing the number of potential entries. It is also possible to use influencer marketing to get even more reach for your posts.

Announcing a competition: choosing the right time to launch, and the duration of the competition

Managing the communications of a competition is essential to make it exciting and productive for its duration, and to further engage your audience. First of all, you need to do the groundwork and inform your subscribers by teasing the announcement in advance. This way, they will know that you will soon publish a post for the contest (or something of note if you’re coy and artful in your teasing) and they will be ready. Don’t forget to follow up throughout the campaign, especially by posting a story on Instagram, or a Tweet, to encourage users to participate before the end of the campaign.

Communicating the results and announcing the winners after the competition is also important. The rules of participation and the attribution of prizes must be available on your website. It is also essential to be familiar with the rules and laws governing competitions in locality so you can propose rules that legally comply.

As discussed earlier in this article, the ideal duration of an online contest, in the broadest terms, is no less than 2 weeks, and no more than 6 weeks. The only exceptions would be if your contest was tied to a specific event, or it was a supplementary prize draw as a surprise for subscribers that was only 24 hours long. In these cases, your closing date, and potentially even your whole promotion strategy, may break the conventional wisdom for competition duration.

Encourage virality and sharing

First of all, use your email marketing campaigns to reach your customers and prospects directly by making them want to participate in your competition. To promote a wider reach for your contest, and to reach a maximum number of people, it is possible to implement an influencer-based marketing strategy, with the participation of influencers and the opportunity to reach their large, typically highly engaged audiences to boost visibility.

These are personalities with very large communities who can wield significant influence that brands can benefit from. Choose people who are in line with your company’s values, interested in your product, and are active in your niche. Through their followings, you can benefit from a much larger audience, generate more entries for your contest, and expose a lot more people to your branded messaging.

Simpler instructions such as “tag your friends in the comments” or “share your result” also works very well. There are many ways to make a post go viral, from picking up on a trend, to implementing masterful storytelling.

Plan an effective contest strategy

With Drimify, the gamification platform that simplifies the creation of your online contests and competitions, you can easily create all kinds of experiences to support prize draws and giveaways. Whether you’re looking to encourage people to opt in to your newsletter, launch a new product, or encourage sales with an engaging method of distributing promotion codes, Drimify is the place to create and manage your online contests and marketing games.

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