How to Grow Your Brand with Social Media Contests
Social media contests have proven to be a very effective way to grow a brand in this digital age. Brands can explore the numerous benefits of this marketing strategy, which comes with little to no expense. With the help of a social media marketing agency, this can be done effectively, however, you can make use of the following very simple ways to use social media contests to grow a brand. Take a look at these 7 tips below.
1. Have a defined purpose
There are different aspects of every brand and your business needs to make a decision on the ones to focus on first in order to drive a very effective social media contest. If your company is thinking of using social media contests must decide on whether they want to increase the engagement on their website or social media page, draw traffic to their website, increase social media presence, increase brand awareness or even market a new product or service that they are about to release. Having a clear focus will help guide the strategy used to develop the contest that will be most effective for accomplishing that objective.
2. Give something of high value
The law of reciprocation is very important here for a very effective social media contest that will help grow a brand. Giving someone something of value can really spur that person to go above and beyond. This is simply because you put extra thought into the gift itself. This simple act can be transferred to a business setting where brands are willing to give something of high value to those who participate or win the social media contest. Your brand does not have to give beyond what it can afford but the quality of the gift is what matters especially in relation to the target audience that the business hopes to gain. People will be more than willing to participate in the contest when they see the value of what they stand to gain, making it super easy to get the word out about the contest and get more persons participating.
3. Know your target audience
It’s vital to think of social media contests as a marketing strategy that you can run with little to no money. And as with any marketing strategy that hopes to be successful, the brand needs to have a clear understanding of the ideal target audience. People who have no interest in what your brand has to offer have no business participating in the contest because it will just be a waste. While it is good to draw the attention of many people, your business must also draw the attention of its ideal target audience. Having a good understanding of who your brand’s target audience is will help with creating the perfect social media contest, in terms of tailoring it to their needs and interests, that will be effective.
4. Use good tools to run and manage social media contests
There are quite a lot of free and paid tools out there that brands can use to effectively run and manage all their social media contests depending on the type. Some of these tools come with really cool integration features that allow brands to integrate these contests easily with their social media pages or their websites
5. Decide on the best fitting contest
There are quite a lot of social media contest formats available. Like we mentioned earlier, in order to decide which format will be most effective in delivering the core objective of the brand, your business will need to decide on the primary goal of the contest and then clearly understand who the ideal target audience is. A combination of these two will help determine the best contest format that will drive the most effect. When more than one contest format is used, it would be most effective for driving the goals as you can experiment with each to see the ones that will sit well with the target audience as well as generate more results (based on the objective your brand has in mind).
6. Decide on the best social media platform to carry out the contest
If your brand has a clear purpose for the social media contest, it will find it much easier to determine which social media platform would be best to use, in terms of the features in relation to the objective of the brand. For brands that want to integrate their website to the contest, social media platforms that make it easy to share links that people can easily click and get redirected to would be the preferred option. Also, having a clear understanding of your brand’s target audience will help with determining which social media platforms that the target audience uses the most.
With these two crucial steps, your brand can decide on the social media platform that will get the most result. It can also experiment with two to three dominant social media platforms that the target audience engages with the most. If your brand has more of its target audience using Facebook and Instagram, it can have the contest on both platforms at the same time or alternate between both platforms each time a contest is run. This way the business will have a better understanding of how its followers interact on its social media page during such contests and then learn more about how to improve their experience to drive more engagement.
7. Create an experience to remember
While millennials and Generation Z are all about building connection first with a brand before deciding to part away with their precious time, (which sadly is very limited with so many things to distract them on the internet today, and their precious money), they are also about having a good experience which is the quickest way for brands to get their loyalty.
Always ask yourself, when people participate in this contest what do you want them to remember two to three years from now after the dust has settled? This is crucial if you do not want to create a contest that will easily be forgotten. Recall the ‘Coca-Cola Find Your Name on the Bottle’ contest? Where the brand got people scrambling through every supermarket to find the bottle with their name on it. If so, such a contest is what you should be aiming for.