Running a business requires a lot of work. You’ll find that you need to focus on a number of different areas to keep things up and running and to generate as much profit as possible – which is ultimately every business’ main goal.
With profits come expansion, wider recognition and further success. While there are countless areas that you could focus on to maximise your business’ success, for now, we will focus on competitions. Competitions are an often neglected form of marketing that many businesses fail to engage with. But the savvy amongst are aware that competitions hold a lot of scope and potential when it comes to boosting sales, building brand awareness and generally helping your company along the path to success. Here’s some more information on the subject that you could use to your benefit!
How Competitions Can Benefit Your Business
As briefly touched upon above, competitions can hold a huge number of benefits for your business. People love something for nothing. But your business can’t necessarily afford to give something for free to everyone who comes across it. This wouldn’t be cost effective and would likely result in mass losses. Instead, a competition offers you an alternative, which is giving something free out to one person while engaging a huge number of people who enter for a chance to be that individual. When you hold a competition, you only have to forgo one prize, but in return, you can boost engagement with your brand and direct more people to your website where they may go on to make purchases or encourage more people to follow your social media, where a later post may entice them to buy a product.
Planning a Competition
If you’re planning on running a competition, you need to come up with the competition itself, as well as the terms and conditions, before going public with it. Coming up with a great competition takes multiple areas of expertise. You’ll need advice from a financial perspective – what you can afford to give away and what anticipated return you’ll get from it, helping you to determine whether the competition is worthwhile or not.
You’ll require advice on legalities of the competition. What you can ask people to do, how you need to store their data and how to set terms and conditions so that people can’t raise complaints or legal cases against you as a result of the competition. You’ll need to decide how you’re going to spread awareness of the competition and how you’ll ensure people know it exists and want to enter it. You’ll have to decide how long the competition will run for and what people have to do to be eligible. You’ll find yourself coming up with fair ways to choose a winner. This isn’t even a comprehensive list of all of the different areas you’ll need to take into consideration. As you can see, a lot of work is going to go into it!
Deciding a Prize
Of course, the level of prize will depend on what you can afford to give away. The bigger and more impressive the prize, the more attention the competition will get. However, generally speaking, many brands settle for giving away some of their own stock to a lucky winner.
Spreading Awareness
You’ll have to curate a whole marketing campaign around spreading awareness of your competition. You could post on social media. You could contact your mailing list. You could include labels on products you’re selling to inform people of the competition – perhaps through a dedicated area printed onto your packaging or bottle neck tags. You may want to run promotional campaigns with promotional staff – though this is better advised after the pandemic and social distancing measures have passed. If you want to go all out and have a large budget, you may even want to consider TV or radio ads.
Setting Terms and Conditions
Make sure to make your terms and conditions extremely clear. Make it clear exactly what people have to do to enter. Make it clear when they need to enter by. Make it clear exactly what prize will be awarded and to how many individuals. You should also include any further essential caveats and conditions too.
As you can see, competitions can do wonders for your business. While they will require time and financial investment to get up and going and to manage, they will generally prove more than worth their while. So, why not try one out? It could be the best thing your company has ever done!