Promoting and running your online competitions through TikTok

Running and promoting online contests through social media networks has become more and more popular. While they used to mainly be used as marketing tools on Instagram and Facebook, they are now spreading to some of the newer, more specialised social media platforms such as LinkedIn and TikTok.

Focusing on TikTok to run and promote online contests, which is really a micro-form content-first approach to social media, allows businesses to generate engagement and raise awareness for their brand by attracting more views and subscribers through original video content.

To get the best results, it is important to produce engaging videos that promote your competitions which are designed to suit the format of the platform. Influencer marketing on TikTok, when used strategically to promote your online contests, can also play a key role in getting your message to the widest possible audience and maximising the amount of entries you can generate. By having influencers promoting your contest and using a short URL placed in their page bio, you can piggy-back on their existing communities, and when it’s a harmonious partnership and a well executed campaign, expand your own.

In order to maximise engagement, views, entries, and ultimately achieve your business goals, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide on the subject. To learn how to support your online contest on TikTok, read on…

Run a contest on TikTok in 5 steps

Choose the right game mechanics

Surely this is applicable to any contest you’re creating? Well, yeah, it absolutely is, but it’s important to consider who uses TikTok, and how they use TikTok. Different generations and different demographics within those generations will probably engage with TikTok differently. You’re bound to have seen some variation of a meme or a Reel that says, “I don’t watch TikToks, I wait for the best ones to be turned into Instagram Reels, then I watch them 2 weeks later like a grownup.”

Even some segments of millennials find themselves lost and confused when faced with TikTok – previously the tech-savvy and cutting edge generation who took great delight in repeatedly showing their bosses how to attach spreadsheets to emails.

To get the best participation rate, it’s important to choose the game mechanics that best suit your market, your audience, and your TikTok subscribers. Does your audience even have a TikTok account, or do they just view saved ones their more TikTok-enthused friends send them on Whatsapp? Equally, if your target audience is in the 18 to 25 bracket, chances are TikTok will be your best bet. In-keeping with the format, it might make sense to create shorter contest and marketing game formats that can be engaged with quickly, or even customise the settings of the experiences you create to be short and to the point by giving people less lives or less attempts. Similarly, make sure your contest rules are comprehensive, but economically written and in plain language.

Create compelling and original content

Your product or service should be at the heart of the contest experience, but in addition, your videos promoting your contest should reflect your company’s identity and values while also being engaging (and engaging users quickly). You want to create promotional videos that incentivise people to comment on them, and engage with them, in order to optimise your posts’ reach according to the algorithm. In practice, this will allow you to appear more in the “likes” or “fyp” page, boosting the visibility of your video.

Plan your communication operation meticulously

To increase the results of your marketing campaign, you will have to produce video content with a clear editorial line, and religiously adhere to your publication schedule.

First of all, start with a video teaser (or even a couple) announcing the prize for the winner – bait the hook, make your subscribers want to participate. Next, once the campaign is launched, make a video dedicated to the launch, making sure you have added the link to the game in the bio of your brand account beforehand.

Be aware that the organising company is responsible for providing rules for your competitions, indicating the rules of participation to which participants must adhere, the prize to be won, and the methods of designating the winners (random draw, merit, etc.). Remember to produce regular reminder posts throughout the campaign to improve the number of views of your videos.

Optimise your visibility

In order to increase traffic on your social networks and website, your TikTok contest campaign must benefit from all the marketing and promotional weapons at your disposal. Something that’s incredibly effective on TikTok that was mentioned earlier is to use influencer marketing. Perhaps even more so than Instagram, TikTokers, or TikTok influencers are able to blow up almost overnight and reach enormous audiences, and as it’s really just videos and content, they can potentially reach more followers, and more general users. This can improve your engagement rate, and increase your number of subscribers.

Make sure the link to your online contest is available in your bio, and remember to include it in a comment so it’s visible to all users – even if they’re more casually looking at your content. The easier something is to find, the easier it is to enter. It is also possible to use the challenge principle to make your contest more visible. You will have to choose the right hashtag to reach the maximum number of potential participants: it must be both precise, and carry with it a good search volume.

In addition, don’t forget to communicate on all the other available channels: other social networks, as well as other relevant websites you manage or publish on. You will gain greater engagement and participation rates by being present on all platforms. Just because the majority of your audience is on TikTok doesn’t mean they’re all going to use TikTok in the same way. While most might be responsive to engaging with online contests through TikTok, there may be a significant proportion of the minority who would be more receptive through their Facebook or Instagram accounts.

The beauty of using a games creation platform like Drimify for creating your contests is that it allows you to manage your application in one place, but easily integrate it in websites, across social media platforms, and in email newsletters. The variety, or only work you need to do proprietary to different social media platforms, lies in the promotion and the phrasing in the calls to action (CTAs).

Make a dedicated video announcing the winners

To announce the winners among the participants, it is highly recommended to make a dedicated video – that’s what Tiktok’s all about, afterall. This video, in addition to providing video content with an organic reach, will allow you to create a link with your community and to promote the lucky winner (or winners).

