Who doesn’t like winning prizes and contests? Increase your brand’s social media engagements with this fun idea! [Every Thursday: FYO!]
Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. LinkedIn. Snapchat.
These are just a few among the myriad of social media platforms that exist online.
For business owners and marketers, social media has become one of their marketing tools as a lot of their target market are also active in this platform.
Aside from putting up ads in these platforms, what else can business owners and marketers do to reach their target market and boost their business’ online visibility?
Create a social media contest!
As a business owner or marketer, one way to achieve a successful social media marketing plan is to get your target market to engage with your brand.
Since a lot of businesses are also active on social media to market their products and services, there’s no way you’d get noticed if you do what everyone else does.
You have to find a way to differentiate your business from the rest of your competitors.
Instead of simply advertising on social media, why not run a social media contest?
Get your target market pumped up with your creative contest ideas and giveaways!
Here are benefits of running social media contests for your brand or business:
- It increases your brand’s social media followers.
Simply having a social media account for your business isn’t enough.
You also need to build a large list of followers to establish your business’ online authority.
A huge social media following is a form of social proof. When a non-follower checks your business page and sees that it has a lot of followers, he or she will acknowledge your business’ legitimacy.
In your social media contest, you can ask people to follow your business’ social media accounts as a way of gaining entry.
This increases the number of people that are getting exposed to your contents.
- It generates brand awareness.
When people like, comment, and share your content, you are reaching a larger market.
People who might not have encountered your business before may learn about your business after seeing your contest.
Aside from just asking people to follow your business’ social media accounts, you can further instruct them to share your content and encourage others to join in the contest as well.
This can increase your business’ online visibility.
You can also collaborate with other brands for a combined and much larger market reach.
- It jumpstarts your business engagements.
Social media contests are a great way to create buzz around your business and get people to engage with your content.
This brings more attention and gets a lot of people talking about your business online.
Since the nature of a social media contest involves a lot of sharing, liking, and commenting, you can expect a boost in your engagement rate as more people interact with your brand.
This can also attract more people to visit your page and increase your web traffic.
However, you shouldn’t rely on social media contests alone. If you want to keep your engagement rate up, you should also consistently make interesting content for your target market.
The more that your target market sees your business as relevant to their demands, the more they will stick around to see what goes on in your business page.
- It is a good source of consumer data.
Participants in your social media contest can provide you with the consumer information you need to make your business more appealing to your target market.
This can be achieved by including questions on your social media contest about their habits and interests.
You can also use this information for your email marketing efforts in the future.
You can create a successful social media contest for your business by taking note of these guidelines:
- Set your goals. Are you trying to increase your business’ social media followers, generate more leads, raise brand awareness, or all of these things?
It’s important to know what your goal is before starting a social media contest so that it can yield great results for your business.
- Determine your contest type. Depending on the purpose of your campaign, you can set up a photo contest, caption contest, trivia contest, follow-and-share-to-win contest, and other types of social media contests.
- Plan your budget and prizes. You have to determine how much your business is willing to spend for your contest.
As for your prize, you have to make sure that it is enticing enough for your target market so they choose to participate.
- Know your target market. You have to know who your target market is and where they spend most of their time on social media.
That way, you’ll be able to determine which social media platform you should be focusing on for your social media contest.
- Understand contest rules on different social media platforms. Each social media platform has a specific set of rules that you must adhere to for your contest.
You don’t want regulators to flag your business or take down your contest, right?
Make sure that you read, understand, and comply with all the rules of the platform you’ve chosen.
Let’s see how these two businesses used social media contests to extend their target market reach:
Starbucks’ #RedCupContest
Starbucks created this contest in 2014 and 2015, challenging its Instagram followers to design their own red cup and upload it on their account.
Starbucks asked participants to use the #RedCupContest as part of their caption for the photo as well as to tag Starbucks’ Instagram account.
Selected followers would receive a prize and their self-designed red cups would be used and reproduced by the company for the Christmas season.
The first two days of the contest saw people uploading photos of their red cups every 14 seconds. Starbucks received a total of 40,000 entries in their contest.
Aside from that, the photos uploaded by Starbucks’ Instagram followers also got shared by their friends and followers, giving the company’s brand visibility a massive boost.
Chaguaramas Amusement Park
In the summer of 2016, the Chaguaramas Amusement Park in Trinidad and Tobago was preparing for its grand opening.
The problem?
It was just a new amusement park and it didn’t have an official name yet.
The park’s marketing team decided to run a social media contest on Facebook that encouraged Facebook users to suggest a name for the park.
The winner would get a free year’s worth of entry to the park for a family of four. Aside from that, he or she would also receive TTD 10,000 as a cash prize!
The contest attracted over 3,000 entries. That meant although only one could win, more than 3,000 people were now aware that a new amusement park is opening soon.
A number of visits from all those people who joined the contest (and others who simply encountered the brand online because of the contest) would contribute to the park being able to more quickly generate returns on its investments.
Social media contests for your business, when done properly, can be a really good way to increase awareness among your target market.
It can also be a fun way to engage with them.
Squeeze your creative juices and plan the most suitable social media contest for your business!
Let your target market do the marketing for you too as they interact with your brand and contest.
About The Dynamic Marketing Communiqué’s
“Thursdays: FYO! Find You Optimization”
Why should you stop thinking SEO and start thinking FYO?
We’re not saying that you should abandon Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Don’t get us wrong, of course, we know this is something very important, especially in today’s digital marketing age.
The internet landscape is vast, and a world of its own. You really need to distinguish yourself and make your brand/company/website known and easily searchable.
Better yet, get to the top of page one for Top Results on Google or any other search engine.
However, what is the purpose of SEO? It’s that customers Find You!
That’s what matters. So, while SEO is one factor of FYO… it really is only one, and we ought not to abandon all the myriad of ways digitally and offline for improving your FYO.
How can we look at this from a different and better perspective?
Let’s say you have it in the bag! You and your team are experts in SEO. Awesome. But did you ever wonder what else you could do to push it further and give your SEO skills a boost?
FYO! Find You Optimization!
You need your target audience to FIND YOU—your brand, product, service, or offer. This is SEO plus other tools that increase visibility online (and offline).
Every Thursday, we publish content on how you can get your target market to find you, beyond the typical “type and search.” There are other things you can do along with your SEO to give your online advertising process a boost.
Try considering other tactics beyond it—WOMO (Word Of Mouth Optimization), RO (Referral Optimization), and “All-Other-Means-Of-Getting-Your-Target-Market-To-Find-You” Optimization (AOMOGYTMTFY, if you’d like a long acronym).
Part of a great marketing strategy is knowing how to adapt new methods and make use of different types of marketing and promotion that best fit your business goals and which give you the results you want.
Hope you’ve found this week’s insights interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next Thursday’s FYO!
Cheers,
Kyle Yu
Head of Marketing
Valens Dynamic Marketing Capabilities
Powered by Valens Research
www.valens-research.com
