The different types of online competitions

If you’re considering creating online competitions for your company and your digital marketing strategy, it’s important to consider the various different types of games and contests you can use to engage your audience.

These vary from the classic prize giveaway contests we’re all familiar with, that can be used to lure a target audience in with an attractive prize for the winner, with the proven potential to blow up on social media, but also to newer more sophisticated online competition ideas that can be used for more nuanced business objectives. An online contest is fundamentally a piece of content you’re designing to appeal to a target audience. The basic gist of it is you’re putting up a prize people would want to win to encourage them to interact with you, and perform any calls to action you might include (CTAs).

With modern gamification, the application of video game mechanics and elements to everyday tasks, such as for marketing and HR purposes, there are different ways to develop each game according to your needs and your brand identity. The possibilities are only limited by the competition ideas you can come up with. Here are a few ideas to serve as starting points for the kinds of online contests and competitions you can create on the Drimify gamification platform.

Competitions with a draw

Running a prize draw competition, or a prize giveaway, is a great way to engage your audience, and promote your brand, products, and services to a broad selection of people. There are many different ways to approach this classic format, with modern mobile technology making them far more sophisticated and engaging, and giving them far greater reach than was previously possible..

• An example of a traditional competition: you can choose the traditional landing page with a simple form to fill in to enter a prize draw.
• An example of an original competition: a 6-week campaign with a different game each week, and a draw at the end of the experience, all combined in Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ to create a unique piece of digital brand storytelling.

The more original approach offers an engaging gamification experience that can attract new users, build brand awareness, and even drive sales.

The overall format could crown a winner based on the points accumulated over the course of the 6-week campaign, have the top X participants on the leaderboard entered into an instant win experience, or even feature instant win competitions inter-spliced throughout the campaign for spot prizes to make more of your audience winners. By sustaining participant interest over the course of 6 weeks, the online contest has greater potential to spread your targeted message through shares on LinkedIn, Facebook, or whatever social media platforms you’re using to promote your contest. It also has a greater chance of having an impact on your audience, and seeing calls to action answered through repeated user engagement and more exposure to pop-ups of brand messaging and content.

Question and answer-style competitions

Contests of this type, which operate around a customised question and answer game engine, can be a great way to obtain valuable information about your community. By revealing preferences or habits through a Quiz, or holding a prize draw to encourage participants to fill out a Survey, you can make all sorts of adjustments to your marketing and the user experience (UX) of doing business with you. When used correctly, these can offer customers fun and engaging ways to interact with a brand’s message.

• An example of a classic Quiz: go for a fairly traditional model with a 10-question interactive Quiz to keep all participants engaged.
• An example of an original contest: the Personality Test with a double action, both revealing a character trait of the user, and a product recommendation.

By offering an interactive experience, brands not only get useful data on participants to develop their products and their services, but also create a more enjoyable customer journey. In addition, social media competitions such as Quizzes and Personality Tests allow for increased engagement with target users, maximising your chances of converting them into customers.

Instant win games

Instant win competitions offer a fun and interactive way to engage the largest section of your target audience as they’re asking the least of a user, are heavily marketed on the potential prize to be won, and are universally understood. Every possible target user grew up with prize giveaways. Whether they first encountered them in newspapers, on televisions, or on social media platforms, the concept of an instant win game is baked into the name.

• An example of a classic competition: like Scratch Cards or a Wheel of Fortune game, where users either “scratch” a digital card with their cursor to reveal a “Win” or “Lose” screen, or click on a button to spin the wheel for a potential prize.
• An example of an original competition: you can also opt for a Throwing Game to reveal new content, or gifts for a more original operation. The Throwing Game could be perfectly adapted to winter campaigns as the balls can be customised to represent snowballs.

Creative competitions for sourcing user generated content

With the rise of social networks and messaging apps, particularly Instagram and Whatsapp, the ease with which photos and videos can be shared has become far easier. Coupled with the powerful camera phones everybody has in their pocket, this has led to more content being created in a given week than could have been created in a year pre-internet. The ratio is incalculably skewed towards today’s excess. Because of this glut of photos and videos, there’s a transiency and loss of value in these as individual mediums. If everyone’s a photographer and a videographer, the viewership becomes incredibly localised.

Customising a Video or a Photo Contest gives your audience a legitimate outlet, and a brief through which to create their most thoughtfully composed photos, and their most creative short-form videos, and gives you as a business a hook upon which to share this user generated content (UGC) pertaining to your brand. From a marketing point of view, these types of competitions allow people to let their creativity run wild. It’s the participants and their creative spirit, combined with your brief, that will make the contest classic or innovative.

The possibilities inherent in a Photo or Video Contest to showcase a company’s products, or highlight a field of interest are unlimited. Whatever the project, these types of competitions have a predefined duration from the start, value creativity and originality in participants, and give opportunities for further audience engagement when you ask users to re-engage and vote for the winning entries from your approved shortlist in a Voting Gallery.

Create your competitions with Drimify

When creating online competitions, it’s important to be creative and take your audience’s expectations into account, possibly to match them, but possibly to subvert them to deliver something more memorable. The advantages of online contests for your business marketing strategy are numerous, whether they are more classic, old school competitions that everyone understands, or more original, innovative ideas that have the potential to help you achieve more nuanced business goals.

You can grow your audience by including the possibility of winning a grand prize – this is the bait that encourages mass participation. You can drive website traffic to your strategic pages by calls to action, or even including clues or questions that require participants to search your site. You can even drive sales by including discount codes for all participants, so even if they don’t win the big prize, they’ve interacted with your content, absorbed your messaging, and now the product that they want is on an exclusive deal, making higher sales figures a greater possibility.

Drimify has the tried and tested game engines that can be easily customised and branded to your company’s graphic style. No matter your competition idea, no matter your level of technical expertise, Drimify makes online competition creation easy and quick.

Want to know more?