Here's How A Sweepstake Can Help Your Online & Offline Business

For small and medium businesses, `Sweepstakes is an effective tool to optimize the promotion. Furthermore, if you have managed sweepstakes properly then you will get the best results from the promotion of your brand or business and it becomes easier for you to increase your customer engagement.

What is a sweepstakes?

A sweepstakes for small and local businesses is generally some kind of contest in which the prizes are awarded to the winner and the selection of the winner is done randomly on chance base.

So, we can say that it does not depend on the skills of the winner. It may also be considered as a type of lottery but due to anti-lottery laws, it is now compulsory that there is no restriction of purchasing something for getting entered into the sweepstakes. So entries into the sweepstakes must be free for the people but if you intend to make purchases compulsory, you should also adopt an alternative method that encourages free entries like AMOE.

Winning a prize in sweepstakes depends on the luck of the people, not on the skills. The information you can gather from any entrant includes the basic information to award the prize like name, contact number, etc. but in some cases, additional information is also collected to create useful content. Additional information may also be needed to enter any contestant in the mailing list.

“Sweepstakes is basically a contest of marketing and getting the attention of people.” — Set Godin

Significance of sweepstakes for local business

Sweepstakes for small and medium business occupies a prime position in the promotion and publicity of a newly established business or brand and its importance can be understood from the following points:

● Hosting any sweepstakes for small and medium businesses can increase your subscribers or it may become a source of collecting leads for your business.

● It can be very beneficial in establishing a good repute and boosting your business profile in the early months after the launch of your business.

● It also creates a chance for your fan base or followers to get in touch with you and it is a fascinating opportunity for you to increase your fan base engagement. Because by participating in sweepstakes your followers feel free to stay in touch with your brand or local business

● The few lucky winners can also become a source of creating user-generated content and you can get reviews from them about your brand.

● It is an invaluable chance to create awareness about your brand.

All these tasks can be mentioned in a single contest with the same prize pool. So you can use sweepstakes as an invaluable tool for the promotion of your brand with little investment.

Here are some benefits you can get from sweepstakes:

1.Promotional advantages

Sweepstakes for small and medium businesses are helping to create a buzz in the whole marketing environment. It is an excellent opportunity for you to match or beat your rivals or competitors all at a one-time price. Online contests or sweepstakes are a better chance to generate fans online via different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.

You might have seen that different companies often offer contest promotions using different channels like radio, television, and other online sources when any new product like music or movie comes in the market. All these things are carried out to bring the attention of the peoples towards the new product. So, sweepstakes are the best tactic to leverage your promotional activity.

2.Research Advantages

From the standpoint of research, sweepstakes for small and medium business also brings many advantages. It is because when you gather information from the entrants or peoples who are willing to participate you get awareness about the names, phone numbers, and other contact information. You can also get information from them about their interests and other research questions.

It also helps you to get information about the voice of your potential customers and what are their demands or expectations regarding your business or brand. You can know about whether the peoples of your target market prefer the quality of the product or their concern is the price of the product. For instance, for a television channel, one can ask the entrants about their habits.

When consumers fill out forms for entry they must answer all the questions asked by the retailers. Companies gather this data, perform different statistical techniques, and use this information for different projects of the future.

3.Cost

Depending upon the setup and reward offered by your company for the sweepstakes, it is a cost-effective tool of marketing as compared to other tactics or tools. It requires less cost to create publicity about your brand rather than any other promotional tools if carried out wisely. You should be very strategic in your choice of prize and location to make it cost-effective and beneficial. A single price for a local business may not be that expensive. The cost of this prize can be added to different prizes offered via the ac retail chain or to promote the new products.

Its cost can also be considered as a blessing in disguise because it could generate more revenue. The revenue generated after the promotion will be ten times the amount of the prize.

Indifference

There are many factors that affect the objectives of the sweepstakes for small and medium businesses. Any business owner should also keep them in mind. The factors that mask the activity or performance of sweepstakes could be as:

● Sometimes the entrants do not even pay attention to the brand or the business that is carrying out the sweepstakes. They simply fill the form and drop it into the box and don’t notice the name of the brand.

● Due to the increased use of social media, almost all the businesses and brand arrange some sort of sweepstakes, contests or giveaways to promote their business, due to which the potential consumers go through different sweepstakes and contests with the chance of winning exciting prizes due to which they become fed up of these type of contests and don’t pay attention to them

● Sometimes it happens that the entrants or even the winners don’t get a lot of appreciation or a memorable impact due to which the promoter could not achieve the goals they expect.