To be even more effective, gamification in the form of online contests should not just be used for one-off experiences. When you repeat the experience over time, you get the public used to playing and having fun, and you can encourage positive associations with your brand, as well as get across your USP and ethos through targeted messaging over time. Additionally, when calculating your return on investment (ROI), even if your contest is a huge success and delivers many wins, you will no doubt discover areas where you could improve, both through metrics available internally through your Drimify dashboard, and through external metrics such as social media analytics and POS analytics if you’ve used your contest to distribute promotional codes.

6 ideas for contests to launch on TikTok

We talked earlier about choosing the most appropriate game mechanics for your project and your business. The decision you make, and the final game design you land on, is paramount to you landing on your target subscribers’ #fyp pages.

Here are some tried and tested game engines you can customise on the Drimify platform to create online contests that can be tailored to perform on TikTok:

The Quiz

The Quiz is a favourite format full stop. It works on Facebook, it works on Instagram, and it works on TikTok too. Everyone knows how Quizzes work, and people of all ages enjoy them. Whether you’re testing people’s knowledge of their favourite brands, products, their preferred hobby, or general knowledge, there’s something incredibly satisfying about coming off as knowledgeable or learned about something.

The key with promoting your Quiz on TikTok, whatever your Quiz may pertain to, is to make the promo videos snappy and engaging. You only need to lose someone’s attention for 3 seconds and they’ve scrolled on to the next dopamine hit.

From a prize giveaway perspective, you can make a draw among the best results to reward the winners, or players who got into the top 10 or 20 on the leaderboard, and also promote a product, or even a line of products, by making it the grand prize.

The Photo and Video Contest

Often proposed via a challenge, this is the ideal way to generate user content (UGC) around a product or service. Calling upon the creativity of users is an excellent way to improve your conversion rate on your website, and ultimately increase sales and newsletter opt-ins. You can reuse this original content all year round, so it can be a very productive exercise, especially since you don’t have to create any content yourself except for initially customising the Photo contest game engine.

The Scratch Card

Through this instant win game format, each participant has an equal chance to win a prize, and to discover it instantly. This is a good strategy for communities that are not familiar with the codes of social networks, especially the elderly (they are, in some numbers at least, well and truly on TikTok). This format is well known in physical stores, even on eCommerce sites, and is a good way to engage your subscribers by rewarding them for paying attention to your messaging.

The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune is an excellent format for TikTok. It’s easy to understand, it’s a quick experience, and it offers visual excitement as you watch what you could possibly win literally spin by before your eyes. By using games of chance and instant win type games, you use a familiar visual model to create engagement and offer a different gift or prize for each slot on the wheel.

Bubble Shooter

This game mechanic is ideal for creating a link between your subscribers and your brand. It is possible to personalise the bubbles with the brand’s products to make a fun points-based challenge with a leaderboard. This way, participants will earn more and more points as they play the game. Remember to clearly define the duration of your competitions, particularly in the rules, in order to deliver an optimal experience to users.

The Advent Calendar

The Advent Calendar format allows you to deliver a series of games and contests in the run up to Christmas, which can either be unlocked sequentially, or released at specific times, either one per day, one every couple of days, or once per week. The interest in creating an Advent Calendar competition is not limited to increasing conversions and sales at Christmas, it is also about being present in the “fyp” of a maximum number of people, making views, and creating links with your customers for a whole month.

The same format can be customised to build a gamified campaign of online contests in the run up to any event, be that a significant sporting event relevant to your niche, Black friday or Cyber Monday, or even a much anticipated product release in your industry – for some examples, think about the hype and fanfare around new games consoles being released, or the latest carbon plated running shoe that’s going to be used by all the top athletes at the major marathons.

Power your social media strategy with rocket fuel and conquer new worlds with TikTok

Make everyone a winner and create online contests and promote them through TikTok for data collection. As the organising company responsible for the event, you can collect key data that can be used to optimise your marketing.

Our advice:

• The hashtag remains a fundamental element to allow your contest to be found by potential participants. Add a targeted hashtag related to both your company and your audience. Be inspired by what is done on other social networks.
• Don’t hesitate to couple your digital marketing strategy with a phygital marketing strategy. For example, by creating interactive animations in a shopping centre or in your shops, you can also capitalise on physical and digital best practices to offer a rich and fun user experience to customers or participants – make the gap between your physical stores and your social media presence seamless. You can also promote your contest on TikTok with a QR code.
• When setting up the draw, it is essential to consider the most appropriate draw method. For example, a random draw is often used if there is no need to follow qualification criteria, but is this a live-streamed draw out of a hat, or randomly generated by a computer programme?

Online contests, both paid and free, are ideal for media coverage and promotion of a product or brand. Thanks to the popular micro-form video format everyone’s so receptive to, you can use the power of TikTok and end up in your target’s #fyp in no time.

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