Online prize draws are an increasingly common tactic used by marketers to encourage engagement and also to increase leads, particularly in key sales periods. I think this is largely due to the simplicity of devising and setting them up using social media campaign tools and their popularity on social networks which facilitate sharing.
I'm finding that I am often being asked about best practice for planning and running online prize draws. While I think the best approach differs in detail by audience and compliance needed for each brand and industry there are some general best practices we can summarise. In this post I have outlined a process I follow and included some of the tools you can utilise too.
Key to any successful marketing activity is planning, I have outlined an approach to that below, please use / ignore as you feel relevant!
Overview:
By deciding on the type of prize draw you wish to run you will determine the goals it relates to, naturally this can work the other way round as well.
This is completely dependant on budget available balanced against the potential rewards of the data / leads you collect and is specific to your audience too. It helps if it's a stand-out prize, but that doesn't necessarily mean a stand-out cost - witness the number of free iPad offers still doing the rounds amongst B2B prize draws.
Of course, ensuring your prize links back to your customer personas is crucial if you are to attract the right types of leads.
This becomes a competition as a level of skill is involved so please ensure you check back to the relevant law first. In this context, a quiz is a series of questions that respondents are then placed in a ballot to potentially win. Facebook can be a good place to run quizzes, though it originally required a Facebook app which doesn’t always help with generating traffic. But competitions can now be run on the page - see Facebook's new competition rules if you're not aware of them.
We would recommend a quiz is hosted on a specific landing page within your website and then utilise channels to drive traffic to that hub.
Pros
Cons
The most common type of prize draw with a very simple entry mechanic which generally results in a high volume of entries. This could easily be run in social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc. Equally hosting this on your own website is valid, you can use customer data differently when collected on your own site (email etc). Entries can be filling in a form, utilising a specific hashtag etc, you then need to choose at random a winner.
Pros
Cons
These types of prize draws require a larger amount of effort on the side of the consumer, and you! Rewarding consumers for their content is something that has become way more common the rise of social networks. There are now multiple ways to do this, utilising channels such as Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and Facebook is an obvious cheap route to starting such a contest.
You would need to ensure an identifier such as a hashtag can be utilised to group entries. Another route is to build the functionality into your website, and utilise the social channels as amplifiers. Either way such contests have to be creative, entertaining and easy to enter for pick up.
Expecting a few hundred entries over thousands is wise (depending on your promotional activity). How you utilise the content to attract engagement and further entries is key to the success, how can you take current entries to spark conversation / debate. Equally, making engagement for those that haven’t entered easy is an obvious way to utilise the vast majority of consumers that wouldn’t enter. This can be voting, sharing or commenting mechanics.
Pros
Cons
Ways to extend / differentiate:
If you are looking that enable easy to manage prize draws with integrated social features:
Services:
Creating the mechanic is all well and good, but we have to push, or promote such activity if we are to boost awareness and engagement. We have broken down options available to us that are commonly used for such activity by the Paid, Owned and Earned framework below. Not all tactics will be relevant as they are dictated by budget, resource and mechanic type.
Utilising paid media platforms is an easy, though costly way to drive new awareness to the mechanic you have created. The utilisation of paid media can be just to 'kick start' the mechanic or you may plan to run throughout. We would recommend monitoring daily against agreed KPI’s such as Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) to ensure you spend is effective.
Don’t forget to utilise the channels you already control , the easiest way to get some early traction for your mechanic and a good use of all your other marketing efforts:
Last but not least utilising our earned assets to generate awareness of your mechanic, consider the following tactics;
Mechanics tend to create content, even if that is as simple as a comment. Ensure that you react to any conversations triggered by your mechanic in an on-brand, conversational way. It can be as simple as, 'top entry, thanks! Our fingers are crossed for you'. The footprint a simple a conversation can make is remarkable and will attract new entries.
Utilising the content garnered from your mechanic you can spark conversation or intrigue daily to ensure you are not constantly saying the same thing 'please enter'… A simple thing such as:
Yesterdays top entry (in our opinion, not that, that matters in the final result) has to be XXYY, what do you think, and have you entered yet?!
The final point in any mechanic is obviously the awarding of the prize, ensuring that you utilise this opportunity to create more content to engage a wider audience is key and also gives you a platform for future mechanics to say that people do win, it is real, not that consumers are skeptical at all ;-).
Once we the mechanic is complete and we have earned the attention of a new audience, plus re-engaged an old one, we can start to consider the best or most relevant way to incorporate sales messages.
With Social Networks if we have garnered enough engagement through the mechanic your sales post will likely be visible to a higher % of audience. Email would be another route to re-engage with a sales message, consider giving all entries a unique offer, this will encourage further engagement with future mechanics.
You should always ensure you are constantly evolving your marketing tactics through insights and learnings. As part of each mechanic we would recommend you create feedback to the business and consider the following stats (depending on quiz type). Ensure that all reporting requirements are considered when setting up your mechanic.
By Chris Soames
Chris Soames is a Smart Insights blogger and consultant, he has worked in digital marketing for over 6 years with the last few years managing international web strategies for a leading travel brand. Now the Commercial Director at First 10, an Integrated marketing agency, he helps clients get clarity on their marketing strategy and create campaigns engineered to engage with their consumers to help drive sell-through. Most of all, Chris enjoys working with talented people who want to create great (& commercial) things not just tick boxes.
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