One of the most effective ways to generate buzz about your brand, product or service is to run competitions or giveaways that appeal to your target audience. It is a great technique for extending brand reach and visibility and to build engagement and followers on social media.
Typically, the running of competitions and giveaways has been cobbled together using different types of technology that don’t sync together. Web forms capture email addresses, answers to questions or videos that are then sent to a database with the marketing team having to manually wrangle the data, then manually alert the winners and rekeying information into a CRM for ongoing mail outs and leverage.
It gets even more complex when applicants are required to tell why in 100 words or less they should win, or send in a video entry or TikTok showing product placement or for instance send in a sample of a beer, wine or spirit to win the best winemaker or gin-maker of the year.
In order to plan, launch and run competitions, marketing teams need to choose the platforms to promote them on and how they will capture information. The era of digital competition management affords many advantages if businesses invest in digital transformation.
Here are three ways to streamline the complexity in managing competitions in-store, online, across social platforms or even radio competitions:
Leverage the power of SaaS
Software as a Service (SaaS) has completely changed the way competitions can be run and managed with tools available to streamline engagement. With SaaS, there’s no need to build or buy software and install it directly on an internal server or a user’s computer. New team members can get to work quickly simply by accessing through a web browser.
As the software is held centrally, security and functional updates are instantly available to all users ensuring everyone is working with the most up to date tools. As well as reducing deployment and operational costs, SaaS tools make it far easier to share information so everyone is working with the most current data all the time, from anywhere.
Streamline the process for applying
SaaS based applicant and registration tools make it faster, easier and more affordable to gather competition entries, communicate with the winners and capture applicant details for use in other marketing campaigns. SaaS tools provide the opportunity to offset the cost of processing and securely storing applications.
Leverage contacts for future campaigns
Running competitions and giveaways should be an easy and fast process. Marketing teams need access to end-to-end digital solutions that are cost effective, easy to use and enable information to be retained and accessed so that applicants’ details can be used for future campaigns and promotions.
When considering the right software tools to invest in, look for ones that enable you to create personalised online application forms, so you can capture key details, add customised questions and request applicant photos, videos, and social media accounts if required as part of the entry.
Marketers need to look for solutions that provide applicants with the ability to enter using QR codes in-store and easy to use, mobile friendly web links. You also need to ensure that you have a solution that assures privacy and security of personal data.
The management of competitions and giveaways was born in the analogue age. But digital transformation is an opportunity to streamline these processes. It simplifies information sharing and workflow while allowing marketers to execute faster, more securely and more cost effectively.
