By
No matter what industry you’re in or who your customers are, a social media contest is always a powerful marketing tool. Running a contest can be an excellent way to drive up your sales and help your business go viral online.
Contests don’t require a massive investment, and when done correctly, they can offer great ROI for your business.
There are many different ways that you can use a social media contest to increase sales and grow your business. We’ll explore this all, as well as how to run a successful giveaway, in our guide below.
Why Run a Social Media Contest?
A social media contest or giveaway is one of the best ways to reach a larger audience, increase your brand popularity, and ramp up your sales. Depending on the type of social media contest that you run, there are different ways that you can use it to increase sales.
Increase Brand Awareness
A viral social media giveaway will help to increase your brand’s popularity in a big way. If you offer a prize that generates enough excitement, you’ll get loads of people sharing and entering your contest. The more popular your contest becomes, the more people will find out about your business.
When running social promotions, you should give away prizes that relate to your business and target audience. The best option for prizes would be your own products or services. If you manage to gain enough popularity through this, then all of the people you’re attracting are going to be interested in what your business offers.
This means you aren’t just generating a lot of buzz for your business, but you’re increasing your popularity amongst your direct target audience. This offers a great opportunity to boost your sales.
Gain More Social Followers & Engagement
You can use your giveaway to help you boost your social media presence. The right contest can get you more followers and get more users engaging with your brand online. Having a bigger, more engaged audience will help you generate more sales.
A good way to achieve this would be through a bonus entry contest. These types of contests allow you to give users additional entries for taking certain actions, such as following your page or referring the contest to a friend.
Increase User-Generated Content
User-generated content on social media can make a big difference to your credibility and sales. Brands need user-generated content to offer real-life proof of their products in action. Social media users will also trust other people before they trust brands. If they see their friends or people they follow posting about a certain product, then there’s a good chance they will look into that brand.
Social media contests are one of the best ways to get more people posting about your brand. This can be done through things like selfie contests, hashtag contests, or photo contests. By creating certain entry requirements for your contest, you can get each participant to post photos of your brand. This can have a huge positive impact on your social media presence.
Run a Buy-to-Enter Contest
You can increase your sales by offering entries to your contest if your followers make a purchase. This incentivizes your audience to buy your product, directly increasing your sales before you even draw a winner.
Just make sure that your product is not too expensive. If your limit is too high, then you won’t attract many contest entrants.
Promote a Specific Product
Contests can be an excellent way to promote a new or best-selling product. If you have a specific product that you want to promote, then offering a giveaway of this product on social media is an excellent tactic.
You could either promote a new product through a contest and use the contest to generate a lot of interest in the new product. Or, you could do a giveaway with customized products to help you achieve more social engagement and entries.
Boost Your Lead Generation
Businesses are always looking for new leads in order to boost their sales. Running a contest on social media is one of the best ways to attract high-quality leads for your business.
To do this, you will need to use the right social promotions tool that allows you to create customized forms and landing pages for your contest. Once you promote your contest on social media, people will need to fill in their details to enter.
This allows you to capture the email address of each entrant which you can add to your mailing list and market towards in the future.
These are also going to be high-quality leads because they’ve already shown an interest in your product and business by signing up for your giveaway. This will make it easier to convert these leads into customers later on. Sending out a discount code to these leads after the contest has ended is always effective.
Increase Referrals
Loads of customers base their buying decision based on referral, or word of mouth. The more referrals your business gets, the more likely your sales will start to increase. Running a contest on social media is one of the best ways to increase referrals.
With the right contest tool, you can offer participants a greater chance of winning with each referral they send out. This results in them referring your brand to their circles, who end up entering your contest or heading to your website.
Referral contests like this create a kind of snowball effect, where your referrals just continue growing. This will directly affect your sales.
Create Trending Hashtags
Hashtag contests are a great way to create some buzz around your brand and product. You can use your social media contest to create new, trending hashtags that make your brand a lot more visible.
If your contest becomes popular enough, social media users will be searching for your hashtag. A viral hashtag will boost your traffic and sales in a big way.
How to Run a Social Media Contest
Ready to run your social media contest? Before you start posting about your giveaway, here are some important steps to take:
- Start with a goal: First, set a goal for your contest. Are you trying to increase traffic, promote a specific product, or get more social followers? This will help you design a more successful contest.
- Know your audience: Understand your audience and know where they spend their time online. This is necessary for knowing which social media channel to promote your contest on.
- Choose your contest type: You could run a hashtag contest, photo contest, sweepstakes, photo caption contest, and more. The entry method and contest type should be based on your goal and audience.
- Set your contest rules: Make it clear who can enter, what is allowed for an entrance, what isn’t allowed, how the winner will be chosen, and when the contest will take place.
- Choose the right prize: Your contest will only be a success if it has a good enough prize. This prize needs to be big enough to get a lot of people excited to enter your contest. However, the prize shouldn’t be too much of an overbearing cost for your business. You should also think about your target audience when choosing a prize. The prize needs to relate to your business to ensure you only attract potential new customers.
- Create a landing page for your contest: A contest landing page will help you to capture information from each of your participants, such as their email addresses. This will help you to market to each participant after the contest in order to boost your sales.
- Launch your contest: Now it’s time for your social media contest to go live. Promote it on your chosen channel with an exciting post and an eye-catching image that shows off your prize.
- Promote your contest: Make sure that you get enough interest in your contest by promoting it properly. Post it across your marketing channels, and even consider running paid ads for the contest.
- Choose a winner: Pick a winner based on your contest rules and announce this to your audience.
- Follow up with entrants: Now you can send all of the contest participants an email with a discount code or special offer. There’s a good chance that you’ll be able to generate new sales from your participants.
- Track the results of your contest: Measure your contest results against your goals and see what worked and what needs improvement for next time.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a new way to boost your marketing strategy and online presence, then a social contest could be the answer. When done the right way, social media contests can have a huge impact on your business. They allow you to attract plenty of positive engagement, as well as drive up your sales.
There are many different types of contests out there, each one suitable for achieving different goals for your business. Make sure that you have a clear plan, use the right social media tool, and you will be able to achieve awesome results with each contest or giveaway.
Are you thinking of running a social contest for your business? Let us know what type of contest you plan on running in the comments below!
