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Martech, or marketing technology, in sweepstakes and contests has exploded in recent years as marketers have started to explore the enhanced ROI that a martech stack can bring. While there are thousands of martech platforms and solutions that you might consider for managing your sweepstakes marketing, there are some key considerations with budget and features being among them.
Marketing Automation Is Key
Sweepstakes marketing experts agree that the most effective martech stacks tend to be centered around a marketing automation platform.
What Should a MarTech Stack for Sweepstakes Include?
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A Contest or Sweepstakes Platform Starts Your Martech Stack
Sweepstakes platforms, contest and sweepstakes management tools, and contest platforms all feature some elements of marketing automation, such as done for you email marketing and SMS templates to high-converting sweepstakes opt-in pages. However, these are just the optimization basics when it comes to creating a winning contest or sweepstakes campaign through data.
If you’re ready to increase ROI from a sweepstakes or contest campaign, then it’s time for your brand to build a marketing technology stack. In this article, here’s what you need to know about how to build a martech stack for sweepstakes and contests, what are the key components of a martech stack for sweepstakes, and the benefits of martech tools for giveaways.
Let’s dive in!
IN THIS ARTICLE:
- How do you make a martech stack for sweepstakes?
- What are the key components of a giveaway martech stack?
- What martech tools should you integrate with a sweepstakes platform?
What Is a MarTech Stack?
A martech stack is a group of marketing technologies that work together allowing you to monitor and optimize your sweepstakes or contest marketing. These components all need to work together in order for you to optimize your campaign on the front end with a better customer experience for participants and obtain the intelligence and data that you need to grow your brand.
Sweepstakes Marketing Plan: Getting Started Steps to Build Your Martech Stack
To build your martech stack, you should start with an evaluation of your business goals for sweepstakes marketing (brand awareness, sales, followers, increased engagement). Initial choices when building your martech will influence your decisions when it comes the developers on your marketing team, the design of your sweepstakes or contest campaigns, and choice of sweepstakes or contest platform.
By carefully considering all of these aspects before beginning sweepstakes marketing, you can avoid missing out on collecting valuable insights or having to make change due to sweepstakes law or privacy law compliance requirements.
Essential Components of a Martech Stack for Sweepstakes and Contests
Every martech stack has valuable components. However, there are some essential components for your martech stack that you shouldn’t overlook if you want to optimize sweepstakes and contests.
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A CRM is essential for managing participants in a sweepstakes. Most sweepstakes platforms and contest platforms have a CRM build in that will allow you to manage participants’ personally identifiable information (PII) in a manner that is compliant with federal, state, and local privacy laws.
The CRM can be integrated with your sales tech stack so that you can monitor the entire buyer funnel of a sweepstakes participant entering your promotion to becoming a first-time customer. Ultimately, it helps ensure that your sweepstakes drives sales, not just signups.
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2. Marketing Automation Tools Must-have for Martech Stack
Sweepstakes platforms, sweepstakes management platform, and contest marketing platforms all have marketing automation tools built-in. They can send email and SMS messages that are triggered by certain events or dates/times during an active sweepstakes or contest.
However, you also need to make sure that your nurturing campaign continues after your sweepstakes or contest ends. By leveraging multiple marketing automation tools and integrating them with the sweepstakes management platform, you can create a unified workflow that is seamless to the consumer on the front end.
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Email marketing and social media marketing automation tools are a must to ensure that you access to participant attribute creation and management, list segmentation capabilities, and automated marketing personalization.
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3. Content Management System (CMS)
Your CMS is where all of the content related to your sweepstakes is stored. Before you choose a content management system for your sweepstakes marketing technology stack, consider the types content that you want to create and host. Some examples include:
- Blog posts
- Sweepstakes web entry pages
- Sweepstakes rules, privacy, and TOS pages
- Social media posts, images, stories, and videos
- Sponsored articles and videos
- Sweepstakes advertising creatives
- Email marketing templates
- Contest entries (if participants need to submit entries)
While a sweepstakes platform may offer the option to store your content there, it’s more efficient and will provide better performance if you store your content with the best possible martech tool for the job and simply link to the content from that platform. This helps you ensure that you have the ability to optimize your content in real-time to maximize participation.
