Are you struggling to keep consumers engaged with your brand after they subscribe? If so, you’re not alone. Business owners often struggle with keeping consumers interested in their product or service after they click the like or follow button.
Contests and giveaways are excellent marketing tools you can use to boost consumer engagement. There are several other valuable benefits to using games on your website. Your WordPress SEO ranking will improve due to the value Google places on brands that are frequently shared and mentioned online. You’ll also expand your reach to a broader audience, which could result in increased subscribers and sales.
Everyone loves the opportunity to win a prize, but it’s your job to make sure the reward resonates with your target audience. We are going to explore several steps you should take when you decide to create a contest for your business.
Pick a Prize
The first, and perhaps most obvious step, is that you need to pick a prize for your contest. The challenge occurs when you’re trying to figure out what kind of reward you should select. The three most common types of awards are cash (gift cards), products, or discounts.
Keep in mind that products and discounts are more likely to get you engagement from your target audience, while cash prizes cast a much wider net. If your goal is engagement, your best bet is to offer one of your most popular products or services as a prize and offer the losers of the contests a discount on your site as a way to thank them for participating.
For example, if you operate a membership site platform, you could run a contest where the winner gets access to the premium section of your website for a year. Next, you could send everyone who participated in the competition a special price on an annual membership. This discount could encourage a significant percentage of participants to come to your website and buy a subscription with their discount code.
Your prizes will depend on your niche, but generally, discounts see increased sales, especially when they are coupled with contests.
Establish Clear Guidelines
Next, you need to establish the guidelines for your giveaway. You’re going to want to think about things like start/end dates, contest rules, and how consumers will enter. These are all critical pieces that contribute to the success of your event. Let’s look at each section individually.
Start and end dates are crucial to your contest. If your event is too short, it might not reach the number of eyes you were expecting. On the other hand, a contest that drags on for too long can result in a loss of momentum, and some people might even forget that they entered. Generally speaking, a giveaway should last between one and two weeks. If you’re offering something high-end, you could get away with creating a contest that lasts for one month.
You must establish rules for your event before the launch. You’ll want to consider whether the contest is limited to a specific region, or has age restrictions. Make sure to include all of this information in the rules section of the contest, so users know if they are eligible to win.
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Finally, you have to think about how users will enter your event. The action to enter the contest should align with your marketing goal. Since we are talking about engagement, you could make it mandatory for consumers to comment, like, and share a post, then tag several of their friends. These entry rules ensure that your posts get engagement and generate additional leads for your business.
Create Your Event
You now understand your marketing goals, researched your audience, picked a prize, and figured out the rules; now it’s time to create your contest. If you’re looking for a pain-free way to create a giveaway without touching a line of code, I recommend the plugin RafflePress.
Building your contest requires the same thought and effort that you put into the other stages of development. You have to create compelling copy that gets readers excited and eager to engage with your brand. It’s vital that you incorporate an eye-catching call to action (CTA), so readers know the next steps in the entry process.
At this stage, you’ll want to add an attractive image of the prize as well as the rules that you wrote in the last step. The best contests use flashy photos, contrasting CTAs, and engaging copy.
Promote Your Contest
Finally, it’s time to promote your even to your following. Your email, content, and social media marketing strategies can help improve visibility and generate traffic on your website. Your email subscribers should get a notification that you’re running an event, and wanted to give them a heads up so they can enter as soon as possible.
Don’t forget to make a blog post announcing your contest. If a new subscriber lands on your page through a source other than your content link, you’ll need to make sure that they know this event is taking place. Your social media marketing strategy should consist of you announcing your contest is groups relevant to your niche and creating sponsored ads for your target audience.
You should add google analytics to WordPress so you can track the results of your marketing efforts across all forms of media. The results will help you learn what marketing tactics work, and which ones need refinement.
Conclusion
Contests are one of the best ways to engage an existing audience while encouraging new people to check out your brand. There’s a reason that #onlinecontest is frequently trending on Twitter. Business owners understand that consumers want to participate in events that allow them to win something for tagging a couple of friends or subscribing to an email list.
As your business grows, you should consider increasing the frequency of your contests to keep up with the momentum of new traffic. As a final note, don’t forget to announce the winner of the giveaway on social media. Personal emails are helpful, but when you publically tag and announce a winner, you build trust and rapport with your audience.