If you want to appeal to your audiences and establish a strong connection with them, Facebook remains one of the best channels to achieve this. As of 2021, there are around 2.85 billion monthly active users on the platform, making it crucial for maximizing your brand’s reach and staying power. While Facebook ads and other social media marketing efforts can build a following and build relationships with prospects, leads, and customers, the Facebook contest feature is also vital for speaking to nearly any audience.

 

Benefits of Creating a Facebook Contest

 

Wondering why it’s worth it to create a Facebook contest and use this feature to its full potential? There are a few key reasons for doing so if you’re not already.

 

Boosted Brand Awareness and Overall Reach

 

 

Facebook is a great marketing platform to use if you want to connect with millions of users and significantly increase brand awareness. You can create a contest that your audience finds interesting and familiarize them with your brand and offerings in the process. If your contest is particularly engaging, people will come to recognize and ultimately trust your brand over less engaging competitors.

 

More Engaged Users Through Interactive Content

 

 

Although ads and conventional posts can drive a certain level of engagement, Facebook contests can truly maximize engagement, seeing as they’re highly interactive. If people can contribute and find entertainment value in a well-constructed Facebook contest, they’ll be more likely to engage with both the contest and your brand. As more people engage with your contest and company, you can also use this opportunity to collect some data about them and their buying behavior, which can help you market to them more effectively and ultimately increase sales.

 

Steps for Creating a Facebook Contest

 

With the benefits in mind, it’s important to know how to create a contest that your target audience will enjoy. The following are some steps you can take to develop your contest and ensure it stands apart from others.

 

1. Set SMART Goals for Your Contest

 

Like any other marketing campaign, you can’t build a contest if you don’t know what exactly you want to achieve with it. What exactly is the goal behind your contest? As you set your goals, use the SMART practice and keep them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.

 

 

For example, you might want to build brand awareness for a new business. In other cases, you might want to drive sales for a specific product or service. Other goals may include collecting data around audiences to better understand them, collecting email addresses for email marketing campaigns, or drawing attention to the launch of a new offering.

With your goals set, you can identify specific key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to help you measure your success. For instance, if you’re launching a contest with the goal of boosting brand awareness, you may want to look at the total number of people contributing, likes, and shares. Meanwhile, if your goal is to promote a particular product, you would want to look at the number of clicks to your website through the contest and see if sales also increase.

 

 

2. Determine the Kind of Contest to Launch

 

 

Once you’ve set some SMART goals to inform your contests, you can decide on which type of contest to run. There are a few different options available to you based on what you want to achieve. These include:

• Photo Contests — You can launch a photo contest by requesting users to post photos around a specific theme that’s relevant to your brand and goal.
• Referral Promotions — In referral promotions, people would need to refer the contest with other Facebook friends before participating.
• Prize Giveaways — Arguably the easiest contests to hold, giveaways enter people into an online raffle when they like, share, or comment on one of your posts, which can greatly increase brand awareness and reach.

 

 

3. Figure Out the Prize

 

 

Think about why your audience would participate. What’s the motivation beyond the contest being fun and entertaining? Regardless of the prize you choose, it needs to be relevant to your audience and brand. It could be something that your audience might want as a luxury item, or it could be something that makes their lives easier somehow. You can figure out which prizes would be the most enticing to your audience by conducting customer surveys or other market research.

 

 

4. Set Specific Rules for Your Contest

 

 

Again, based on your goals, you should determine what the rules are for entering and participating in your contest. As you set the rules, think about what people should do or submit to enter the contest. You should also decide whether the contest is local or open to everyone, if there should be age limitations, and if people should be able to enter multiple times.

 

5. Create and Promote the Contest

 

With the details of the contest figured out, you can begin creating and promoting your contest. As you design the contest materials, be sure to do everything you would for other solid marketing campaigns. This includes using high-quality promotional images, engaging headlines, descriptions about what to expect and the rules around your contest, and clear submission forms for people to enter information.

 

 

When promoting your contest, you can do so on your website, social media pages, email marketing campaigns, and paid ads. This will make sure your audience is made aware of your contest on every platform, including Google through good SEO.

 

6. Wait for People to Enter and Select the Winner

 

 

After promoting your contest, give it some time to attract participants. Once you have run the contest and enough people have entered, you can either select a random winner or the participant with the contest you like most. You can then publicly announce the winner and your decision behind the pick if you manually choose them.

 

 

Keeping all of this in mind can help you develop a successful Facebook contest that helps you meet your goals and effectively connects with your target audiences. In the end, you can use contests to drive engagement with your brand and boost sales while differentiating yourself from competitors. If you want to build a winning Facebook contest and other social media marketing strategies with the help of experienced experts, get in touch with the team at Vigor Seorchers today.