Sweepstakes and Contest Promotions Boost Social Engagement and Capture First-Party Data

Many social media marketing strategies for the world’s largest brands have a primary success measure of awareness, impressions and consumer engagement. For retail and e-commerce businesses, social media provides essential targeting to convert impressions into direct e-commerce sales. But your social media strategy doesn’t have to be so polarized. Digital promotions provide an essential link between engagement and marketing acquisition.

Bridge the Social Engagement Gap

Organic social efforts aim to target your followers with your message and get them to engage through likes, click-throughs, and even re-sharing. Paid social efforts look to expand your reach through audience targeting, getting click-throughs or a follow from reaching consumers with that message.

Digital promotions are a key way that you can make the most of your marketing efforts from both paid and organic social efforts. Sweepstakes, instant win games and contests all carry the excitement of winning a prize. This creates a message that draws more consumer attention and more viral sharing.

Linking your paid and organic social efforts to the same digital promotion microsite makes it easy to incentivize users to signup, plus you can include an opt-in to your seasonal or ongoing marketing efforts. This turns your social media activation into a driver for further tactical marketing goals. It’s a great way to grow email opt-in lists and boost key parts of your marketing funnel that need a lift.

Want to Keep the Conversation on Social? No Problem!

Not looking to drive users away from social to a dedicated promotion microsite? No problem! Here are two ways we can help you keep users going where you’d like, just providing a little extra incentive to action:

1. Choose an action on your website that can qualify for a sweepstakes entry (including a purchase — we take care of all the legal requirements). This could be a newsletter signup, creating an account, confirming their mobile number — you can set almost any action as the eligibility requirement for an entry into a sweepstakes. This means you can simply make messaging updates to your website and we’ll worry about the back-office logistics of legal requirements and selecting a winner.
2. Invite users to engage your brand directly on social media. At Realtime Media, we have the ability to crawl social channels to collect qualifying entries (both text and photo/video). We can even provide you a snippet of code to display those entries in a curated gallery on your website, or we can build you a promotional landing page that includes the official rules for the promotion and instructions to consumers on steps they should take on social to enter.

When entries are collected from social platforms, you can screen or judge entries in our Admin Review Tool:

And we have different gallery styles you can use to feature your collected entries:

Learn more about our Social and User-Generated Content capabilities here!

Incorporating Digital Promotions Boosts Click-Through Rates and Engagement

By using a big shiny prize, you create a value exchange where consumers are willing to engage with your brand, provide first-party data, create and share content for a chance to win. These campaigns can live exclusively on social, include a call to action/click/swipe to collect first-party data or a combination.

In the example below, an e-commerce site is looking to drive sales with a (% off) sale. Look how easy it is to incorporate a sweepstakes overlay to convert a social media impression into a first-party, marketable prospect. Plus, they can still be re-directed to the e-commerce site after they signup.

Our clients typically report a 25% boost in click-throughs (via emails or social media ad channels) when a sweepstakes or contest is involved. This means a decreased cost-per-acquisition for a prospect and even more people being re-directed to the purchase-driving destination.

Conclusion

Whether you are looking to optimize your current social media efforts or looking for experimental opportunities with new social media content, you can see how sweepstakes, instant win games, and contests are excellent drivers of increased engagement and go far beyond likes or impressions. Plus, we handle all other services you require when running a sweepstakes or contest promotion: legal administration, official rules, purchase-to-enter sweepstakes requirements, development, winner outreach, and randomized winner drawings, and even prize procurement.