If you plan to run a user-generated content (UGC) sweepstakes or contest, you will need to keep track of what content was submitted by participants versus content created by your brand. A digital asset management (DAM) system can help you manage permissions when it comes to UGC.
DAM can also help with version control, access rights, making sure that all of the creatives needed for your sweepstakes advertising campaign including logos, images, and promotion details are always available to your team in the latest versions.
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4. Data Analysis and Insight Tools
In order to make the most of your sweepstakes or contest, and know where to focus your efforts in order to attract more participants or increase sales, you need data-driven insights and only a sweepstakes martech stack can provide. The data analysis and insights may include tracking sweepstakes KPIs, lead scoring, or other type of calculation.
Data integration tools can help further help bring together sweepstakes and contest data from multiple systems allowing your marketing team to gain a top-down view of your marketing ROI. For example, by joining participant contact information data with customer transaction detail data, a marketer can immediately see which sweepstakes participants are also existing customers.
5. Multichannel Customer Experience Tools and Optimization
Utilize martech tools that make it possible to track participants and deliver a multi-channel customer experience. Brands that excel at the multichannel customer experience for sweepstakes are those that have deployed a martech stack that allows them to identify the best time and place to reach the individual participant regardless of the platforms that they use to interact with your brand online.
6. Advertising Technology Tools: Essential for Sweepstakes Marketing
Advertising technology, or adtech, is a key component of successful contest and sweepstakes advertising. Before the launch of your promotion, make sure to incorporate advertising tools into your martech stack that will allow you to optimize your sweepstakes marketing to attract more targeted participants in greater numbers. Most adtech tools that brands incorporate into a martech stack for sweepstakes include SEM, display ads, customer attribution, ad tracking, and retargeting features.
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Martech Stack Makes Sweepstakes and Contests Flexible and Scalable
The biggest benefit of building a martech stack for sweepstakes and contest marketing is that it’s both scalable and flexible. Sweepstakes companies know that they have limitations when it comes to the services that they can deliver via their sweepstakes platforms.
However, by building a martech stack from the start, the decision to scale up your promotion will be at the sole discretion of your brand’s marketing decision makers rather than on the technological limitations of a third-party vendor. Low-tech all-in-one solutions may seem useful to small businesses. However, they typically don’t scale on the level of the needs of enterprise level marketing needs.
How to Build the Perfect Martech Stack for Sweepstakes
Here are the 5 key steps to building the perfect martech stack or sweepstakes and contests:
- Figure out which processes should be automated (e.g. email marketing).
- Select between sweepstakes-specific and marketing-specific tools.
- Check user reviews to see what other marketers think.
- Plan for the long term (e.g. recurring annual or monthly sweepstakes).
- Ensure legal compliance with applicable advertising and giveaway laws.
Martech Tool Integration and Sweepstakes Legal Compliance
In today’s fast-paced digital transaction world, it’s simply not enough to have a single stand-alone tool that does everything. Integration capabilities for the martech tools you choose, including your sweepstakes platform, needs to be at the top of your list.
Sweepstakes Martech Stack: Responsive Instead of Reactive Marketing for Sweepstakes
By having the option to integrate your contest or sweepstakes platform with your other martech tools, you’ll be able to make optimization decisions in real-time. This can also help you to avert any problems that may arise during a live sweepstakes or contest campaign, allowing you to respond faster to incidents.
Caution on Martech Tools and Consumer Privacy Legal Compliance
Martech tools and personally identifiable information sharing concerns are significant. It’s always a good idea to consider exactly what data will be shared between platforms. You need to ensure that all participant PII is handled to the highest regulatory standard to ensure that your sweepstakes marketing is in compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local data collection and usage laws, as well as, mobile marketing laws, and advertising laws.
If you need further clarification from a martech vendor in that area, it’s best to consult with a sweepstakes attorney for further assistance with data management legal compliance for marketing promotions.
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Next Steps
Customer expectations are higher than they have ever been across the board. As marketing promotions become more sophisticated, brands need to be able to deliver interactions with consumers that are seamless, personalized, and engaging. Building a martech stack for sweepstakes and contests is how you meet consumers needs and build meaningful relationships that drive sales and long term customer loyalty.
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