If you are an online retailer and want to improve your marketing promotions then you landed on the right platform. Sweepstakes are perfect with your marketing mix strategies. These sweepstake promotions are the effective and most efficient marketing methods which help you to grow your business, promote your brand, generate more leads and increase your sales.
In fact, these types of promotions are affordable and easy to run. When you implement the sweepstake promotions perfectly, you will gain its benefits which are more useful than any other marketing methods. With only a single promotion, you can get the number of email subscribers, attract new customers and boost up your sales.
You can even increase your follower’s list on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and much more. It is easy to generate brand exposure and awareness across all your social platforms.
What is Sweepstakes?
Sweepstakes are the promotional methods in which participants are awarded prizes at no charge. Here winners will be selected randomly and determined by luck instead of skill. This increases the brand awareness, business and most importantly sales. Nowadays these sweepstakes are widely used in the marketing promotions to draw attention towards their product or services.
These sweepstakes award with large grand prizes mainly to grab the attention of new entries rather than winning. With the help of sweepstake entries, you can get the marketing information about your customers. In this, the company doesn’t question about specific knowledge to answer the questions.
Did you notice that the sweepstakes promotion and contest are similar?
Here contests are special promotional events to award the winners to increase the business. Unlike sweepstakes, in a contest, the winners are picked based on the skills which they declaimed.
If we take an example of a baking company, they offer various free vacation trips for the winners in the baking contest. In this promotional strategy, winners are picked by the particular panel of judges.
Difference between Sweepstakes and Contests:
Sometimes, the words sweepstakes and contests are used interchangeably. Here are the few differences between sweepstakes and contests. To initiate with, the word promotion can use in various ways to describe the business marketing strategies which include various terms such as Loyalty programs, Contests, Sweepstakes, and Games.
But among them, Sweepstakes and Contests are the common promotional ways used for marketing promotions. Contests mean games of skills and Sweepstakes means games of chance. That means the Sweepstakes completely rely on the luck of the winners whereas Contests rely on people skills.
Sweepstakes and contests differ in many ways such as sweepstakes winners are selected randomly whereas contests winners are selected by the panel of judges. Take a glance at the deep dig into the sweepstakes and contests differences.
Sweepstakes are generally used to create brand awareness and increase the client database. This promotion is very easy to apply and people enter the contest with ease. If you are having online sweepstakes, your consumer has to enter some personal information such as name, address and email to win the prize.
If the sweepstake promotion is implemented and managed correctly means the outcome of the promotion can be threefold. That means consumers, show interest to win the grand prize and even shares this amazing benefit with their friends. They even encourage them to visit the particular online ritual to go on with the purchase and gain the new lead from the database of the client to send marketing messages in the future.
Contests are mainly used for the engagement purpose with your consumers with products or services. In the simple contest, you have to advertise the CTA and ask the consumers to build the content to win in the contest. The content that your consumers create has to score and judge by the particular panel and outlined with official rules.
In short, winners in the contest are selected by the panel of judges and increase the engagement and interaction with your consumers and users. It’s all about building deeper relationships with your audience and stay connected with them.
Don’t forget to give the reward before the close of a contest and that should be equivalent to your consumer’s effort that they kept winning the prize.
This improves your brand awareness, attract new visitors, generate more leads and increase sales.
Benefits of Running Sweepstake Promotions:
Gain a new customer base:
When you implement sweepstakes promotion perfectly, you can get in touch with your consumers through sweepstakes forums and newsletters. We can see many people showing interest in participating in the contests and even some people make it as hobbies.
Holding the contest means you will get a chance to showcase all your products and services. In the contest, if any visitor shows interest in your product means there are many chances to turn him as a lead.
Gives you the best SEO value:
There are many chances that popular website links to your website. Through sweepstakes promotions, if a popular website wants to link with your website means you can gain great rank in the search engine results page. Spread the promotion through tweets and Facebook updates and link those to your website.
If more people find your website through online means there are more chances of getting people who buy your products and services.
Cost-effective promotion:
Most of the online contests are free advertising methods. Moreover, there are many chances of getting your products details and company name on other popular websites just for free. This promotion is cost-effective and even low-risk investment in building brand awareness. If you want to try for the low-risk investment for your SEO, then you can opt for this sweepstakes promotion.
Easier sweepstakes management:
If you have stopped the running online contests due to less knowledge about how to handle sweepstakes management, you will be more worried about what are the wrong things that you insert in the contest. Don’t worry; the process can be made simple and easy with the help of bloggers.
Most of the bloggers handle these kinds of strategies and are pretty good at implementing this kind of sweepstakes management. They will promote your contests in various social media platforms which adds overall exposure to your brand.
Sweepstake Promotion Tips:
Always remember that planning and setting up the sweepstakes promotion is a good start. Along with that, you need to have a good marketing plan if you want to make your sweepstakes promotions a huge hit and reach your goals. On this page, we have furnished some of the sweepstakes promotion tips for you so that it will be easy to plan and set up your contest.
Directories:
You have to remember that the sweepstakes promotion is a great way to promote your brand with a low-risk investment. It easily drives traffic to your website by submitting your websites which links directly to the promotion. It is the best way to get more traffic and one thing you have to remember is that most of the users who visit your websites are freebie seekers.
If you set a goal of getting more exposure then submit about the contest on popular websites. This is the best way to grab the traffic to your website. In case, if you want to reach this contest to only your targeted audience means, you can skip submitting process.
Blog post:
If you want to go with the easy and simple way then writing a blog post about your sweepstakes promotion is the best way. You can easily make your consumers stay informed, that you are running the promotional contest. Make sure to give complete information about the contest such as,
- How to enter
- What are the contest prizes
- When your contest ends.
Don’t forget to include a short description of the contest and this plays a very vital role. Most of the people just check the descriptions rather than reading all the content on the post. So make the description short, simple and most effective.
Email newsletter:
Send emails about the contest to your list of consumers which include information about sweepstakes promotion, direct link to your page for the people to enter on the page easily and other promotion details.
If the people are already on the list and you still want to promote to them again, then you can. Because when they enter your website, they will end up sharing the prize with their friends on various social media networks.
Post on social media platforms:
Nowadays social media plays a vital role in everyone’s life. People always stay active on their social media accounts. Target social media platforms to promote your sweepstakes contest. If we take Facebook, write a post about the giveaway promotion on your Facebook timeline. Don’t forget to insert the image related to the contest so that it will grab the attention of the people most.
Write a short and sweet description and include what they can win and link that to your page. Along with Facebook, target Twitter also. Write a tweet with all necessary information in short about what are the prizes and for the remaining details link that to your post.
Promote the contest in other social media networks such as Instagram, Google Plus, and LinkedIn and pin it on Pinterest. Share it with your consumers as well.
Conclusion:
Sweepstakes promotion is the best way to increase your brand and improve sales. Hope you guys got enough information about How to run Sweepstakes promotion.
Follow the tips and various ways discussed above to implement with your product promotions. Grab the benefits of it for your business. If you still facing any queries, then drop them in the comment section below and we will get back to you with the right solutions.