Online sweepstakes promotions are an effective way to generate new leads, promote your brand and attract new customers to your business. If you want your promotion to be as effective as it can be, you need to follow a few simple design guidelines. Designing a sweepstakes promotion is not difficult, and the rewards far outweigh the effort you need to put into it.
The first thing you need to do is figure out how much you can afford to spend on your promotional efforts. Many online sweepstakes can be conducted on a shoestring budget, but some types of advertising may be expensive. Determining your budget ahead of time helps ensure that you don’t overspend. You want your sweepstakes to bring you far more benefits than it costs, so don’t spend extravagant amounts on it.
Once you’ve done this, next look at your product line and determine what you want to use as prizes for your sweepstakes. You need a grand prize that will excite potential customers; a free item that has a high value will draw more people than an item that normally costs only a few dollars. It makes the most sense to use an item that your business produces because that helps promote your business. It depends on what your objective is, however. If your objective is to get customers to advertise your business for you via their sweepstakes entries, then you may want to offer a high value item that you pay for out of pocket rather than an item your business pays for.
There are a couple of different types of sweepstakes you may want to design, depending on which social media outlets you plan to use and what you hope to accomplish. Some sweepstakes offer entries to people who sign up for a mailing list or social media page; these types of sweepstakes are easy to keep track of and implement because you will get notifications in email or on your social media pages that people entered. Other sweepstakes require customers to repost a status or use a customized hashtag related to your business in their Twitter posts. These sweepstakes can be slightly harder to keep track of, but if you set up your social media accounts appropriately you should be able to generate lists of people who have participated in your contest.
Once you’ve chosen prizes, figured out your objective and figured out how the contest will work, the next step is to determine official rules. Every sweepstakes competition must have official rules and two means of entering the sweepstakes so that you satisfy the “no purchase necessary” requirement. You might offer people the ability to enter your sweepstakes via Facebook and via postal mail, for example. The rules are often the hardest part of creating a sweepstakes promotion because you have to satisfy legal requirements for your state. You may want to consult an attorney if you aren’t sure about the laws.
Other than satisfying legal requirements, however, there’s nothing difficult about setting up a sweepstakes. As soon as you find out how to comply with the law, you can have your attorney help you draft the official rules. Then you can post your sweepstakes on your website or Facebook page and attract customers to your site.
For more information about sweepstakes, call the team at Marden-Kane today!