Benefits of including competitions in your PR strategy

Everybody likes to be in with the chance of winning something – especially when it costs nothing at all to enter the competition. 

If you have a product to push and you can afford to giveaway a few samples, competitions can be a great way to get your product out in front of potential customers.

Different websites and magazine have different rules when it comes to competitions. Some you need to pay up to £20,000 just to place the competition, whereas other papers and magazines will run them for free. In these cases, the cost of the prize is therefore the only fee incurred.

Before placing competitions, it’s important to think of your target audience and what they are going to be reading. If you have a potential prize which could suit the whole family, consider who the main decision maker will be.

1. Product placement

If you’re wanting to push a product, competitions are a great way to secure coverage in some of your target titles. Getting your product in as many places as possible means that you can get as many eyes on it as possible. Product placement is such a great PR tactic, we even wrote a whole blog all about it, check it out here!

2. Data capture

Some competition providers will offer you the option of capturing data, although there may be an extra fee to do this. In order for data to be captured, the person entering the competition will need t consent to their data being shared. Some of the competitions we’ve ran for clients have resulted in over 100,000 entries, so it can be a great opportunity to build newsletter lists.  You can have the email addresses of thousands of potential customers who can then be targeted by your Google ad or email marketing team.

3. Brand awareness

The more potential customers see your brand, the more likely they are to purchase products from you.  Consumer habits are changing regularly, so whereas they would have once seen a product they liked and bought it, it’s now not as simple. As this article on Forbes suggests, “digital interaction influences 70% of purchases” and consumers are likely to buy from brands they’re familiar with. 

Competitions help boost brand awareness and can convert potential buyers to paying customers.

If you’ve read this blog and think that running competitions could be a great addition to your marketing strategy, get in touch here.

© MOTIVE