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Whether you’re a business owner or freelancer, many times you will find yourself wondering how to gain more exposure and boost user engagement. You want to gain customer loyalty as well as getting to know your market al,l whilst promoting your brand. One of the best ways to do that is by creating competitions.
Gain Exposure
Competitions create brand awareness as well as communities that harvest potential sales. Even if a person hasn’t heard off you, with an interesting enough competition, they will hear about you from friends, family and socialising in general. With the ease of sharing information online, executing well planned-out competitions can sky rocket your fan base and social media following.
Boost User Engagement
Photo and video competitions are a great way to do that, simply because they are UGC, user generated content. Using UGC is a great way of doing things because you’re hitting two birds with one stone. The first bird you’re hitting is by using UGC in general, because as the name suggest, it generates content and properly key-worded content can soar in search engines. Your second bird is boosting user engagement. When you are asking people to submit their photos and videos, you are getting personal with them. When you are requesting an effort from them, their acceptance is an investment in your brand. You can be sure that they will share their efforts in every possible way they can, most probably through social media; displaying that they trust your brand.
Customer Loyalty
Being constantly bombarded with adverts and marketing ploys out there, we reach a point, as end users, where we become somewhat untrusting and at times oblivious to it all. So, when friends and family share posts on social media or tell us about things, in general, we are more accepting. The beautiful thing about competitions is just that, the word of mouth attribute that comes along with it; the equivalent of which in today’s world is social sharing. We are more likely to click or react to an advert or post that someone we know previously has than to one no one has.
Meet your Market
Premium brands know who their users are, what they want and how to deliver it. The best way to know all that is to simply ask. There are several ways to collect such information from your users, like using quizzes and surveys, but competitions receive a more welcoming approach. Remember when creating your submission form, keep your questions related to your promotion and don’t stray too far; in the end people aren’t really fans of filling out endless forms that request too much information. Information your users supply can reveal a lot about your market and business. It can give you a clearer idea of who your audience is and understanding their needs along with a better perspective about your business.
Properly planned competitions can go a long way, and thanks to social media, can spread like fire on gasoline. At the end of the day, when looking for that final sale, it’s all a numbers game and it’s up to you how to get those numbers in.