Marketing·
Many online contests get this backwards. The prize gets all the thought, and the entry form gets none.
What you ask people to do in order to enter is the only part of a contest that reaches anyone who is not already following you.
Make entering produce something public
Compare two contests.
In the first one, you click a button and leave your email. A thousand people enter. A thousand people see it.
In the second one, you post a photo and tag the brand. A thousand people enter, and each of them shows it to their own friends, who have never heard of you and who trust the person posting.
Same prize. The second one is a campaign. The first one is a mailing list.
So write the entry step as if it were the ad, because it is.
Ask for something specific
“Post a photo of what is in your bag” gets you a few hundred photos and no personality.
“Post a photo of the one thing you never leave the house without” gets you the same number of entries, all of them different, most of them with a story attached, and all of them worth reposting.
A narrow prompt is easier to answer, not harder. People stall when they have to invent the idea themselves. Give them the idea and they only have to supply the photo.
Pick a prize your customer wants, not one everybody wants
Start from who you want in the room. Everybody else is noise, however many of them enter.
Here is the quick test. Would this prize make a nice gift for almost anyone? If the answer is yes, it will not filter a thing. An iPad brings in everyone, and so does a year of coffee.
A prize filters only when it presupposes something: a year of guitar strings is worth nothing to someone who does not play, and contact lenses in your prescription cannot even be handed to a friend. Those people scroll past, which is the point rather than a flaw.
Everyone who does enter has told you three things without being asked: they own the thing, they buy the refills, and your brand was appealing enough to act on. Your own product is usually the best prize for exactly this reason, and it doubles as a trial.
More winners, and a bigger ending
One winner means one happy person and everyone else quietly disappointed. That feeling attaches to the brand that ran the contest, the same way it does with a raffle.
So give out more than one prize. A top prize, a handful of runners-up, and something for everyone who entered. Say it up front, too. “Everyone who enters gets something” brings in more entries than any single grand prize does.
That last part is easier than it sounds, because it does not have to be an object. A discount code costs you nothing per person, and it turns the contest into sales instead of applause. So does being featured: publishing someone’s entry with their name on it is a real prize, and it is the one they will share.
Which is why the ending deserves as much thought as the launch. Many contests close with a single post naming a winner, and all that attention evaporates.
Instead, publish the finalists. Show the entries you loved. Say what the judges were looking at and why the winner had it.
Everyone who entered comes back to look, and most of them share the post that features them. The announcement can reach further than the launch did, and it costs one afternoon.
Run it with a nonprofit
The arrangement is simple. You pay a nonprofit a sponsorship, and they put their name on the contest and tell their people about it.
Both sides get something they need. The nonprofit gets money it did not have to raise, and it gets in front of an audience that had not heard of it. You get that audience, a partner with their own reason to promote, and a brand that is standing next to a cause instead of standing alone.
It also changes why people enter. On its own, the only reason to enter is wanting the prize. With a nonprofit attached there is a second reason, and people who do not care about the prize will enter and share anyway, because sharing it does not feel like advertising for you. It feels like helping.
None of this asks anything of the people entering. Entry is free, the prizes come from you, and what you pay the nonprofit is between you and the nonprofit.
One thing to get right: pick an organization connected to what you sell. A pairing with no connection reads as a pose.
Voting spreads it, but choose what voting decides
Letting the public vote turns every entrant into a recruiter, because people ask their friends to come and vote. That is real reach, and it costs nothing. The catch is that voting rewards whoever has the most friends, not whoever made the best entry.
So split the decision. Judges pick the winner on stated criteria, and votes decide a separate people’s choice prize, or narrow the field to the finalists the judges then choose between. You keep the spread and you keep the quality.
The entries are worth more than the prize
At the end you are holding a folder of photos, videos and captions made by real people in real homes. That is a year of content, and it performs better than anything shot in a studio, because it obviously was not.
Whether your product is in the frame depends on the prompt. Ask for it and every entry features it, but only customers can enter. Leave it out and you get more entries and looser content. Either is fine, as long as it was a decision.
Two things make it usable. Say in the rules that you may repost entries with credit, so permission is settled before anyone enters. And credit the person every time you use it, by name or handle. People are glad to be featured. They are not glad to be surprised.
The rules are short, and they matter
A promotion in the United States turns into an illegal lottery when three things are true at once: a prize, chance deciding the winner, and entering costing something. Remove any one of the three.
That leaves two clean shapes. A sweepstakes is free to enter and picks the winner at random. A contest picks the winner on skill, judged against criteria you publish in advance. What decides the classification is how you actually pick, not what you call it. Choose a winner at random from a “contest” and it is a sweepstakes in the eyes of the law.
If you are judging, publish the criteria, the judges, and how ties are settled, before entries open.
Instagram and Facebook add their own layer. You need written rules, a line saying the promotion is not sponsored, endorsed or administered by the platform, and a release of that platform by everyone who enters. You cannot ask people to tag themselves in a photo they are not in. Following, commenting, tagging friends in comments and sharing to stories are all fine.
Rules differ by state and platforms change theirs. Every promotion has to be checked against the rules that apply to it.
What to measure
Not likes.
Count the people who entered. A like costs a thumb. Entering costs a photo, a caption, and a post their friends will see, so the same number means something completely different.
Count people rather than entries, too. If you allow more than one entry each, the entry count can look large while the crowd stays small.
Count new followers and new subscribers, because those are the ones you can reach again for free. And count the reach on entrant posts, not only your own.
Then look at your actual sales. Give it a window that matches how your business is bought: two weeks for something people restock often, a whole season for something they book once a year. And compare it to the same stretch of a normal year, not to the week before the contest, or seasonal swings will take the credit.
A contest that grew the follower count and moved nothing is a contest that found people who like free things.