Want to Stay Ahead of Your Competitors? Try a Promotional Competition as Part of Your Marketing Strategy!

Trying to think of new cost effective marketing campaigns to drive customers to your business? Well ever thought of running a promotional competition.

The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP), (2014) define sales promotion as ‘providing an incentive for the consumer to buy by using a range of added direct or indirect benefits, usually on a temporary basis, to make the product or service more attractive. A non-exhaustive list of sales promotions includes: “two for the price of one” offers, money-off offers, text-to-wins, instant-wins, competitions and prize draws.’

Ken Peattie et al, (1997) conducted two studies on sales promotions and competitions and concluded that competitions are a ‘versatile, creative, cost effective marketing tool.’ This is supported by Marketing Week, (2014) who say ‘businesses running competitions are staying in front of competitors due to the benefits of data collection and consumer engagement.’ Marketing Week go onto say ‘competitions are now part of long term marketing strategy for many companies.’

Marketing Week also indicate that running promotional competitions can provide many benefits for your business including;

v  Low Cost

v  Improved Data Collection

v  Creation of Long Term Customer Relationships

v  Improved Consumer Engagement

v  Create Positive Online Word of Mouth

Competitions that are designed well can be inexpensive, running your competition through a channel like social media or email is free. Competitions usually ask the entrant to trade some personal information in return for entering the competition; consumer information like, email addresses, names, home addresses and phone numbers can all be acquired by using competitions and are a valuable asset for your future marketing activities.

Through gaining this personal information your company can strive to build long term customer relationships. This consumer data enables your business to contact these competition entrants with product offers and brand promotion. This in turn may drive them to purchase more regularly over a longer period of time.

A competition is a great way of engaging your audience; audiences are immediately engaged by the drive to compete and the prospect of winning a prize. If the competition is designed well it can simultaneously engage the customer with the company’s products, services and brand name whilst communicating about the competition.

Some competitions have the ability to create an online ‘buzz’ this is where your competition is being talked about by many people online. This will increase the reach of the campaign exponentially and potentially drive people which have never experienced your brand before to enter the competition; this will give you the chance to obtain their data and market to them.

Resources

For more support click here to read Peattie (1999), ‘The Uses of Sales Promotion Competitions in Social Marketing’ - http://smq.sagepub.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/content/5/1/22.full.pdf

For a guide to designing a powerful promotional marketing competition click here - http://sbinformation.about.com/cs/advertising/a/promos.html

References

CAP.org, (2014), ‘Sales Promotion’, [Online] > http://www.cap.org.uk/Advertising-Codes/Non-broadcast-HTML/Section-8-Sales-Promotions.aspx < [Accessed 23/04/2014]

Ken Peattie, Sue Peattie & E. B. Emafo (1997) Promotional competitions as a strategic marketing weapon, Journal of Marketing Management

Marketing Week, (2014), Brand Stay Ahead of the Competition, [Online] > http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/trends/brands-stay-ahead-of-the-competition/4002435.article < [Accessed 02/04/2014]

Five Factors to Consider When Developing a Viral Marketing Campaign

Viral marketing is defined as, ‘using consumer communication as a means of multiplying a brand’s popularity through customers spreading the brand name of a product or name of a company’. (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004)

As part of my study at the University of Brighton I have been tasked with developing a new digital marketing strategy for a company of my choice. While developing this viral marketing campaign I came across a study by Woerdl et al (2008) that cited four strengths of viral marketing and presented five key factors to consider when developing a viral marketing campaign.

Four strengths of viral marketing are;

v  Low Cost

v  High Reach

v  Ability to Integrated Marketing Communications

v  High Diffusion Speed

These strengths make viral marketing an incredibly exciting proposition for any business, if you are thinking about implementing a viral marketing strategy for your business; consider these five points below to ensure maximum (ROI) return on investment.

Key factors to consider are,

1.       Structure of the campaign - Ask yourself the following questions?

Does it encourage viral activity? Does your campaign encourage people to share the message? Encouraging people to share your message is a key success factor in a viral marketing campaign, the higher proportion of people encouraged to share your message will result in improved campaign reach and higher ROI.

2.       Product or service characteristics – Ask yourself the following questions?

Is the product or service suitable for viral marketing? Can it be passed on easily? Your product or service needs to be suitable for viral marketing; if the product falls down here it could spell in the campaigns failure.

3.       Message content – Ask yourself the following question?

Is the message fun, engaging, easy to use? Does your campaign engage the recipient; the viral concept needs to be designed carefully to make sure it engages the maximum amount of people. Creating a competition to win a prize may be a good way of engaging your audience doing this.

4.       Peer to peer information conduit – Ask yourself the following questions?

What channel does it use? Can it be passed on easily? It is paramount that the recipient is able to pass this message on easily and quickly, a long process will result in the campaigns failure. Advice here would be to use email. Email forwarding is one of the most straight forward things to use for you and your recipient, it also takes no development by your or your business and it’s free.

5.       Diffusion characteristics – Ask yourself the following question?

Does the message spread quickly? Can the recipient see what message is trying to be communicated quickly and effectively, if this is possible it is likely to positively affect the campaign.  

Click here to read the full Woerdl study - http://kar.kent.ac.uk/25586/

References

Hennig‐Thurau, T., Gwinner, K. P., Walsh, G., & Gremler, D. D. (2004). Electronic word‐of‐mouth via consumer‐opinion platforms: What motivates consumers to articulate themselves on the Internet?. Journal of interactive marketing, 18(1), 38-52.

Woerdl et al, (2008) Internet-Induced Marketing Techniques: Critical Factors in Viral Marketing Campaigns. Journal of Business Science and Applied Management, 3 (1). pp. 35-45. ISSN 1753-0296.