5 brand benefits of running consumer competitions

It's a fact, consumer competitions work.

On average, 34% of participants become customers after entering a competition, while 33% of participants are open to receiving future communications from that brand.

Social media has become the go-to platform for promotions and contests, with brands hosting competitions on Instagram growing their followers 70% faster than those that don't.

People are also 8x more likely to enter a competition using their mobile phone today than 10 years ago, leaving further room to grow on-pack competitions that use SMS, USSD and WhatsApp for entries.

The brand benefits of competitions

Consumers love the chance to win prizes, which is great news for marketers because competitions (aka contest marketing) bring with them a host of benefits for your brand.

Here's our 5 top competition brand wins:

1. Competitions drive purchases, helping you to reach important sales targets and get more products into consumers' hands
2. Competitions provide a ton of customer data that you can harvest to inform future marketing strategies (as well as legally access those all-important customer email addresses, as email remains one of the most influential channels for conversion)
3. Competitions provide novel ways to engage potential and current customers, helping your brand stand out from the crowd (and all that marketing clutter)
4. Competitions help collect user-generated content, showing how potential and current customers perceive, interact with, and experience your products in their own words, visuals or videos (which are a great source of creative inspiration for your marketing department)
5. Competitions can be aligned to any marketing objective, from building a subscriber database, generating leads or launching a new product or brand

But how to do it?

One of the biggest challenges marketers face is effectively using competitions, contests, sweepstakes and promotions to reap these rewards.

The primary reason is that brands often lack the creative and technical resources needed to manage a competition from start to finish, especially when it comes to entry mechanics and prize fulfilment. The latter is particularly time consuming and most often underestimated by brands with little or no experience in this area.

All aspects at every participant touchpoint must be proficiently handled, and prizes efficiently dispatched and received by prize winners, to prevent your brand-building competition from turning into a reputational disaster.

What we can do for your brand

At FoneWorx, we know competitions and have been running them on behalf of some of South Africa's most renowned brands for more than 25 years.

From this experience we have learnt what works and what doesn't, and have formulated our competition and fulfilment solution around that.

We can help you with:

• Selecting competition winners using an externally audited Pick a Winner solution, done in conjunction with our internal auditors (can be undertaken with external auditors too)
• Verifying competition winners, including collecting required documentation for verification
• Delivering instant airtime or data prizes throughout Africa
• Digital vouchering - the new way to reward customers en masse without the hassle of physical delivery (ideal for sampling and quick rewards, and eliminates many fulfilment costs)
• Prize storage and delivery where you need to ship physical prizes to winners across South Africa

Contest marketing nurtures brand loyalty among existing customers, and delivers unparalleled brand awareness among potential customers, with excellent conversion rates. Make sure it's part of your marketing mix.

Sources: 

https://www.snipp.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-sweepstakes-promotion 

https://www.tailwindapp.com/blog/instagram-contest-ideas-that-will-grow-your-followers-70-faster