As an online marketer, your job is to consistently build excitement around your brand. This is where contest marketing comes in handy. People love contests. It appeals to their competitive side, the side that likes winning. And speaking of winning, people love to win and get free stuff. Catchy contest marketing can bring your audience out in droves, but only if you come up with some good ideas. The following are some catchy contests to market for 2013 so that you can hopefully ‘win’ over a whole new section of your target market.
Video Contests
One of the best contests to market for 2013 is the video contest. Never before has it been easier for the average person to record a high-quality video. Nearly everyone has access to an HD camera, with them being built into many modern day smartphones and tablets. You can ask your audience to record a video of themselves using your product, or you could ask them to come up with your new brand slogan. As you’re going to see with most of these catchy contest marketing ideas, appealing to your audience’s creative side is always the way to go.
Short Stories
People love to create and they love it even more if their creation wins them something. These don’t have to be long stories. They can be as long as a Tweet. You could hold the most creative Tweet contest revolving around your brand. And that’s the key. Try to make the catchy contest marketing entries revolve around your brand, your products and services or the overall customer experience.
Participation
If you don’t want to have to put up with an elaborate entry and scoring system, you can always hold a contest for mere participation. Your entrants could participate in your contest marketing campaign by Liking your Facebook business page, by repinning your Pinterest pins or anything else you have in mind. If you are hosting a webinar, why not sign people up for your contest if they register early. Use your imagination and give your contest a catchy name. That’s how catchy contest marketing is done.
Let Your Contestants Do the Work for You?
Are you thinking about sprucing up your ecommerce page? Are you thinking about revamping your Facebook profile? Why not let your contest marketing entrants do all your hard work for you. Instead of merely sending out a survey asking your audience what design and content changes they’d prefer, why not turn it into yet another contest to market for 2013?
You could ask for people to submit their best color choices, their best logo ideas or designs or you could even ask people to design you an entire new website mockup. Ideally, you’ll want to make it so that everyone in your audience can participate. If you ask for technical knowledge, you may end up alienating someone who wants to participate but doesn’t have the know-how to do so.
For this reason, you will want to keep your contest marketing campaigns open to all who want to participate and make sure that everyone has a chance to win.
Prizes to Use
While coming up with catchy contest marketing ideas is never easy, coming up with the prizes to include in those contests is an even bigger challenge. Only you know what your audience would be interested in. You don’t have to go out and buy the latest iPad or Samsung Galaxy, but you should include prizes that are worthwhile. Even if that includes nothing more than listing the winner’s name on your home page, as long as the winner feels as though the effort of participating was worthwhile, you’ll have done your job as a contest marketer.
Catchy contest marketing should be conducted by every marketer at least once a year. It’s a perfect opportunity for building more awareness for your brand and you just may end up creating a feeding frenzy of activity that revolves around your brand. Now that you have some ideas of contests to market for 2013, start spreading the word and tell your audience to step right up to see what they could win.
