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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
When I first came across the term “contest marketing,” I figured it was just another way to say giveaway. But once I started using contests as part of my actual marketing plan, I realized it’s much more than that. Done well, it can grow your email list, drive traffic, and even boost product sales.
So what is contest marketing? It’s a giveaway marketing strategy that uses online contests, sweepstakes, or promotions to attract attention and turn it into leads or sales. And unlike paid ads, contests can keep working for you long after they end.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to use contest marketing step by step. These tips and examples are based on what I’ve seen work best for small businesses, creators, and anyone trying to grow online.
Quick Summary: How to Use Contest Marketing
| Set Clear Contest Goals | Know what you want to achieve before you begin |
| Define Your Audience | Focus on attracting the right people, not just anyone |
| Choose a Relevant Prize | Pick something your audience truly wants |
| Use a Contest Tool | Make setup and tracking easy with the right plugin |
| Build a Giveaway Page | Send traffic to a focused, distraction-free page |
| Promote on Social Media | Get more reach with targeted, platform-specific posts |
| Analyze the Results | Use the data to improve your next giveaway |
Some people also call it sweepstakes strategy or gamified marketing, but it all comes down to the same thing, using a prize to encourage action, like following you on social media or joining your email list.
Contest marketing is a way to promote your business using giveaways, sweepstakes, or online competitions. The goal is to attract new people, increase engagement, and grow your audience by offering a prize in exchange for taking an action—like joining your email list or following you on social media.
This type of marketing works especially well for small businesses, ecommerce stores, and creators because it’s interactive and shareable. With the right prize and promotion plan, a single contest can drive thousands of new visitors to your website or social pages.
Planning your contest marketing strategy is just as important as its execution. You’ll iron out each part of your contest at this stage, so it’s easier to run and manage.
Before creating and marketing your contest, it’s essential to identify your goals. Doing so will help you monitor your success and analyze your results when the contest is over.
What do you want to accomplish from running a contest?
For example, you can launch a social media contest or giveaway promotion to:
Once you know what you want to achieve, it will be easier to align the rest of your contest to those goals.
After setting your goals, turn your attention to the types of contest participants you want to attract. It’s easy to create a contest for anyone and everyone, but those leads are useless if they don’t align with your business.
Those leads will likely have no interest in your brand – all they want is the chance to win a prize. After they enter the contest, low-quality leads will leave and probably won’t ever return.
You should research your target audience instead, which you can do by:
Marketers call this type of research creating a buyer persona, and it’s fundamental for any digital marketing campaign. Check out this guide from OptinMonster on creating a buyer persona for help getting started.
After carefully researching, you should know what your goals are and who your target audience is. Now go back to your goals and ensure they align with your audience.
For example, having a contest marketing goal of growing your Facebook page won’t yield valuable leads if your audience isn’t active on that platform. Similarly, you can’t expect to boost car sales if your audience is only interested in motorcycles.
Re-evaluate your goals until they match your overall promotion strategy. Whether you’re running a sweepstakes to build your list or a gamified contest for engagement, your plan should reflect that.
The next step in your contest marketing plan is choosing a giveaway prize your audience genuinely wants to win.
If your prize isn’t desirable to your target audience, they won’t make any effort to enter. Moreover, if the prize isn’t exciting enough, your audience won’t share it.
Consider the following aspects when choosing a prize for your contest:
Check out this case study from Smash Balloon. They gave away a MacBook Air for Black Friday, a high-value product they knew their audience would get excited over and relevant to their brand.
Bottom line: pick a prize worth sharing that adds value to your audience’s lives. Need ideas? Here’s a list of giveaway prize examples that attract real interest.
The next section of your contest marketing strategy involves executing your campaign. That’s where you’ll put your contest together, fine-tune your entry methods, and publish your contest online.
Creating a successful contest is much easier if you use the right tools. Many contest tools are available, but they often have a steep learning curve or are difficult for beginners to use.
I suggest choosing a lightweight giveaway tool that works seamlessly with your website’s content management system. You can use your website to host your online contest, which helps build traffic and supports your long-term marketing goals.
For WordPress websites, RafflePress is one of the best solutions.
