How to Create an Effective Sweepstakes Marketing Strategy for Your Brand

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Modern sweepstakes marketing strategy is multichannel and martech platform-based. An effective sweepstakes marketing plan will help to increase brand awareness, build trust, and convert fans to customers. An effective sweepstakes marketing strategy helps you leverage all of the benefits of sweepstakes and social media contests at once.

Before we dive into how to create an effective sweepstakes marketing strategy and marketing plan, define the goals that you want to aim for. Read on to learn what you need to create effective sweepstakes marketing that delivers ROI.

How to Create an Effective Sweepstakes Marketing Strategy for Your Brand

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IN THIS ARTICLE:

• Why is sweepstakes marketing effective?
• What makes a successful sweepstakes marketing strategy?
• How can giveaway effectiveness be improved?

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Before You Start Your Sweepstakes Marketing

Before you start your sweepstakes marketing, plan what is needed for the implementation of your sweepstakes marketing strategy. First, consider what you need to run a sweepstakes:

1. What areas do we need to improve in (brand awareness, sales, lead generation)?
2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of our in-house marketing team?
3. What are the motivations of customers looking to enter a sweepstakes or contest?
4. How can we measure the success of our sweepstakes marketing strategy during the promotion? After one month? After six months?
5. How often to run giveaway promotions? Monthly? Annually?
6. Should we outsource the sweepstakes marketing strategy work? Can our marketing department do it in-house?

Share Your Sweepstakes Marketing Strategy With a Sweepstakes Company

With so many points to consider for designing an effective sweepstakes marketing plan, it’s a good idea to consider how and when marketing content will be produced. Your campaign will need all of the elements of a great marketing strategy – planning, design, content, legal compliance, prize fulfillment, PR, social media, PPC, influencer marketing, and more. Don’t settle for anything less than the best.

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Develop Your Sweepstakes Marketing Strategy

Effective sweepstakes marketing begins with a well-informed marketing strategy. Your sweepstakes marketing strategy impacts the ROI that you get from giveaway promotions, including the number of participants, prospects from sweepstakes surveys, sales, and brand reach.

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An effective sweepstakes marketing strategy helps you create a sweepstakes marketing plan that:

1. Demonstrates the value of your flagship product or service
2. Explains the positioning and role of your brand in the market
3. Appeals to your target audience and exceeds the competition’s promotions
4. Defines the promotional tactics you will use
5. Allows you to build a comprehensive sweepstakes marketing plan (the implementation of your promotion) and measure your sweepstakes effectiveness.

Sweepstakes Marketing Strategies vs. Sweepstakes Marketing Plans: What’s the Difference?

While the right sweepstakes marketing strategy is critical to the success of your giveaway promotions. There are several important distinctions between a sweepstakes marketing strategy and a sweepstakes marketing plan.

Namely, the following:

The main difference is that a sweepstakes marketing strategy guides you long-term, while a sweepstakes marketing plan is focused on the short-term goals of a specific sweepstakes or social media contest campaign.

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Identify Your Sweepstakes Marketing Strategy Goals

Make sure that your sweepstakes marketing strategy aligns to your overall marketing goals for your brand. Your sweepstakes marketing goals might include:

• Increasing case orders from a certain supplier
• Increasing brand awareness for your flagship product
• Reaching a new audience and customer segment

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Set KPIs to measure to help you ensure that your sweepstakes marketing strategy is properly designed to measure those goals.

Effective sweepstakes marketing strategy requires that you ensure that your company’s business intelligence is incorporated so that you can set data-driven KPIs for your campaigns. This is why it’s critical to design your sweepstakes marketing strategy to achieve your business goals.

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Profile Your Customers and Target Audience for Sweepstakes Marketing

Use market research data and past sales history to develop profiles of potential sweepstakes participants and new customers. By defining customer personas, you can personalize your sweepstakes marketing strategy to maximize their participant and ensure that your promotion meets their needs.

Track Trends Among Sweepstakes Participants and Customers for Optimization

The profiles will also help to reveal customers’ buying patterns so that you can also optimize the sales funnels to help sweepstakes participants convert to customers. Make sure that you also keep track of the latest trends and upcoming popular events that perform well with consumers. Keeping up with trends ensures that you don’t miss out on any opportunities or become irrelevant in your marketing messaging.