Objectives of sweepstakes

Here are some objective and aims you must set up before sweepstakes for the promotion of your business

1.Capturing Lead

If you want to increase the numbers of your participants, the instant way to get more participants is to get them to enter by providing their email address.

Most of the organization appears with a lead capturing form that is required by the audience to join the contest.

So, sweepstakes for small business is a chance of getting your email newsletter subscribed.

It is realized in the business community now a day that shouting in a crowd is of no use to capture lead or for creating awareness about the brand.

By following the tactics mentioned here you may create brand awareness but you not be able to get conversions if the prize you are offering is not relevant to the target customers.

If you shout only you will not be heard. Today the voice of customers is that the product offered must be relevant to them.

“We do not intend to push our ideas on the customers and end-users, we are meant to make and offer what they want or desire.” — Laura Ashley

2.Growing your followers on social media

If your goal is to increase your followers base of the fan base on different social media platforms, then you should adopt the following tactics:

● You should ask your entrants to like any image on Instagram, Facebook, or any other platform.

● You can also ask your followers to comment on any image or post on any of your social sites.

● You can ask them to re-pin any of their favourite images from your boards on Pinterest.

3.building awareness about the brand

It means to make your brand or business a household name. This goal is more theoretical rather than being concrete. It means that you can overlap this goal with other goals.

So to create awareness about your business you should initiate the process of promotion on your social media platform and then you should redirect all the entrants or participants to your official site. Where you can add a sign-up option for the users to enter and enroll.

4.Increase sale or conversions

It is coherent with the idea of creating brand awareness. Because if you become able to bring the consumers to the storefront or Marketplace listing, then it is an excellent and outstanding opportunity to boost up the conversions or sales procedure.

Goals regarding the sweepstakes for small and medium business

However, it does not matter what is your objective, the goal mentioned here will help you to make sweepstakes for small and medium business a silver bullet for you.

1.Selecting a suitable platform for sweepstakes

If you are intended to run any sweepstakes for the small and medium businesses you should adopt a strategic approach while selecting the platform to create awareness about the event.

There is a number of options for hosting the event. You can host the sweepstakes on your official website or run it on different social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, etc.

There are different terms and conditions for these three websites regarding the hosting of any sweepstakes or giveaways.

They have listed their own do’s and don’ts if you want to sponsor any event or sweepstakes on their platform. For example, you should mention on every platform that your sweepstakes for small and local businesses don’t own any sponsorship, administration, endorsement, or affiliation to their platform.

Let’s have an overview of different platforms in order to check which platform is best to make your sweepstakes beneficial for your local business

“Every advertisement and promotion should be considered as a key contributor to the complex symbol that is known as the brand image.” — David Ogilvy

2.Promotions on Facebook

If you want to use the platform of Facebook, you must host the promotion of your event on your official business page or any group for your business on Facebook. You cannot make use of your personal accounts for developments. The point to be noted is that you can’t make the use of your fellow’s connections to promote your local business. So, it is of no use to ask your fans for “tagging the friends,” or “sharing the event” on their timeline. Moreover, asking people to like your page is of no go. The only task you can do is to ask someone to comment on your page to enter the contest.

3. Promotion via Instagram

Instagram also has similar rules like that of Facebook to promote or host the sweepstakes for small and medium businesses. It does not allow the peoples including the promoter or the entrant to tag your fellows or fan base in the posts of your brand.

The thing you can do is to ask the followers to share or post their own photo that relates or is suitable for your niche. For instance, Food 52 a very famous website that is related to food executes this task every weekend. They ask their fans to share the photo of any meal they cooked round the weekend that is according to the hashtag of the weekend like #f52desert. It is not like a contest but you can promote your event and increase your fan base if the winner of the contest is a food blogger and it happens so often. You can maximize your fan base at an exponential rate by re-posting.

4. Promotion on Pinterest

On this platform of Pinterest, users or entrants can enter the contest only once. The drawback here is that you cannot ask your followers to re-pin your post. But the outcome of this rule is that more organic and fresh content is generated on Pinterest. So, here is the chance that you can encourage your followers to re-pin any post from the board you created for the promotion of your sweepstakes of small and medium businesses.

“Incredible awareness about the brand and bottom-line advantages could be achieved through the sweepstakes for small and medium businesses if and only sincerity, quality content, eye-catching prize, constant work and engagement, long-term commitment, and strategic moves and stunning storytelling are adopted.” — Gary V.

