Congratulations! You’ve taken the first step to boost your brand! Online contests, giveaways, games, and quizzes have the magic power to drive engagement, traffic, leads, and sales. But before they do that you need to make sure you know how to fascinate your audience with your interactive campaigns. You need to appeal to your audience, grab their attention and captivate them. It seems quite easy, doesn’t it? And believe us when we say that it really is quite straightforward – as long as you follow the tips we’re about to share!
But let’s start from the beginning. If you use one of the Easypromos applications (apart from the social media sweepstakes) your promotion will be published on an independent microsite, with a unique and shareable link.
Your main job will be to attract as many participants as possible. To accomplish this task you will need a consistent dissemination strategy that will focus on online and offline channels and publication timings. And before we take a look at how to disseminate your promotion once it’s active, let us point out one particularly important aspect: your promotion strategy can start long before you activate your campaign. Build up the suspense by sharing attention-grabbing sneak peeks of your contest, slowly introducing participation rules, or showcasing prizes that will be up for grabs. The more excitement you generate the better for you, your contests, and your brand.
Ready to promote your online campaign and attract more participants? Let’s dig in:
Promote your contest, game, giveaway or quiz on your social media channels
Let’s start with the most obvious and easiest way to promote your digital campaign. Sharing the news with your social media followers and encouraging them to enter your promotion or contest is the most widely used technique to drive traffic to promotional campaigns. This is why the very first step you want to take is inform your social media followers that the promotion has begun. Create a post on your Facebook page, share Instagram posts and Stories, and tweet about your promotion to reach as many potential entrants as possible. If you have a corporate YouTube channel you might also want to promote the campaign to your subscribers.
Encourage users to participate by explaining the participation requirements and highlighting the prizes involved in the promotion. Make sure you share a direct link to your campaign! The easier you make it for users to access your promotion the more participants you will get!
Learn how to get a direct link to share your Easypromos campaign.
But let’s remember that social media is not all about organic posts – especially now that organic posts don’t reach nearly as many people as they used to. Run ads to reach more followers and impact a new audience – social media ads are more powerful than organic posts.
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to promote the post you’ve already published on your Facebook or Instagram page. Alternatively, you can create dark posts – these ads don’t appear on your main page, but they’ll still be shown to targeted audiences.
Pin the post to the top of the page on Facebook and Twitter to promote your campaign
Pin the post to the top of your Page so that it stays visible while users can participate.
As soon as you publish your post announcing the promotion, hover over it and click on the menu that appears in the top right-hand corner. Select the option ‘Pin to top of page’. It’s a great tactic for anyone looking to target their Facebook community.
The same applies to those looking to target Twitter users. If you pin a tweet to the top of your page it will be visible to anyone visiting your Twitter account. Otherwise, the tweet with a link to your promotion will get lost between all the other messages you tweet in the meantime.
Promote your promotions with 24-hour Stories on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin
Social media users loooove Stories! All of our favorite social media channels now have the option to share videos and photos that vanish after 24 hours. What was first a phenomenon on Instagram and then Facebook has now taken over Twitter and LinkedIn.
Stories are a good way to attract new users to your page with valuable, follow-worthy content. And to promote your online campaign!
Did you know that you can create Story Ads? Learn how to promote your next promotion with Instagram Story Ads!
Customize the background image on your FB and TW
Chances are that your Facebook fans and Twitter followers will visit your page or profile while looking for information about your products or opening hours. Make sure you catch their attention as soon as they lay eyes on your profile! Change the background or header image so that it exhibits the campaign you are promoting – keep it this way for as long as your contest is running.
The cover image is the first thing that users see when they reach your Page, so they’ll be introduced to your promotions right away. Facebook now allows brands to use horizontal videos as the background – visual content attracts more user attention than static images!
Promote your online contest on key social media networks for your target audience, for example, Strava, TikTok or Twitch
We all know the most popular social media channels but let’s not forget about other networks like Strava, TikTok or Twitch among others. These platforms gather a huge amount of users that are interested in specific or niche topics. Don’t forget to promote your digital promotion to these social media users; it might be one of the not many chances to convert these individuals into qualified leads for your brand.
Donettes for instance effectively uses the Link in Bio feature on TikTok. A good step for you would be to record a new fun video and redirect your viewers to your Link in Bio so that they can head over to your active campaign.
