Here's some breaking news for you. People like to get free stuff. I've talked before about giving away promotional items for marketing and branding purposes, but now I want to discuss marketing through contests.
A contest can be a great way to get people to notice your business, particularly if you are an online business.
"We all like to win something for free. Contests offer an attractive marketing vehicle for a small business to acquire new clients and create awareness," says Darrell Zahorsky at About.com. "You don't need to run a billion dollar giveaway like Pepsi, just a valuable prize to your target market."
For one, you don't have to give something away for free to every customer. You have people basically competing with each other to win one product (or however many you want to offer) .
Branding
While they're entering, you are putting your brand right in their faces whether they like it or not. They may on the surface not care about what your business is about and only want to get their hands on a free item, but they'll know about you regardless. You will be on the map.
Traffic
Promoting a contest can be a fantastic way to boost the traffic to your site. You can run ad campaigns promoting it if you wish, but there are also free ways to promote a contest such as submitting it to sites like Contest Beat.
Contest Beat is simply a blog that links to a different contest on the Internet every day. And they'll do it for free.
Subscribers
If you run a blog, a contest is an excellent way to gain subscribers to your feed (especially if you make signing up a guideline for entering). Take Marketing Pilgrim's Andy Beal. He recently launched a contest in which he would give away an iPod to one lucky subscriber. All they had to do was sign up for his RSS feed and watch for something that would only appear in the feed. He only has to give away one iPod, but I bet he attracted a good deal of subscribers.
Sure, there is the possibility that they will just unsubscribe after the contest is over, but in the meantime, they will be exposed to Andy's content, and it is his job (and his staff's) to write good enough stuff to make people want to stay (not that they have any problems there).
The beauty about running a contest is that you can completely control the rules. You can aim the guidelines to focus on your needs. If you need more subscribers, have sign-ups count as entries. If you need content, have people submit articles, etc.
If you've ever run a contest as a marketing strategy, please let us know about it. Were the results favorable?
Ways RSS Feeds Can Benefit Your BusinessHow Are Small Businesses Marketing For the Holidays?How Are You Promoting Your RSS Feeds?Email Marketing Still Has a Place in Your Marketing ArsenalSpeaking of Small Business Contests...Small Business Marketing Unleashed - The Tip of the IcebergMarketing Through ControversyThe Good and Bad of Marketing with TwitterMarketing Tips for Limited BudgetsEmail Marketing: Trends of the Past, Predictions for the Future | |||
| Do you have a business site? Submit your business related site FREE! | |||
| |||
Submit Your Article
Advertise
Newsletter
Comments
Great marketing strategy
Like the idea of the having a contest. I will try adding that to my blog to see if I can use it to add more subscribers to my list. Thanks for the idea. It’s good to know that some small business owners are implementing it effectively.
Joyce Oladipo Business Growth and Marketing Mentor
Discover 19 Secrets to Immediate and Exponential Business Growth at www.beawealthyentrepreneur.com
Promotion
online content platforms
Contests are definitely a great marketing tool... but are there a lot of good contest platforms out there? I only know of http://www.memelabs.com - a viral video contest platform - and while Memelabs is awesome and definitely drums up a lot of buzz and business for its clients, there've got to be other contest platforms out there as well.
Contest Beat
competition
Chris do you have actual results to put forward for the claims you make in this article. How many of these have you done and can you outline what you did and what the results were. writing articles on marketing topics gives you the status of an 'expert' on the topic. To be an expert you must have extensive experience. So since you promote contests as a wonderful tool, I am asking you to justify this with some hard numbers as I am sceptical about people who cannot support their opinions with facts.
RE: competition?
I appreciate your concern, but I don't recall calling myself an expert (quite frankly, I think that would be a bit arrogant of me). I'm just offering my thoughts and advice. Whether or not you choose to take it is entirely up to you.
I don't have any cold hard facts for you. Like most marketing tactics, it can go either way. Just because one man's contest works doesn't mean another's will. It just makes logical sense to me that since people like to win prizes, they will take more notice of you when you are giving them away.
If you provide a worthwhile contest and promote it well, I believe it can be good for your business, even if it only serves as a branding tool.
RE: Marketing Through Contests
I try and do 3 or 4 contests a year. I announce them on my Websites Blog. I usually get about 40% of my subscribers to enter. I also make sure I get the announcement in my Gazette too.
I've done concert tickets, t-shirts, mousepads, and other misc gifts I usually get from ThinkGeek.com.
The payoff for me is usually about 120 new subscribers, which over a yrs time equates to a dozen sales.
Its not the sales endpoint I care about so much here, its the new subscribers.
In my business, people come to my site when they are in a panic. My biz is computer security. So when these new signups need security software to ensure their online safety, I can count on them shopping at my site fiorst almost always.
So contests always work for me.
Numbers
ACT! Software Contest in Progress Now
I belong to a CRM (customer relationship management) software buyers coop and we are trying our very first contest with a really hefty grand prize: $6,000+ ACT! Software System installed with training. We've promoted it very well and registrations are impressive so far.
I'd be very interested to get feedback from anyone or suggestions on other places we can promote it. It's open till April 30 and we are targeting business owners, sales managers and professional salespeople.
CRM contest
Post new comment