7 Reasons Why You Should Engage Your Community with a Contest

The subtle art of engaging your target community is the best practice you can master when building your business or brand reputation. Through active engagement, people test your products/services, learn the values that you communicate, and if you’re lucky, make the decision to stay with your brand long-term. Launching an online contest for your community is an effective and inexpensive way to attract the attention of the right audience.

How contests increase engagement

Engagement can be defined as the active interaction between a brand and a target community realized in versatile forms like shares, comments, content creation, and more. By communicating with your business in one way or another, people develop mental shortcuts associated with a contest, the contents your brand promotes, or the products you offer. Therefore, contests boost engagement by examining the heuristics of a target persona and impacting his/her decision-making.

The ways to engage your community with a contest

You’ll probably fail if you try to build strong bonds with a prospective client by relying on sweepstakes alone. Since running a contest to increase engagement has become a traditional practice, your brand has to pick a unique approach which works for the target community. Here are some proven ways of engaging a community with a contest:

• Awaken creativity. The most memorable for the audience are the contests that require getting creative. Don’t be afraid to make your contests complicated. To build a targeted engagement campaign, you have to attract those people who’re ready to invest their effort into a contest. From video commercial creation to sharing personal stories, there are many engaging activities your audience is happy to do for your brand.
• Educate. A contest can build great virality for your business if it’s set on teaching your audience something new. Encourage people to participate in an expedition, set up a creative workshop series, or feed your community to some engaging facts. A good example of learning-centered contests is the VISA Everywhere Campaign asking startupers to build business ideas to inspire millennials.

• Doing good. Another powerful source of inspiration for any community is participating in contests that encourage doing good works. In 2017, Oscar Mayer’s “Good Mood Mission” engaged over 3 million people who were asked to share things which made them happy on social media. In exchange, the company invested 1 pound of food in Feeding America for each post.

The top 7 reasons why you should engage your community with a contest

Still hesitating about a contest campaign? We’ve collected 7 whys that help you make a final decision. Here are the 7 reasons to engage your community with a contest and help your brand hit a home run:

Growing your list

One of the biggest values that your contest generates is a list of email addresses. Make the field of entering a personal email address mandatory to collect as many contacts as possible. This way, you have a bridge to your community and are able to treat them to lucrative follow-up offers, inform about updates, and engage in further campaigns. To maintain a balance between interaction and intrusion, ensure your audience always has the option to unsubscribe. Getting a targeted contact list is an excellent way to grow your revenue and traffic.

Building awareness

Especially if you’re a newcomer entering the world of powerful industry sharks, online contests can help you win a place at the top. Building engaging campaigns that maximize shares and UGC creation, you push the awareness about your business sky high.

Gain trust through user-generated contents

There’s 28% brand engagement increase if a company uses the combination of professional and user-generated contents to promote its products or services. UGC creation adds value to your business offers, because it highlights the unbiased positions of unpaid clients and thus generates trust for a brand.

Let your community make a valuable investment into a brand through contests promoting the creation of digital assets. These can be video/photo materials, creative commercials, essays, or any types of UGC content interacting with your business mission.

Increase the number of followers

Your fanbase builds hype around your brand on social media. Although the principles of Facebook social media marketing will change in 2018, launching contests in which people write unbiased reviews of your brand on their personal pages will help you create buzz. The more attention the name of your brand generates on social media, the higher the engagement you build.

Maximize exposure

Online contests engage not only your existing clients, but also their friends, relatives, and coworkers. Launch competitions in which you ask people tag their friends or share your contents with a specific number of people to capitalize on online exposure.

Sell it

Sales increase is the logical outcome every business wants to achieve when building contest campaigns. To make an online contest benefit your revenue, launch campaigns that can acquaint your community with a product or service. Either by testing it in the course of participation or by winning a free demo as a prize, there are great ways to make your contests impact buying decisions.

Refresh

There are many outstanding companies losing their clients because they don’t interact with them enough. To keep your relationships alive, you have to cherish every connection. Otherwise, there’s a risk that loyal clients will simply forget about you getting distracted by some other buzzy brands. Launching online contests is the good way to refresh your clients’ memories.

Tips on how to increase engagement with contests

Set up a contest to get more engagement following these working tricks:

• Do co-marketing. Two heads are better than one. If there’s some brand in your industry you’d like to work with, go for a co-marketing campaign. Co-host an online contest that resonates with both your marketing and the marketing of your partner to maximize the impact.
• Run seasonal contests. Leverage the vibe of Christmas or the summer heat to build targeted contests that can catch the attention of your community.
• Automate. Use automated software solutions to make both contest organization and participation easier.

Conclusion

Automated, online contests pave your way to targeted communication with a loyal community, build a fanbase, and maximize your marketing efforts. Build engaging contests in a few clicks and grow the game reputation of your brand