This example from Red Bull UK is a great illustration of how brands can create online communities on secondary social media platforms. Apart from sharing regular posts, brands can also organize weekly or monthly challenges; once they’re finalized they often send out discount vouchers and coupons for their online stores. But who said you couldn’t send an email with a link to your online contest, game or quiz?
Turn your employees into brand ambassadors
Who’s more to be trusted than your employees? If your own staff believes in your product, your company will close many more sales! Encourage your coworkers to be brand ambassadors.
The easiest and most straightforward way is to ask your employees to share your campaign with their social media followers. If your employees have corporate Facebook and Twitter accounts you can also ask them to change their cover pictures to the image you used as your background picture on your company’s social media channels. It’s also a great idea to talk to your customer support team to ensure that they close all chats, tickets, and inquiries by inviting the customers to participate in your promotion.
Promote your campaign to newsletter subscribers
Lead generation is often the very main reason to run promotional actions. But wouldn’t it be great to re-engage your existing subscribers and drive repeat sales? Prepare an email campaign for your database contacts and invite them all to enter your campaign – if it’s a quiz you will be able to learn more about your subscribers and therefore offer more personalized and better targeted discounts and coupons in the future.
Convert anonymous website and blog visitors with banners and pop-ups
Think about the number of online users to visit your website, e-commerce or blog without leaving no personal information behind. And now think about how great it’d be to convert at least some of those visitors into qualified leads! Not many people are keen to share their contact details with brands – however, they’re keen on winning! Display pop-up windows and add banners introducing your branded games, contests or coupon campaigns. Many users will willingly share their contact details for a chance to win attractive prizes or simply obtain a discount code.
Flexi generated 130,000 leads with a branded mini-game. Find out how the footwear branded maximized lead generation by converting website visitors into leads – all with banners and pop-ups!
Promote in-store
Is your shop visited by numerous customers on a daily basis? Make sure you promote your online campaign to your visitors – they might not yet be your social media followers. Hand out leaflets promoting your contest, hang posters showing all the prizes that you’re raffling and print the direct link on receipts. You can also encourage all shop assistants to invite customers to participate in your giveaway while they’re at the till – the more the merrier!
Here’s an easy trick from a Spanish supermarket that was looking to grow their social media following. They organized a comment giveaway on their Instagram and Facebook accounts. All paying customers received a leaflet promoting the sweepstakes. One lucky participant won a new electric bike while the supermarket augmented their following.
Encourage participants to invite their friends to your contests
Did you know that digital promotion participants are very likely to share the promotion with their family and friends? A few years ago Easypromos found that around 43% of entrants invite their colleagues to participate in the contest, too! But don’t just wait for them to do it – make sure you encourage them to do so! You can even give users extra entries in the prize draw for each new participant they recruit!
Team up with influencers and brands to go viral
Teaming up with like-minded brands and social media influencers is a great way to reach new audiences or target a specific segment of online users. Before you launch your campaign consider collaborating with popular bloggers, influencers, and companies. Together you can offer a better prize and therefore attract more participants. And let’s not forget about growing off of each other’s backs!
Add your promotion to contest directories
If you’re not trying to promote your campaign to a specific target audience or segment, but you’re rather looking for high numbers of participants, you should definitely add your promotion, game, or giveaway to contest directories. There are many different websites that list a real variety of different digital promotions and they’re popular for their effectiveness. You will surely convert hundreds or maybe even thousands of participants but they might not be the most qualified leads for your database.
Extra trick: Focus your efforts where you get the best results: use UTMs to track the traffic
Once your promotion finishes (and while it’s still running) you can track traffic with the help of UTMs. It’s essential to know which channels work best for attracting participants to your online promotions; next time you will know which strategies worked well and which need improving.
Once you have a direct link to the promotion, create a personalized link campaign to measure where participants come from. So you can check whether a participant finds the promotion via an organic post, Facebook Ads, or other online channels.
Learn how to create a customized link campaign with Easypromos.
Setting up UTMs is easier than you think – you just need to define some parameters and add a short piece of text to the end of the link.
Are you ready to promote your campaign online? Don’t worry if you have more questions about attracting more participants to your campaign. You can contact our Customer Support Team – ready to help with all inquiries!
