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Running a social sweepstakes is a great way to reach your customer on the platforms they engage the most with. Promoting sweepstakes on social media is a great way to give your target audience an incentive to interact with your brand. As brands look for new ways to engage customers online, many are turning toward the social sweepstakes category. In a previous blog, -insert blog title here-, we explain how sweepstakes can incentivize your customer and drive brand loyalty and interaction. Now, it’s important to take a simple social sweepstakes a step further in order to stand out. Looking for recommendations to spruce up your #SummerBummer? Here are some helpful tips to make your summer sweeps campaign stand out. Deliver Relevant Prizes While people spend more time at home this summer rather than traveling, social sweepstakes are a vital part of engaging consumers at home. By delivering prizes such as grills, lawn chairs, or corn hole, social sweepstakes can help make consumers’ summer at home better and provide further incentive for consumer engagement. Products that are related to the summer months are more likely to receive high engagement during a seasonal promotion. At Realtime Media, we’re ready to help you construct the best prize winner experience. From the timeline of procurement to trip coordination, we have every service to support your promotion. Learn more about our fulfillment services here. Engage Users Outside of Social Media Take your promotion a step further by having a microsite to bring social promotions outside of social media. Using UGC content hubs (for promotions like hosting a recipe contest) draws in users and allows your social activation to become even more interactive for the consumer. By taking the users somewhere outside of social media, it allows your social sweepstakes to stand out and engage the target audience. One promotion idea to reach customers outside of social media could be a contest where users compete to have the best backyard set up. Invite your customers to send photos of their backyard for a chance to win a prize. At Realtime Media, we offer contest moderation and judging services to help you manage your promotion. RTM can screen contest entries or select your winners based on the guidelines you set. Alternatively, you can have the public vote on entries to drive extra engagement to your promotion. Learn more about our UGC + Contest Services here. Utilize Receipt Validation & Buy-Get Promotions Receipt validation and buy-get promotions are great ways to interact with your customers in-store and drive purchases. With receipt validation, consumers can make a purchase in-store or online and submit their receipt to be entered into a sweepstakes to win a prize. This drives consumers to buy a product in order to get an entry. By keeping the product relevant to the summer season, like a box of popsicles, consumers are motivated to make the purchase and participate in the promotion. With our validation engine, Realtime Media can capture and process receipts from any retailer to ensure your receipt validation social sweepstakes is handled from start to finish. Learn how Realtime Media helped General Mills and Walmart utilize in store activation to reward consumers who bought a box of cheerios. Conclusion When it comes to creating an engaging summer sweeps event, it’s important to take your promotion to the next level. By creating an engaging digital promotion that captures consumers both on and outside of social platforms, brands can make their social sweepstakes stand out in a saturated category. Implementing unique digital promotion techniques is a great way to elevate the results of your summer sweeps campaign. With the flexibility and scale to run social sweepstakes and contests of any size, Realtime Media is the leading full-service promotions partner. Learn more about how we can help you launch your summer promotion!

As mentioned time and time again, there is no doubt that the chance to win, and the prizes up for grabs, are one of the leading reasons that consumers enter digital promotions. There are several factors that all must come together in order to create a successful promotion. Often times prize strategy and fulfillment is often overlooked. Taking a closer look at how prize fulfillment services fit into your overall marketing strategy brands begin to uncover just how vital fulfillment is.

In the ever-changing online landscape, digital marketing has become increasingly more important to driving brand awareness. Tactics often center around getting repeat engagement with the brand to facilitate consumer loyalty and bring back customers back for more. Instant win games and gamification promotions bring a user back time and again while delivering a unique customer experience.

When looking to understand how and why successful digital promotions worked, the first place you should turn to is the prize strategy - a small and often overlooked piece of a digital marketing strategy for the promotion.  The incentives placed behind engagement are typically the key drivers of consumers taking action.

It is no secret that COVID-19 has changed the marketing landscape and shifted promotional strategies for companies. Business shutdowns, school closings, and stay-at-home orders extended into June have left consumers and companies wondering when life will return to normalcy. The truth is we need to be prepared for this to be our “normal.”

For marketers, we are living in an uncertain time. On top of an ever-changing media landscape, the attention of consumers’ has suddenly shifted almost entirely to digital. With stay-at-home orders extending through early June 2020 and shoppers growing apprehensive about rushing back to stores post-COVID-19, e-commerce is seeing huge growth. Maria Rua Aguete of Omidia said to Forbes, “Ecommerce will be the other sector that will see a revenue boost as a result of the pandemic, adding $175 billion in revenue in 2020, which represents a 5% increase.”