Top 3 Ways to Drive Results for Back to School Promotions

#1 Activate Cross-Channel with Event-Based Promotions

Tying your promotion to a real-world event is a great way to maximize engagement with your promotion. Not only does this tactic help create contextual relevance for your promotion, but it also generates brand awareness. Aligning your brand’s promotion with the event keeps your top of mind with consumers.

Between parents getting their kids ready to go back to school, or college students getting ready for their upcoming semester, back to school promotions are a great way to directly connect and engage a wide target audience. Especially relevant for B2C companies, school season should be a mainstay in your digital marketing strategy.

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When planning your back to school promotion, there are three (3) major ways to ensure that your promotion drives results -

1. Create a Purchase Incentive that provides participants a chance to win or use a “Buy Two” qualifying purchase requirement and have them redeem for a guaranteed reward.
2. Engage Across Social Media with a hashtag promotion or encourage social followers to comment with a promotion hashtag and tag a friend.
3. Be Sure to Promote a Relevant Prize Pool that market research suggests your target audience may be interested in winning.

#2 Boost Revenue with Purchase to Enter Promotions

A surefire way to generate a boost in revenue with your back to school promotion is to launch a promotion that requires entrants to purchase a product in order to gain entry into the promotion. By placing the incentive behind school supplies that shoppers may have already purchased (such as notebooks, pens, or pencils) you are creating yet another reason for consumers to interact with your brand.

With purchase to enter promotions it is important to keep No Purchase Necessary Laws in mind. To avoid a penalty from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an Alternate Free Means of Entry (AMOE) must be provided. Known also as a mail-in entry, AMOEs give users the ability to enter the promotion for free to avoid illegal lottery laws.

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#3 Incentivize Social Media Interaction

Like many digital promotions, one of your primary goals is likely to engage users and raise brand awareness. Many brands consider social media a core part of their overall marketing strategy. For this reason, hashtag promotions are a great solution to efficiently reach your followers, and insert an incentive that widens your audience and boost your social media goals.

Cost-effective and quick to launch, social media promotions leverage the familiar mechanics of social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. With a simple call to action, you can kick off your promotion and engage consumers.

“Post your favorite memory of our brand with the hashtag #YouCouldWinSweepstakes for the chance to win”

With Realtime Media, we make aggregating social media entries simple. Whether you are looking to collect posts and user generated content from users as they post, or gather likes or comments from an influencer post, we’ve got you covered.

Prize Procurement & Fulfillment Services

At the final stage of every enter-to-win promotion lies the winners, and prizes are often the reason that users enter a promotion. For social media promotions, it is best practice to offer prizes that are accessible to users outside of your core target audience. Prizes such as gift cards, checks, and generalized items such as video game consoles, often work best as they are relevant and attractive prizes for a wide audience of social media users.

At Realtime Media, our goal is to help you design, source, and execute the prize fulfillment of amazing prizes. Whether you are looking to give away a giant prize or ten thousand smaller prizes, our prize fulfillment services will make it easier than ever.

Conclusion

Keeping in mind the importance of social media marketing efforts for consumer engagement in 2021 and beyond, RTM can help you bring your digital promotions to life. From authoring your official rules, legal compliance consulting and guidance, aggregating social media entries, managing the odds of winning, assisting with the selection/drawing of winners, and procuring and shipping prizes - Realtime Media is your one-stop-shop for assistance in running a back to school promotion.

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