I’ve used several giveaway plugins over the years, but RafflePress is the only one that consistently helps me launch contests fast without breaking my site. It’s the tool I reach for every time.
You can choose from several premade giveaway templates that align with popular marketing goals, including:
Then you can customize your giveaway with the visual drag-and-drop giveaway builder. It requires no coding to use; simply drag, drop and perfect your giveaway design with a few clicks.
Additionally, RafflePress offers various one-click entry methods that make it easy for users to participate. Each action qualifies users to enter to win your grand prize. Plus, the more actions they take, the more chances they get to win.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on creating an online contest with RafflePress for WordPress-based contests.
No one wants to jump through hoops to enter a giveaway. Would you enter a contest that takes more than a few minutes to qualify?
Attention spans are brief online. Your contest should be easy to enter, enabling users to enter quickly and then go about their day as usual.
Luckily RafflePress offers tons of giveaway entry options that only take a single click. Even better, each entry option aligns with the most popular giveaway goals:
You can even create your own unique entry method.
In this contest marketing example, WPForms tailored RafflePress’s entry options to fit their contest goals.
They wanted to promote their Facebook group, so they used the “Visit a Facebook page” action to ask users to join their Facebook group. They got over 11,000 new group members as a result.
No contest is complete without a robust set of rules. The rules you set for your giveaway will help users understand the tasks they need to complete to qualify. It will also weed out any time-wasters, ensuring you only attract high-quality leads.
Here are some points to outline in your giveaway rules:
You should also consider the giveaway rules for different social media platforms.
For instance, according to Facebook’s contest rules, you cannot ask participants to like and share your giveaway. Moreover, most platforms require a disclosure stating they are not affiliated with or endorse the giveaway.
You should display your giveaway rules clearly alongside your initial announcement or inside your giveaway app.
RafflePress users can use the built-in giveaway rules template to generate rules with a few clicks. Simply answer a few easy questions, and it will automatically make the rules for you.
You can then edit your rules to fit your brand and display them right inside your contest app for users to read before entering.
The next part of your contest marketing plan is crucial: making it live. If you want your giveaway to make an impact from day 1, you need to publish it in a distraction-free format that’s easy to share.
The most effective way to publish your giveaway in WordPress is on a giveaway landing page.
Landing pages focus on what you want visitors to do next instead of distracting them with tons of information. They also allow you to simply copy a link and share the contest online, helping you direct targeted traffic to your giveaway page and attract even more high-quality leads.
There are several ways to create a contest landing page in WordPress.
You can use RafflePress’s built-in giveaway landing page feature to publish your contest widget on an attractive, distraction-free page.
Use this giveaway landing page guide to walk through the full setup process.
Or you can use a landing page builder like SeedProd, to create a custom landing page without code. SeedProd integrates directly with RafflePress, allowing you to add many more elements to boost leads, including:
You can follow this step-by-step guide to create a landing page with SeedProd.
Your contest marketing plan should focus on how you’ll promote your giveaway next. You can’t expect to attract quality leads without promoting your giveaway online.
Here are several ways to market your contest and reach your target audience.
Your email list is a valuable resource for promoting your contest. The people on your list are already interested in your brand and want to hear from you, so they’re likely to enter your giveaway if you ask.
Send an announcement to your list when your giveaway goes live, asking them to enter. You can also ask your list to share the contest with friends or on social media to spread the word.
Another way to promote your giveaway is to use push notifications. After website visitors sign up to receive push notifications from your site, you can send promotional messages that appear in their web browser.
This is an excellent way to reach people interested in your brand after leaving your website. They’ll see the message wherever they are online, allowing you to draw them back to your site to take action.
For example, you can send a push notification when your contest goes live, during the contest to build momentum, and right before the contest ends as a last-chance reminder.
Creating push notifications is super easy with a tool like PushEngage. It lets you set up push notifications without code and offers many powerful features to help you reach and grow your audience, including:
I’ve used PushEngage to send last-minute reminders during time-limited contests, and the boost in entries was noticeable. Follow this guide to create push notifications with PushEngage.
