How to promote an online contest with 6 examples

So, you’ve customised your online contest, you’ve got a great prize, clear marketing objectives, and the end result looks a million dollars… what now? Hand it over to the audience and let the entries (and the personal details, and newsletter opt-ins, and the likes, the follows, and the subscriptions) roll in?

Not quite, I’m afraid. We’ve still got a bit of work to do.

While an online contest is a marketing tool created to achieve specific business and marketing purposes, just a solitary, copy and paste post across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter, followed by a few weeks of laurel-resting isn’t going to cut it.

Firstly, why do I need to promote my contest?

How come when you get a fire going you need to keep adding firewood and wafting oxygen? Because both your online contest and the fire need fuel. With the fire, obviously you only want to do just enough to keep it going, but with your online contest, for it to be a successful online contest that delivers good return on investment (ROI) for your company and brand, you want to fan the flames and have it spread far and wide.

If you create an online contest to support your eCommerce site, nobody really cares, but if you build your online contest to support your eCommerce site, and you market it and promote it and support it, and are able to get enough people to interact with the game in the first instance, it could could yield enormous benefits for your campaign. To throw another analogy at promoting what is itself supposed to be promotional material, from almost the opposite side of the field, you can think of it like making a snowball by rolling it down a hill. It can only take off and grow exponentially when it’s been given enough size and shape to roll by its own weight.

It all comes down to the goals you’re using your online contest to try and reach

By the same token, your online contest needs to be given every chance for it to take off and do its job for your marketing goals. Firstly, think about why you’re creating your online contest. Is it to get more emails? Get more newsletter opt-ins? Promote purchasing? Get some user insights from your audience? Grow your social media following? Boost eCommerce sales?

Whichever the goal, using an online contest or marketing game is always going to be more effective at motivating users to perform their required actions. With the online contest, they get a chance at a prize, and they’re invited to participate. You’re potentially delivering an experience too, rather than passively hitting them with a graphic or a video, you’re invoking interactivity and interaction.

While this is more effective for motivating user behaviours and motivating desired actions, and to some degree could well take off on its own and be more appealing than other media on its own, to give it the best possible chance at succeeding, you need to promote it.

Top 6 ways to promote your online contest

Here are our top 4 steps to effectively promote your online contests and competitions to give them the best chances of reaching the widest possible audiences.

1. Promote your online competition through social media posts

It’s an obvious one, but it’s got to be done. Posting and promoting your online contests on your social media platforms just has to be done to help them reach the right people. It might even be worth promoting or pinning strategic posts about your contest for maximum impact.

Researching how your target audience uses social media, knowing which platforms they’re most active on, and knowing the best times to make posts will help you be more effective in this approach.

2. Promote your online contests and competitions through your social media bios and cover photos

Utilising the bio on Twitter and Instagram is a great way to ensure your live online competition is visible to anyone visiting your profiles, and promoting the contest on your Facebook cover photo also makes it extra visible to anyone happening across your brand’s profile.

3. Make a short, eye-catching video that sets out the rules of your contest

Video creation to a professional level is a lot easier than it was 20, even 10 years ago. Now, almost anyone can make a professionally shot and edited video on their smartphone, but the effect of a well done video hasn’t diminished – it’s still a more appealing medium than static images and text.

If you have a charismatic staff member or marketer with a good physical presence, have them clearly run through the necessary information, and lay out the rules and the pitch of your online contest in a short video. If possible, they could even be holding or demonstrating the grand prize.

Using that as the basis for your social media posts with the text linking users to your competition, will make them far more effective. Shooting a video also makes it a far more effective share on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, with greater potential to hit a larger number of new users.

4. Email marketing

The aim of your online competition or contest might be as much about rewarding and keeping your existing audience engaged as it is about growing it. By including online contests and competitions for newsletter signups, or even exclusive online contests that are just for customers who have opted in to your newsletter, you can help keep your audience engaged, and reward their loyalty.

Just because it’s easier to retain a customer than to attract a new one doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that it doesn’t require a little extra effort from time to time.

5. Partner with other brands, partner with events

Cross-pollination and collaboration between brands is a great way to piggy-back on someone else’s audience. For example, major sporting and cultural events always have their own newsletter, which requires content to fill it, so if your company’s one of the sponsors or affiliated brands, it would be easy to get your online contest promoted as part of the event’s newsletter, or even through their own social media platforms.

6. Consider using influencer marketing

Depending on your industry and your company, it might be appropriate to use influencer marketing. There’s a lot of nuance within the ecosystem of influencers, and they don’t all necessarily give out the best information, or information that aligns with your brand, so this method of contest promotion would very much be on a case by case basis, but with the right personality and the right following, they could help expose your brand to a much wider audience.

For example, you have influencers in the cooking space, in various sporting subcultures, and even the wellbeing space. These are not professional chefs, professional athletes, qualified scientists, nor gurus or philosophers – they’re just people interested and passionate about a niche, and due to the authenticity of their output, people can be more likely to buy into them and their preferences than traditional marketing, so getting them to buy into your brand can help you benefit from their following.

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