A Complete Guide To Hosting Contests On A WordPress Website

Have you ever seen random brands on Instagram get thousands of likes overnight? Like one minute they’d be desperately hash tagging, follow for follow for months, and then suddenly boom! 14.2k followers!

That’s usually the result of a contest.

Contests are a great digital marketing tactic that always works. Irrespective of the industry your brand caters to, the niche, or the objectives, if you are looking to build a follower base, get email ids, or simply promote a product, contests are your ticket to quick and high returns.

Hosting Contests on a WordPress Website

Why Contests and Giveaways?

Great advertising strategy for new brands

When you try to penetrate a market already replete with big players, it’s difficult to get the word out let alone convert existing users. Contests and giveaways – especially where you offer something truly irresistible – could be your number one strategy in luring competitors’ stalwarts.

These give existing users an extra reason to choose your brand. And it mightn’t even be directly purchase related, it could simply be a branding exercise where the aim of the contest is to make your prime prospects aware of your brand. You can use this WordPress Giveaway Plugin to create contests and giveaways.

Increase your follower base

A strong follower number is integral for online branding and digital success. And the barter system always works. Almost every website offers free e-books and resources in exchange of email ids.

Most sweepstake-based contests work on this. Take Qwertee for instance, the quirky t-shirt printing company ran sweepstakes every week till they reached their goal of 100,000 Facebook likes.

If the objective is to amalgamate a follower base, contests hit the sweet spot.

Increased engagement

When you start seeing a lull in your online presence and overall interaction, introducing contests and giveaways can work magic for the numbers.

Look at what Eggo, famous for their breakfast waffles, does. It hosted a recipe contest inviting lots of user-generated content. This got the brand buzzing, it’s follower base active, and they could further reach out to potential prospects as well.

And, they also asked their followers to be the judge of this contest and voting on who should be the winner.

Why Contests and Giveaways Fail

Consider the legalities of it

You mightn’t know but there are gambling laws governing online contests too. For instance if you charge an ‘entry fee’ for a sweepstake, it makes it illegal.

Skill-based contests are a little relaxed since they are chosen on merit, where mostly it’s the participants and followers making the decision. You should consider running your contest strategies with your legal team first.

Disorganized

You don’t have the leeway to goof up here because a large number of your followers are involved, and they have a certain desire associated with it – that of seeing their name as the winner or owning the giveaway prize – so you can’t rub them the wrong way.

Have a strategy in place and test it out to see if it works glitch-free.

Too layered and difficult

Don’t ask followers to fill long forms or take them through a series of steps to participate. Most of them would abandon midway.

Or make the contest too long and detailed. Contests shouldn’t have more than three steps involved.

Upload/Submit a picture and then get others to like is the easiest format. Or invite submission and then ask them to follow the brand on social media and like the post is another popular contest format.

Technical glitches

This could be a major hindrance depending on which CMS (Content Management System) you use. Ideally, if you are running on WordPress, it wouldn’t be an issue because there are some excellent plugins that would make the entire process a breeze.

Like this WordPress contest / giveaway plugin for instance, it takes care of the major parts of the process without a lot of manual inputs. The plugin automates the setups, tracking and even choosing the winner part, which could otherwise get particularly messy. You’d only understand the importance when you realize how much time does nondescript things like shortening URLs for social media take.

And plugins even helps with the promoting your contests – whether it’s a raffle, a giveaway or any submission entry contest, the right plugin ensures that there aren’t any technical hookups.

How to Prepare for Contests and Giveaways?

Decide the objective(s)

Contests should rarely be about making a sale and more about branding, promoting and relationship building. So you need to know whether the goal is unique visitors, more Facebook likes, capturing email addresses, links, image or video submission, or retweets.

A great SEO move here would be to invite content submissions. This leads to increased user-generated content, which shows up as activity on your website. And which in turn helps with SEO.

What type of contest would it be?

There are sweepstakes like giveaways that beauty gurus host a lot, these typically include followers liking or subscribing to their channels and then a winner would be randomly chosen. Skill-based contests like submitting essays, recipes or videos are another option.

The right type takes into account who your targeted audience are, what they are primarily interested in and if the contest ties up with your business objective in some way.

Chalk up the framework

With the goal in mind, you need to now decide on the content. Ideally, it should be in tune with your business. So when Diamond Candles ran a contest – the objective of which was to get more social media likes – they gave away their candles with a diamond ring in it as a prize.

But this isn’t set in stone. Depending upon your product, the targeted audience, and the contest objectives, you’d have to decide upon the type of content that would make this one a hit.

Another thing to factor in is the time frame. Now, this could get tricky. There is no prescribed time frame but usually a week to two is both short enough to get the attention and long enough to allow contestants to prepare for it.

For things like an essay submission or a video, participants would take more time than they would have taken for an image submission. But, having said that, a longer timeframe would not stir your audience, plus you’d have to keep promoting throughout the duration.

The third important item on your framework is choosing the correct prize. It’s the incentive, the primary – and to be honest, the only reason – why people would even bother submitting a post and then asking others to like should that be the contest.

So you have to pick one that lures them in.

And also make it relatable to your products and business.

For instance, if Diamond Candles had chosen to give away an iPad as a prize it wouldn’t have been good brand alignment.

And even though an iPad is pretty much a big deal. You’d have the participants thronging to your page and telling every one from their parents, to the mean girl from high school and Suzie from work to like and promote the bazoomas out of their post, it doesn’t work for the brand as much as their own product did.

Lastly, you need to lay down contest guidelines. Be transparent and honest. It is cheap and wrong to bloat a contest to entice entrants and then mention conditions in the fine prints.

Also, keep in mind that you need to keep request for user data to a minimum if you don’t want them to abandon the page.

Create a Landing Page

Most webmasters create some half-baked landing page because they know it’s a temporary thing. But keep in mind that you’d have to optimize this to reach a wider set of audience. And a way to do that is by prompting them to come to you.

Search-engine friendly landing pages would see an influx of traffic, resulting in more participants. So, use relevant keywords and meta tags, and pay attention to on and off-site SEO requirements.

Promote the hell out of it

Optimizing your landing page – although does work – is more like romanticizing a notion if you’re looking at a big turnout. The backbone of getting higher traffic, and hence more participants, is promotion.

You’d have to do pre-launch promotion, launch promotion, and promote during the time the contest is live. Besides social media promotion, you should also send out newsletters, write blog posts, write and send press releases to PR services, and invest in banner ads.

Choosing and notifying the winner(s)

Depending upon the type of content you’ve chosen and the contest objectives, you’d have to pick a winner. It could be a random draw or a skill-based assessment or it could be based on votes by other followers.

Once the winners are chosen, each should receive an e-mail or a phone call to be notified followed by an announcement on social media. They should also be made aware of the delivery process if the contest involves winning a physical product.

If you’re planning to host contests to bolster your online presence or branding efforts, the idea is to get it right. Keep it simple and efficient with a plugin that cuts down your work and time in half.