Your website likely attracts plenty of traffic from search engines, making it an excellent resource for people learning about your brand. But those visitors probably won’t know about your contest unless you point them in the right direction.
With a tool like OptinMonster, you can add an eye-catching notification bar to the top of your site, promoting your giveaway. You can add a call-to-action link to your giveaway page, inviting visitors to enter for a chance to win.
You can also use several features to grab attention, such as countdown timers, call-to-action buttons, and eye-catching graphics.
There are many other ways to use OptinMonster to send traffic to your giveaway page, including:
You can also use intelligent targeting to show your campaign to the right people at the right time. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a notification bar with OptinMonster.
One of the easiest ways to promote your contest is through social media marketing. A strong social media contest can bring in more traffic, shares, and visibility than a regular post. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube have billions of users sharing tons of content every second.
When I promote a social media contest, I try to match the content to the platform. A short teaser video works great on Facebook, while a graphic walkthrough gets more clicks on Pinterest. Think about which content formats work best on each platform, then plan your promotional material accordingly.
For instance, Facebook users react positively to video content, so create a short video announcing and promoting your contest. Alternatively, you can create a step-by-step photo tutorial on how to enter for Pinterest or an eye-catching GIF for Twitter.
Design your social media campaign to run before, during, and after your contest. Doing so allows you to build excitement before the contest goes live and over your contest duration to maximize your reach.
Influencer marketing is another way to maximize your contest marketing efforts. Influencers already have an established social media audience that you can tap into to promote your giveaway.
It takes time to build a relationship with influencers, but it’s a mutually rewarding tactic if you put in the effort. Once your relationship is established, you can work with influencers to promote your giveaway to their fans and followers.
It’s easy to overlook the next contest marketing tactic, but it’s a valuable source of potential leads. There are more people than you’d expect looking for contests to enter, and many flock to sweepstakes websites to find the best opportunities.
Check out this round-up of the best contest directories to find websites to submit your contest. These platforms are great for getting your sweepstakes strategy in front of people who are actively looking to join contests.
Contest marketing doesn’t stop when your giveaway is over. You can do several things after your contest ends to continue to promote your business and draw in new leads.
First, don’t forget to announce the winner of your contest. Not only does this help notify the winner of the good news, but it also allows you to use the momentum to promote your brand one last time.
You can announce your winner through email and, while doing so, invite participants to enter your next contest.
You should also announce your giveaway winner on social media. Anyone looking at your social media feed will see that you run giveaways and may follow you to learn about your next campaign.
Follow this guide on how to announce a giveaway winner with impact.
When your giveaway ends, it’s time to start nurturing your new leads and turning them into paying customers. One of the best ways to do that is to offer limited sales and discounts. You can even offer a discount as a consolation prize to users who didn’t win.
The idea behind making your sales and discounts time-bound is it creates a sense of urgency. People are more likely to act now if they know they’ll miss out by waiting.
This is also an excellent time to use any user-generated content from past contests. Show potential customers what they’ll miss by sharing photos and videos of happy customers using your products and services.
The final stage in your contest marketing strategy is tracking, measuring, and analyzing your results. You won’t know which tactics work best unless you have data to compare.
By tracking specific metrics during and after your contest, you’ll learn which types of content, online platforms, prizes, and marketing messages resonate most with your ideal customers. You can then learn from that data to get better results for your next contest.
You can track your contest metrics for free using Google Analytics. And if you want to make better sense of your data, I suggest using MonsterInsights.
MonsterInsights lets you set up Google Analytics in WordPress with a few clicks. It doesn’t require copying and pasting code and includes no complicated setup processes.
It also delivers easy-to-understand reports about your key website metrics to your WordPress dashboard, including:
You can also use RafflePress’s powerful entries report to learn which giveaway actions were the most popular among participants. With that information, you can choose similar entry options for your next giveaway to maximize your success.
There you have it!
Contest marketing is more than just giving away prizes, it’s a smart promotion strategy that combines gamified marketing, list building, and lead generation into one campaign. Use these tips to turn your next online contest into a real growth tool.
Check out how Agile’ grew their clients’ email list by 52% with RafflePress, which you’re here. And this guide on how to use contest SEO to boost your rankings.
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