5.Selection of technical stuff like a prize, winner

Before announcing the sweepstakes for small and medium businesses, you should select the prize of the winner. For this purpose, you should be well aware of the mentality of the customer. The recommendation is that you should choose a prize that is related to your business.

For example, some companies were offering tablets at the start of the sweepstakes, but the idea is not very creative because the customers might find the i-pads suitable or beneficial, but it cannot keep them considerate after the sweepstakes to your brand. So be strategic while choosing the prize and select a thing that maximizes your promotion and engagement of customers to your business. Prizes like tablets could not prove pertinent to your lead base.

6.Collecting Data and Selecting winners

If you want to make your sweepstakes for small and medium business successful, you should also hire a panel of judges to select the winner. Because as we have mentioned earlier that winning the giveaways do not require skills, so you should be very conscious in choosing the winners of the contest. If you are hosting an event, there are chances that there could be more than two winners as required by the sweepstakes and heir number could be increased to 15. So it is customary to select the winner at random but you may use some software to select the entrant and to collect their data.

How a sweepstakes helps you to run a business…?

Here are some other benefits of using sweepstakes for your small and medium business and how you should run any sweepstakes event:

a. Build Community

You can build a strong following if you run any sweepstakes event successfully. Peoples do not get awareness about a brand only when they get to know through their family members, friends, and other relatives. So arranging an event regarding the brand creates awareness and peoples share the news of giveaways at different platforms.

Building a community is of paramount importance for any newly established business and the task of establishing community is executed efficiently with the help of sweepstakes. Due to sweepstakes, the contestants are urged and compelled to talk about the business you have established. It is due to social media contests that business owners do not build

b. Incentivize others to follow

A giveaway or sweepstakes for small businesses is an exciting way for the peoples to follow your social media accounts. Sometimes different business organizations motivate peoples to follow pages of their business by providing hyperlinks at different platforms to direct them to ads on any official website. Any sweepstakes is a strong reason for the peoples to follow your accounts in exchange for a stunning chance to win the exciting prizes you are offering.

c. Win-win game

It is of no doubt that brand and business make multiple benefits from sweepstakes but it is also an exciting chance for the peoples to win a contest, awards, prizes, coupons, etc. So it is win to win game for both the companies and the audience as both of them earn something in end. If the clients are gotten happy then they will develop a long term and sustained relationship with the company.

d. Marketing via word of mouth

You can amplify the radius of your market by arranging successful sweepstakes for small and medium businesses. It is because when you offer exciting prizes, you get advertised by your customers and clients. It is also adopted by different companies that they make it compulsory for every entrant to share the event of contest or sweepstakes to 10 peoples and all of them could enter the contest by sharing the new to 10 more peoples. It is a legitimate strategy to increase your audience and reach as many peoples as you can.

e. Increased traffic

Peoples visit different websites due to good incentives. Offers related to small and big gifts to customers act as a motivation for the peoples to search and visit your page the most. Thus these searches and visits increase the ranking of your website or page on google. Thus every customer or visitor of the page is the ultimate source of creating awareness, sales, or conversions of company. Or we can say that everyone visiting the site is a source of profit for the business in the long run. Moreover, an increase in the exposure of your brand will help to increase your sales pitch also. The main idea of offering sweepstakes for small and local businesses is to create sales and grow efficiently and rapidly.

So, it is concluded that the sweepstakes for small and medium business are very crucial and offers multiple benefits within a very short time. Several benefits could be availed only if the hosting and the management of sweepstakes is done properly. They are a very outstanding way to boost the business in terms of customers, awareness, lead, subscribers, customer reach, advertisement, sales, and demands, etc. Summarizing the whole discussion, I conclude that sweepstakes are an excellent and fantastic tool for the promotion of a newly established venture or startup in order to publicize your business, to build up a fan base or fan community, to motivate and stimulate the peoples to follow the brand. Sweepstakes for small businesses is a quite comprehensive and time-efficient way to create awareness among the peoples about your brand. Those companies who build a strategy for hosting and running any sweepstakes event through social media and make progress by leaps and bounds.

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Chris Gulli | Entrepreneur | Content Creator

Chris is a big advocate of free traffic methods, he is always researching websites and strategies to generate free traffic, he is also in love with automation and always on the look for new software to be able to automate the weirdest things. Chris is also in charge of “The Digital Business Owner” project and you can ask him marketing related questions here, which he will then answer on the show — https://www.sharpn.io/ask-chris

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Originally published at https://www.sharpn.io on August 16, 2020