Guide to Running Online Competitions

It takes a strong user engagement strategy to keep your business afloat. While there are thousands of ways to interact with your target audience, an online contest is the most interactive. Through competitions, you can incentivize action. This is why people who participate in your contest can’t avoid connecting to your project or business. The biggest challenge is getting your target persona on board. Based on the best contest strategies we’ve seen, we have created a step-by-step guide on how to run online competitions that will appeal to your community.

Reasons to organise online competitions

Even with a very tight budget, it’s possible to build an online contest that will transform your business goals into reality. Here’s why using a contest strategy is worth the effort:

• Online competitions give you a fan base. Having thousands of Facebook followers shouldn’t necessarily be a fundamental business goal. Still, it’s never a bad idea to strengthen your online presence. But don’t get confused about the goal here; it’s not about “like to enter” or “follow to enter” campaigns. In fact, according to Facebook’s contest regulations, you aren’t even allowed to use these types of entry methods. By engaging people with a contest that is linked to your social media pages, you’ll grow followers organically.
• You can collect personal data. Expending a contact base means getting new customers, so if there is one reason why businesses run online contests, it’s definitely to get new contacts. The GDPR is becoming a game changer though. Now, without adding an unticked opt-in box and a clear privacy policy message to your contest page, you can’t ask a user to share his or her private data with you.

Let’s look on the bright side though. The GDPR definitely restricts your marketing strategy, but it also makes it more targeted. In other words, the users who provide unambiguous consent demonstrate their willingness to interact with your business in the future.

• You can make money in the long run. The ultimate goal of running any online contest is to convert leads into paying customers. To increase sales through competitions, tie your campaign in with a product or service you want to sell. Offer a product demo as a prize, or make interaction with your business into a contest stage. If your contest strategy involves a UGC component, the chances for maximizing financial profits will increase while the trustworthiness of your business goes up.

The core elements of a successful online competition

Before exploring the guide on how to run an online competition, first make sure you understand its core components:

• Objective: There might be several goals you want to achieve with your online competition. However, to make it truly successful, you need to stay focused on your main priority.
• Target persona: The best way to create a successful contest is to cater to the interests and behavior of a real person who could be your target persona.
• Type: A Facebook photo contest or a sweepstakes? Connect the type of online competition with the main goal you want to reach.
• Contest prize: A good reward can be the strongest value offer. Pick a contest prize that relates to both your clients’ interests and your business.
• Theme: Don’t just stop with something like a “Christmas contest.” Research popular trends to spice it up. For instance, for a competition related to AI trends, you can choose something like “Sophia the Robot Challenge” or “AI Cheating Game.”
• Platform: Depending on where your contest is hosted, it can be a sophisticated arrangement of processes and tasks or a one-click thing. If it’s a social media contest, choose the platform with regulations that you can easily comply with. For competitions hosted on a website, it’s best to use an awards management system.
• Rules: It’s important to ensure your online contest stays within the law. Build crystal-clear participation and judging rules that are compliant with your chosen platform’s regulations.
• Promotion: A marketing plan for each stage of contest organisation as well as a detailed timeline are the must-have elements of a strong online competition.
• Winner selection: The mechanism of contest evaluation must be determined in advance. Ensure that your winner selection plan matches your chosen platform’s capabilities as well as the expectations of the participants.

How to run online competitions step by step

To help you craft a strong contest journey, there are four critical steps that you can break down into smaller tasks and align with your goals:

Determine the objectives and design the rules accordingly

An online contest that you create should be based on a smart combination of practical evidence, the organiser’s business goals, and compliance with platform regulations. Since the latter two aspects are pretty understandable, we’ll focus on the first one here.

Whether you have experience running online contests or not, trends are changing on an almost daily basis. This is why it’s critical to make your research regarding popular platforms, contest duration, and themes before launching a campaign. LostGolfBalls recently ran an experiment to see how strongly generated contest revenue depends on the duration of a competition. They discovered that a two-week online contest brought the company $6,400 in revenue, while a four-week contest brought only $4,200. Based on this evidence, you can polish your contest rules and maximise your profits.

Define judging mechanics

Choose online judging software that automates your contest management from both technical and marketing perspectives. Here are the common aspects that you can take note of to make the right choice when it comes to finding a judging tool:

• Scoring capabilities
• Pricing
• Management of multiple judging rounds and categories
• Entries segmentation
• Integration with social media
• Security
• Judges’ abstention

Once you have your perfect tool, develop a step-by-step process of contest evaluation (separate for both judges and contestants), and publish them before the contest begins.

Promote aggressively

Paid ads, blogging, email, or social media—you should get serious about each channel you plan to leverage. Estimate your marketing budget, and choose the activities that can bring you maximum profits. Next, create a schedule of promotion activities with the biggest focus on pre-event marketing.

Measure an impact

The final step is tracking the results of your online campaign. If you use contest analytics tools, you’ll be able to easily extract data related to submission rates, judging results, financial profits, and more. If you choose to do this manually, ensure you identify the major trends, but don’t spend too much time on tracking insights that are irrelevant. This means if your initial goal was to collect contacts of prospective clients, focus on extracting collected emails and studying opt-in analytics.

Conclusion

High-converting online contests can strengthen your business by attracting new clients and maximising your online presence. By following this guide on how to run a successful online competition, you’ll be able to determine a success formula that will work the best with your audience.