How to increase brand awareness through online competitions
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On its surface, it’s super simple, right? Brand awareness equals a lot of people that fit your target customer profile being aware of your brand, with the idea that a significant proportion of those people will become paying customers.
But how do you get there? What’s the marketing strategy? How do you actually create and build brand awareness? How did Nike corner the market in not just a single sport, but in almost all of them? Think about it. Tennis, you’ve got grand slam winners wearing Nike. Football? Soooo many teams are sponsored by Nike. Basketball? Have you ever heard of a pair of Air Jordans? Running shoes? What do you think Kipchoge’s got on his feet when he’s running 26.2 miles at a faster average pace than most people can sprint for a bus at?
There are many giants in many industries that have created insane levels of brand awareness through all sorts of content and marketing strategies. You don’t look things up on a search engine, you Google them, and you don’t flick through micro-form videos on your phone, you scroll through TikToks. While having your brand name and identity becoming synonymous with your industry or niche is a pipe dream for most brands, you still need some level of brand awareness for your business to be successful. In this article, we’ll be looking broadly at how to help boost brand awareness, primarily using gamified media and content, such as online competitions and contests.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is an important objective in any good marketing strategy, and in a nutshell, it refers to how familiar your target audience is with your brand, and how well they recognise it. Establishing a level of brand awareness among your target consumers is essential when marketing or promoting your business through your marketing and content. Think about it inversely, if nobody was aware of your brand, how would they buy from you?
For low ticket items like toilet paper, or clothes pegs, brand awareness isn’t anywhere near as important as convenience and price, but as items become more high ticket, brand awareness starts to count for a lot. For example, if you were purchasing a premium pair of running shoes, and spending a significant chunk of change for something that’s only going to last for 6 months to a year, you’ll probably gravitate towards Nike, Adidas, or a specialist brand like Brooks or Hoka. Up the ante and let’s say you’re buying a new car. As a customer who knows even the slightest bit about cars, you know where you are with a Volvo, but if the dealer is also showing you something made by “Renuvo,” or something where the dealer tells you “You’ve got to put it in H” to get it moving, you’re going to be a bit sceptical.
Brand awareness carries a lot of value for a business but it can’t necessarily be measured or quantified the way other marketing objectives can.
Generate shareable excitement with a grand prize
Online contests, particularly competitions with an enticing and attractive grand prize, are one of the best marketing tools to help generate and increase brand awareness for new and more established businesses. For example, an online contest idea for an online retailer specialising in their own brand of performance outdoor equipment could involve a Photo Contest, with the competition rules asking for entrants to submit their most dramatic hiking pictures. The grand prize could be a new lightweight tent that weighs less than a bag of sugar, can hold up to a ferocious storm, and can pack down to fit into a large pocket.
By creating a video with a charismatic member of the marketing department (or a product expert) demonstrating the tent, and laying out the rules of the competition, you’ve got a piece of media that shows how good the grand prize is, is more engaging than static images, and can be easily repurposed for sharing and promotion across social media sites like Instagram and TikTok, as well as website landing pages.
The performance outdoor equipment retailer is just one example, but it could be a bike brand, a clothing brand, a technology brand, anything where an attractive prize is going to encourage a lot of people in your niche to enter. They’re incentivised to enter because most people take lots of pictures and videos on their phones anyway, and enjoy the challenge of creating better media – the prize is so attractive that it’s a relatively small pay off in effort to be in with a chance of winning. This sort of contest also appeals to your target audience’s desire for social interaction, as the photos will be shared, and eventually, you can invite people back to vote for the winning entry – there’s a social currency incentive to win as well as the tangible prize. This kind of eCommerce contest creation could work for any number of brands in any number of niches.
Create engagement with your brand
The aims of online marketing competitions such as the one outlined above can vary: they might be to incentivise purchasing, to get more email addresses and details from your customers, or to encourage opt-ins to your newsletter and corporate communications, but ultimately, all online competitions when created thoughtfully will serve to improve brand awareness.
Creating online marketing competitions that are proven to engage customers in productive experiences is easy when you use a games creation platform like Drimify. There are a number of pre-made game engines that are already being used by big brands and companies to more effectively engage their audiences for multiple marketing and business purposes, and they all offer extensive customisation options so they can be tailored to your exact specifications.
When you deliver a marketing game to your target audience, such as an online contest or competition, you have a lot of opportunities to not only get contact details and email subscriptions through contact forms, but also opportunities to engage people in your brand, and educate them around your products. The lure of a prize and the thrill of potentially winning, coupled with effective promotion on social media, is what gets people to look at and interact with your contest, but once they engage, you have a captive audience to educate about your brand. Either through a pop-up or an intermediate screen, you have an opportunity to tailor content to appeal to the target user profile and generate some buy-in and hype around your brand, product or service.
Reward all participants by incentivising purchasing
Let’s say for example that you’ve created a Wheel of Fortune or a Spin the Wheel to promote your brand. You have your big prize, which is what draws in the people and encourages mass participation – what about if they then don’t win? Have you created buy-in through your content? Maybe. Have you educated people on your products or services? Maybe. Did it stick? It’s hard to quantify.
What you could do, is include a promotional code for anyone who takes part in your online contest, so if it’s a Spin the Wheel marketing game, even if, for example, they don’t win the speedboat or the holiday, they’ll get a promotional code that gives them a discount as a thank you for participating, and the number of those promotional codes that are then redeemed is measurable. Something like this gives you an extra key performance indicator (KPI) against which to measure whether you’ve created a successful online contest, alongside participation and engagement rates accessible through your Drimify dashboard, newsletter opt-ins, and any time-specific growth in your social media follows and likes, and the performance of your strategic website pages.
Be that dynamic, generous, exciting brand year round
Using online contests and competitions can be a highly effective element of your marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, as well as delivering on various other KPIs and marketing objectives, but you know that like anything that’s effective and worth doing well, doing it once only seldomly delivers the best results.
While you can easily create a professional, branded competition first time out of the gate on a games creation platform like Drimify, and it could well be effective at delivering on your aims, repeating this, and incorporating marketing games into your year-round strategy will allow you to learn far more about your audience, and far more effectively execute on your marketing objectives. It also allows you to work into your branding a reputation for being a dynamic, generous and exciting brand, and one that customers will associate with experiential, exciting experiences.
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