If you’re a business owner you know how much of an integral part marketing is for the success of your business. In today’s day and age, you can solely rely on doing a good job and expecting it to be enough. Certainly, being good at doing what you’re doing is the most important part in maintaining a successful business, however, it’s not enough.
Nowadays, everyone’s online. From watching TV series and movies, browsing for ideas, watching YouTube videos and working to just scrolling through social media to make time fly by faster. The last one is what you should pay attention to. Social media and online presence is extremely important in today’s culture and we spend most of our time there. That’s a marketing opportunity like no other. Anyone who knows anything about marketing will tell you that having a large audience brings more to the table and it’s true.
However, just placing random advertisements can only get you so far. You need something else. You need something that’s going to make the people engage with you. Having a passive viewer is not going to help you out a lot. Ads are everywhere and most of us just skip them as soon as possible. The #1 add-on for web browsers are ad-blockers, so, we need a new strategy. Let us introduce you to – online contests. You may call them online contests or social media contests, depending on where you have them. The name doesn’t matter that much. What’s important is that this strategy is one of the most efficient ones when it comes to engaging with the audience.
First of all, let’s see what the online contest actually is. Basically, it’s a contest where you as a business owner offer something in return for your audiences’ time. Make sure the reward is worth it. If your application is going to cost them 10 minutes of their time the reward better be worth it. Here’s a simple online contest example for you.
You’re in business with skincare products. What you can do is offer to gift a facial tonic and scrub for 3 lucky winners if they follow or subscribe to your page, share and like the post and tag 3 people in the comments. This means that every person will at least reach 3 people who may not know about you, it’ll take them approximately a minute to do so and it’ll cost you just a few products. Great bargain for everyone.
Now that we’ve gotten acquainted with it, let’s see how this strategy can help you with marketing your business.
1. It builds your community
Whenever a contest is started, the engagement with your page rises exponentially. Like we’ve shown with the example, a single person can reach three people, those three can reach another three and so on. If you’re still not sold on the importance of the numbers and growing community you might learn more about the importance of numbers if you visit here.
Now, the great part about this is, you’re not forcing yourself as a brand onto an audience, you’re not coming across as intrusive and money seeking, on the contrary, you have people recommending you to their own respective communities which makes you a lot more valuable and trustworthy. If you can generate that, your community will grow by the minute and we don’t have to tell you once again how valuable it is to have the numbers on your side.
2. Gain a larger following
Okay, we will tell you once again why the numbers are important. A lot of people may ‘follow’ your page and use your products without actually following or subscribing to you on social media. That’s not bad, per se, you’re still doing business, but, a page with a slim following comes across as not popular or trustworthy. Therefore, if you can, every time you have an online contest, make sure one of the requirements for entering a contest is following or subscribing to your page. This way you’ll grow and make your online presence significant.
3. Build brand awareness
Having your brand recognizable is one of the most important things in business. Your brand determines your worth. Although building your brand requires a lot more work than starting an online contest, putting your brand on the map doesn’t. Having people share your contest with their friends will reach a lot of people. As you can assume by now, the strength is in numbers. If you can reach a lot of people, your brand is sure to be remembered by some.
4. It is very affordable
Marketing isn’t free. Whether you decide to put out an ad in the papers or on the TV, you’re going to pay for it. The same thing applies when it comes to social media marketing. Depending on how often and for how long you want your ads to run, you’ll have to pay accordingly and that can get expensive. Also, we’ve mentioned how a lot of people react to ads – they skip them. Unless you have a Superbowl-quality ad, chances are, people aren’t going to be that eager to see it.
On the other hand, having an online contest can be pretty cheap. Depending on the award, it could even be completely free. Nonetheless, it’s still going to be less expensive than the majority of the other options.
5. It increases engagement
We’ve mentioned the number of followers. Well, although very important, it’s not the most important thing when it comes to social media. Most of the social media platforms use an algorithm that ranks and recommends pages to other people based on their recent activity. Like we’ve said, an online contest is guaranteed to stir up some engagement for your page. It’s not by accident that you often see giveaways on social media, it’s because it generates traffic. The more traffic you generate, the more popular you become online. A lot of engagement can even make your page a place where other people come for help, which can also help your business grow.
To sum it all up, online contests are a great way to create engagement for your business, while being non-intrusive, inexpensive and giving your customers something in return, which is essentially the most important part. Having your customers happy and coming back. Hopefully, this has been helpful.
