9-Steps to hosting a Captivating Contest!
10 Sep, 22:20 PM
A small business or a large one, brand recognition is top priority for all of them. To get this sort of brand recognition, these businesses come up with various marketing strategies to achieve their goals!
One of the best ways to gain recognition is to stage contests!
Contests gives reciprocity with benefits which can steer traffic to your site and in turn increase sales too. Any marketing move of yours should be constructed around a strategy which mainly aims at promoting your business.
Running a contest is not a cakewalk! There is a lot of work that happening in the background to even get the contest up and running.
Set your goals straight!
The first thing to keep in mind while a contest is to have a basic idea about your goal for this whole thing. There is absolutely no deficits in strategies of running a contest, but if you have defined your outcomes, you can achieve success. But keep in mind that contest goals should align with your marketing and business objectives.
Who are you targeting?
The next thing you should check is your target audience. They can be based on demographics, social media usage and geographic locations. This helps you focus on how to run your contest and how you market it.
What type of contest are you hosting?
Next comes the type of contest you host, whether it is a writing contest or a voting contest, you have plethora of choices to pick from. Then you can decide upon the other details like the start and end date of the contest, the rules, registration and how you plan on hosting it.
Prizes!
Now comes the major aspect of a contest, i.e., the prize of the contest. You need to have a handout that will motivate the participants to enter the contest. While choosing a prize, make sure it is brand or product related, intrigues target audience and somewhat related to your contest.
Bring your idea to life…
Now that you have a framework for your contest, you can now build you contest. While building a contest, you should keep in mind its title, registration details, rules, image that you use to advertise the contest and its other details in such a way that it motivates and incites people to take part in the contest.
Registration
Once the contest is up and ready, you have to get people to enter, and to do that, you need to market your event, online as well as offline too. Too boost the success of your contest, you need to promote it. To reach the niche market, you need to use targeted advertisements!
Tracking
A good marketer tracks and monitors the participant’s performance indicators so that they cant improve the contest as it goes. Tracking your contest objective’s metrics helps you measure the success of your contest.
Aftermath of the contest
Once your contest ends, you need to now focus on how to strengthen the relationship with your participants and get them to become your loyal customers. You can do this by choosing the winner of the contest and announcing it personally and over your social media handles and also you can connect with the rest of the participants by sending across a follow-up mail and encouraging them to participate in upcoming contests too!
Announce the winner!
Now that your contest is complete, you can take a look at your result and analyse it properly. This also gives you a chance to improvise your marketing strategies for a better outcome, like refining your target market, tracking and monitoring your metrics and also tweaking your contest details and prizes.
Contest management requires a lot of work, but the hard work will definitely pay off in the success of your contest. contests are more than good timing or luck. The chances of your contest even getting noticed by the public will improve if you have a super-concrete plan in place which you must and should meticulously follow!
So find your idea, bring it to life using VUFORA, our event and contest management platform, for everyone to experience and the rest will fall into place!
