The positive effect of promotional games on prospective and existing clients

If there is one fun marketing activity which has nothing more to prove in terms of effectiveness, it is without a doubt the contest. Contests are a steadfast way to communicate information about your company to customers and clients.

There are three types of contest and all of them have proved highly successful:

• Contests where a judging panel select the best entry from all participants, whether it be a recipe, photo, slogan etc.
• Contests in which a winner is randomly drawn at the end of the competition period out of all participants who have entered their full contact details.
• Instant winner games which consist of an immediate draw of one or multiple winners. Before the beginning of the contest, a ‘winning’ moment is preselected: a day, hour, minute and second. This moment is logged in the game’s system and the person who plays at that exact moment or is the first to play following that time, wins the prize.

But what impact do these contests have on clients? That is the question that we are going to try to answer.

The advantages of marketing contests

The recipe for organising a contest in a serious and efficient manner is simple: various prizes to be won, each more exciting than the last, entry forms to complete for each client who wishes to take part in the contest, an enforcement agent to verify and approve the credibility of the contest in accordance with the law, or go through a third party company such as Drimify to design your contests. By doing this, you can ensure that you promote your company in the most successful way.

A significant number of brands including supermarkets and large businesses which operate all over the UK, and other countries, use this kind of contest regularly to fulfil multiple purposes: to increase sales, boost the company’s presence and visibility to clients.

A large portion of clients are drawn in by this kind of marketing campaign. Ease, efficiency and intriguing and tempting prizes are the main motives for customers when organising this kind of event. It is then up to the brand to make the contest attractive to their clientele and ensure that it is properly implemented to meet the needs of the company (to boost their reputation, exposure etc.).

What objectives do these contests achieve? 

These contests allow you to interact with your communities on the various networks which host your competitions, whether it’s on your website, a mini site dedicated to the event, your social media pages or mobile apps. The engagement can be purely textual, such as it is with a quiz or personality test, for example, and it doesn’t have to be used for promotional purposes. The aim is to create engagement, sharing and interaction.

On the other hand, the viral element of a contest is essential. It allows you to significantly grow your community in a highly cost-effective manner, if the competition and it’s viral prospects are well thought out. The viral potential of a contest can be easily enhanced with the introduction of a second prize to be won in the draw or an extra entry if participants share the contest on their social media, for example. Encouraging participants to get their friends to vote for the photo of their cat, their favourite recipe or their holiday video is another great way to boost virality. 

Thirdly, certain types of contests, such as quizzes and memory games, are more engaging than posts as they are particularly well-suited to allowing audiences to discover your products and their features. Other marketing competitions such as personality tests allow you to categorise your audience based on preferences. This could allow you, for example, to offer targeted advice and relevant products based on the client profile gathered through the competition or even to redirect participants to a specific page of your website or send targeted emails etc. based on their responses.

If your contest is well thought out and well-executed, those who take part in it by completing the registration forms should be all the more interested in your products and services. 

Finally, using the information collected via your contest you can modify and organise your existing client profiles in varying levels of detail. Getting to know your prospective and existing clients is the key to being able to send them more targeted content! Think about enriching your database with new information such as clients’ date of birth, address, hobbies, telephone number etc. It’s not just a case of collecting contact details but also about analysing and optimising the important information you have access to.

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