If you are looking for a way to substantially boost your online business revenue, you should consider trying your hand at contest marketing. With regular contests and prizes that your audience cares about, you’ll soon see just how effective this form of marketing can be. To be effective at contest marketing, you must know your audience inside and out. You must know your subject matter and you must have a way to get regular contests out to your readers, viewers, prospects and customers. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time or even the second or third times. The great thing about contests is that you can hold them over and over again until you get it just right.
Which Prizes Will You Give Away?
If you want your audience to respond to the contests you hold, you’re going to have to come up with some attractive prizes. You don’t have to go out and spend thousands of dollars on tablet computers or the latest mobile phone to get your audience excited. You merely have to know what your prospects and customers are into.
For best results, think outside of the box and try to be different than everyone else. With a little creativity and some deep thought, you should be able to come up with two or three contest marketing prizes that will have your audience scrambling to win. Then watch your online business revenue soar.
The Ingredients Of A Great Contest
For contest marketing to be effective, you need to make a big announcement. This is where you announce on social media, in an autoresponder or on your website that a big contest is coming. Make the announcement quite a bit ahead of time so that your audience can prepare. You will also want to announce at least one of your prizes. If you have a main prize and two smaller prizes, feel free to list just the main prize. You can of course list a first, second and third prize to make things extra exciting.
Once your audience is allowed to participate, you’ll really want to get their juices going with regular updates on the winnings.
Types Of Contests
There are various types of contests you can use to get your audience involved in your contest marketing efforts. You can hold a drawing where everyone has a chance to win or you can let your audience work for the prizes you’ve chosen. For the former, you merely need to ask your audience to sign up or register. While this is the least exciting form of contest, it can still be very effective at boosting your online business revenue.
Then there is the type of contest where your audience tries to win. This is the most exciting form of contest because your audience is actually vying for the prize instead of just showing up or buying a ticket. For this form of contest marketing to work, you need to have a way to regularly communicate with contestants. The following should help to give you some ideas.
- Online Forums: A forum is perfect for holding a contest. You merely create a thread that includes the rules, terms and anything else you want to add. Each post in the thread will then be created by contestants trying to win. This keeps everything organized and it also allows every contestant to see every other entry to keep things extra exciting.
- Social Networks: Facebook and Twitter are but two examples of social networks that are perfect for contest marketing. You can post the terms and conditions of the contest on your profile page and you can then update your audience with regular posts.
- Email Marketing: With regularly scheduled emails, you can keep your contestants in the loop and hanging onto the edge of their seats. With Facebook, you can create a whole other page dedicated to your contest, which will keep your audience informed and always coming back for more.
- On Your Website: By creating a separate section on your website where your contestants can go to enter and participate, you will boost your site’s traffic, generate more attention for your brand and you’ll boost your online revenue all at the same time.
Post The Winners
As soon as your contest ends, either when the winning post is entered or time is up, make sure you prominently post your winners so that other people will want to enter your next contest. This is how you garner excitement for each competition you hold. And again, you can engage in contest marketing as often as you want. Be forewarned, however, that the more you hold, the less effective they will become. You should allow some time to lapse between contests so that your audience begins to look forward to them. Then, watch your contest marketing efforts take off and your online business revenue shoot through the roof.
