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This article was first published on Entrepreneur
There are two good reasons to consider giving things away via contests, raffles and giveaways. First, these attract a lot of attention for your business because people love the idea of getting something for nothing. Second, they create fanfare that you can use to get media.
The main reason businesses do “contests” (which is the word I’ll use for the whole shebang in this article) is because it attracts a flood of new customers. The more people who know about your contest, the more people who know about your business. A percentage of those who find out about your business in this way will be interested in finding out more, even if they didn’t win a prize.
The net effect of these kinds of big, splashy things is that it makes you more memorable, as someone who does interesting, refreshing things in your industry. The process itself is easily replicated and modified once learned, and it’ll give you a quick marketing strategy you can keep in your back pocket when you need to refresh public awareness that you and your business exist.
Here’s a checklist for putting a contest together easily. Make sure you give yourself plenty of promotion time -- at least two months -- since promotion is the true purpose here.
Here are some potential prize ideas:
What other ideas can you come up with? If you offer one grand prize and a few smaller ones, you’ll attract more people because more people will believe they have a chance of winning.
You don’t have to go out-of-pocket to acquire the prizes you’ll be giving away (unless it’s cash). You can:
Why would anyone want to sponsor or donate stuff to your contest? Because you have the energy and the smarts to even think of doing a contest! Your innovation alone will attract peers who want to get a piece of your enthusiasm for their own business marketing. If they’re donating or sponsoring it, perhaps they’ll also mail the announcement to their list, post signs in their store, hang a banner off their building with your contest website on it, all in return for you putting their logo somewhere on your promotional materials.
There are multiple ways you can choose. You can:
The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. You can be the judge all by yourself, or you can use the prestige of the judges (local or national celebrities) as an asset in your contest marketing materials. That’s why the TV show America’s Got Talent used celebrities, not music teachers or record label producers, even though ostensibly those people would have been better qualified judges.
The attention from prospects and hopefully media that you’ll get just for having the contest is one thing. The actual act of awarding the prizes is another opportunity in itself.
If you can afford it and the prize is big enough, the tried-and-true event is always best. Think “red carpet” and host an elegant sit-down dinner. Be sure to invite prize winners and a few of their family members, the mayor, anyone who really helped you promote the contest, all the journalists who covered it and anyone else it would be politically expedient to invite.
You can also bring the winner into your office, get some balloons or flowers, hand them a certificate or a big cardboard check and take a lot of pictures that you plaster all over social media.
You can even just sit in your home office by yourself and email/call the winners to let them know they’ve won and announce it on your social media that you’ve given something to someone you’ve never seen. This last option is least fun but is also the least expensive.
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