As you work to identify new customers, a sweepstakes co-sponsor can help provide the target audience and the data that you need that will allow you to modify your messaging without alienating your existing customers.

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Implementing Your Sweepstakes Marketing Strategy

How do you increase the effectiveness of your sweepstakes marketing strategy and maximize your ROI?

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1. Use Content Marketing to Promote Your Sweepstakes

If you use your sweepstakes marketing strategy to run recurring sweepstakes and social media contests on a monthly or annual basis, then content marketing can help boost your brand website and giveaway entry pages, provided that you keep the same giveaway vanity URLs and sweepstakes domains.

Content marketing can be leveraged in so many ways for sweepstakes and contests, not just for increasing brand awareness. In fact, you can use content to engage and influence your audience to convince your audience to try a new product or service from your brand. You can even create content as examples of contest entries for photo and video contents.

The best way to ensure that your content marketing drives sweepstakes participation is to integrate your sweepstakes platform with your martech stack, including content marketing tools.

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2. Leverage AI for Sweepstakes Through Marketing Automation Tools

AI-based marketing automation and data analysis tool integrations can help you identify the sweepstakes participants who are most likely to convert. In addition to identifying new customers, marketing automation can also help reactivate existing customers so that they come to your brand website to see the latest updates. AI marketing tools are useful for tracking customer online behavior for real-time, data-driven marketing.

You can also use email marketing and SMS marketing tools to create a “waiting list” for upcoming news regarding special offers and new sweepstakes and contests. In this way, your sweepstakes marketing strategy will help you to get autopilot leads and a done for you target audience for you next sweepstakes campaign.

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3. Use Business Intelligence to Shape Your Sweepstakes Marketing Strategy

Leveraging business intelligence from all departments can actually help you to create more optimized a sweepstakes marketing strategy:

1. Reporting
2. Analysis
3. Data Mining
4. Data Quality & Interpretation
5. Predictive Analysis

The process of business intelligence will help you make actionable decisions that are aimed at meeting specific sweepstakes campaign goals. With the right data analysis, you’ll be able to answer these important sweepstakes campaign question:

• What is the untapped potential of sales territory? Should we offer a sweepstakes or contest to residents there?
• Are our nurturing campaigns effective for converting participants to customers?
• How are our products and services performing by sales territory? Or by participant demographics?

The ultimate goal of this analysis is to understand the data that you get from each sweepstakes run, spot patterns, identify trends, and make decisions based on it.

4. Test Your Sweepstakes Marketing Strategy

Before you launch your full sweepstakes marketing strategy, conduct a small test with a single campaign. The purpose of this test is to determine whether your sweepstakes positioning will be well-received by your target audience. Testing your sweepstakes marketing strategy helps you ensure that it can perform well.

Before moving forward with your sweepstakes marketing strategy, make sure that you have defined a test marketing plan & campaign to launch.

You could test your sweepstakes marketing strategy in the following ways:

1. Target your sweepstakes to existing customers who can provide direct feedback on your brand and product;
2. Launch a regional social media contest campaign to promote a regional product launch prior to a full product launch;
3. Run a social media based sweepstakes versus an SMS sweepstakes

Run a Regional Product Launch Giveaway Campaign as a Test

With a regional sweepstakes or contest campaign, you can assess the effectiveness of your sweepstakes marketing strategy before the full launch of your product. Take care to choose your target market carefully to ensure that the demographics are as similar as possible to the overall market.

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5. Look at Your Brand Competitors’ Sweepstakes Marketing

Who runs sweepstakes and social media contests in your industry. Don’t forget to take a look at what your competitors are doing when it comes to giveaway marketing.

Look at the effects of sweepstakes and contests on your competitors ability to attract new customers, increase sales, and brand awareness. Make sure that you examine the impacts of each channel, email, social media, and SMS on their ability to attract sweepstakes participants.

Find a Sweepstakes Marketing Strategic Partner

A sweepstakes company can help you develop an effective sweepstakes marketing plan that will help you beat the competition. They can also help you optimize your sweepstakes marketing strategy as you run campaigns and collect data.

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

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