How to Use Contest Marketing to Attract More Sales

Here is a list of our current affiliate partners and how we earn money

Contest marketing when done successfully will attract more sales to your business. The amount of planning that you put into your contest marketing strategy will determine the success of your contest.

If you want to use contest marketing to boost sales, here is how you do just that:

IN THIS ARTICLE:

• How do you use contests to attract sales?
• How can contest marketing boost sales?
• How do contests attract customers?

1. Tap Into Existing Customers for Contest Participants

If you want to improve sales, a cost-effective method to deal with that is to tap into your existing customers as a means of attracting new contest participants.

The best sales prospects are those you have already managed to turn into customers.

By reaching out to them and inviting them to enter your contest, you’ll instantly be able to increase and boost your sales dramatically.

Here’s how:

Market your contest to existing customers. Before your contest starts, make sure that you market your contest specifically to your customers.

Send SMS and email marketing messages to your customer loyalty program list.

During your contest, send follow-up messages. Offer discounts, coupons, and special offers to your existing customers to generate instant sales.

After your contest, invite contest participants to enter upcoming promotions. Have them opt-in to a list to be notified of future promotions.

2. Analyze Contests Run by the Competitors

Most top brands run sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways these days. You should analyze what your competitors are doing and come up with the techniques needed to outdo them.

Namely, this involves taking the necessary steps to ensure that your contest marketing is unique and that your promotion is valuable in the eyes of your customers.

This technique can be especially useful for brands who are trying to scale up their contest marketing efforts to match that of a larger competitor.

via GIPHY

3. Improve Customer Experience

Customer experience doesn’t occur at the point of sale. In fact, it occurs well before the customer ever makes a purchase via your contest marketing.

Your contest marketing needs to focus on helping contest participants get acquainted with your brand and products or services.

Subscribe Now:

This is why we recommend that you obtain contest marketing quotes so that you can have a dedicated contest marketing team to assist you with contest planning and contest administration.

There are so many working parts to designing a contest, namely that the contest needs to also follow legal requirements, such as official rules, registration, and bonding that it contest marketing really needs it’s own dedicated team.

4. Increase Referral Sales from Contest Participants

Your contest participants don’t have to be the only source for sales when to comes to your audience. You can also increase sales from referrals by having your contest participants share your contest.

ADVERTISEMENT

The first step is to make sure that you are offering your contest participants something in return. Reward them with additional entries for sharing your contest and directly referring participants to your contest.

By making sure to use your contest as the introduction to your brand, you’ll be able to move your referral sales prospects through your sales pipeline as you introduce them to your brand during the contest.

With WOM, you could end up boosting your sales significant especially if it’s peak holiday shopping time, your product or service is part of a limited-time promotion or you are launching a new product or service from an established brand.

On the data side:

Here are a few tips to help you find new customers and increase your sales with a contest. Your contest marketing needs to be integrated with analytics tools so that you can accurately track your results in real-time.

Update Your Audience Before You Launch a Contest

Your social media audience is always changing. However, you should know who your customers are among them so that you can reach out to invite them to participate in your contest.

Some methods that you can use to find the audience for your contest marketing:

• Look at your analytics and pay attention to keywords/trends
• Tap into your customer database and send them a survey via email
• Tap into historical contest marketing data (a contest marketing company can help)

Measure Engagement With Your Social Media Contest

It’s not enough to attract participants to your contest if your goal is to boost sales. You should also be measuring the engagement with your social media contest as it progresses.

Work on optimizing your contest campaign messaging, email marketing, and SMS marketing so that your contest participants find it value.

While the contest prize attracts entrants to your contest, it is the customer experience that makes them stick around as supposed to just signing up, not engaging, and waiting to be notified of the contest winners.

Next Steps: Build a Contest Marketing Strategy

Whether you plan to run a contest for the first time or you are planning your annual contst marketing, set the goals that you want to achieve for your sales.

Goal setting will help your contest company come up with the best way to target the ideal buyers and grow your customer list via a social media contest.

Looking for a contest marketing company to help you with your next promotion? Sweepsify helps you find top contest companies in seconds. Create your free Premium account now to get started.

Share: