How Important Are Promotional Contests and Gifts in Nudging Up Your Brand Popularity

Everyone loves freebies! More than just running promotional contests, promotional gifts can be fun ways to increase foot falls, drive word-of-mouth publicity and help you acquire new customers. So, if you are planning to use logo gifts and run a promotional contest, these steps will help you get started with confidence.

#1 Set a target

Have a clear idea on what you want to achieve with your giveaway. This will help you evaluate the results and stay focused on the promotional campaign.

Typically gifts can be employed for all/ any of the following purposes

• To collect customer information for your data bank as these details will help you gain insights into demographics and purchase habits of your customers.
• Thank existing customers: Custom gifts can be used to thank your existing clientele and to convey your appreciation. Choose appropriate logo gifts that will increase brand loyalty and reinforce relations with your existing customers.
• Enhance online engagement: Contests can be run to enhance the number of fans or likes to your social media accounts.
• Promote products: If you have launched a new product, a logo gift can be employed to get your message out.
• To generate new leads: Contests will help you to put yourself in front of new customers as freebies attract a lot of people during events and tradeshows.

#2 – Pick up a popular gift

To ensure a high ROI, the giveaway you choose should be something that relates to your business and that your target customers will be interested in. By handing out a popular or a costly gift, you may get a lot of people sign up. But these may not be customers who are interested in your business. Ideally contest gifts should not just be appealing but significant to your brand as these will bring in the right type of contest entrants who may be seriously interested in your business.

# 3 Think of an appropriate Contest type

• Fun contests: Encourage your customers to submit a photo, a blog or a painting to make them part of your branding exercise. The best part is that when the customers see their creations on your site and stores, they will feel well appreciated and their brand loyalty will go up manifold.
• In-store games: This makes a fun way to get your message out in front of the customers and to engage them with a friendly dialogue and to make an impressive ROI at easy rates.
• Sweepstakes: All the entrants who submit their information in the online form will be eligible to participate in the contest. This makes the simplest contest to collect customer information.
• Engage the participants with your brand: The next step will be to ask for a review of a product that they purchased or send an invitation to a loyalty program to keep your recipients engaged with your brand.

# 4 – Spread the word

Now that you have handed out the giveaways to your target audience, the next phase is spreading the word. Though the giveaways will set off word of mouth publicity for your contest to some extent you have to do a bit of groundwork to boost its impact.

Some of the ideas include

• Newsletter notifications
• Social media promotions
• In-store publicity
• Blogging

Keep up the tempo of the campaign by frequent follow ups and repeat actions which will keep the topic alive among your customers and will help in spreading the message far and wide.

#5 – Declare the lucky winner

Notify the winners as the scores of participants who might have enrolled in this contest will be waiting to know the outcome anxiously. By declaring the winner you can make them feel well appreciated and excited for future contests and highlight the genuineness of the contest. Make sure to feature the winners on your website, stores and in social media pages for maximum publicity. This gesture will go a long way in increasing the goodwill and trust of your brand among your customers.

# 6- Appraisal

Take time off to evaluate the results of your campaign and its results and whether you were happy with the entries that you got. This exercise will help you to improve and fine tune the design of contests that you intend to run in future.

#7: Put The Collected Data Into Optimum Use

You have put in a lot of time and effort in collecting customer details. Make the most of the priceless data collected to good use. You can add the participants in your mailing list to keep them in loop while sending out newsletters or making special announcements, product launches and more.

Contests and gifts are fun ways to make your customers engaged with your brand without any pressure selling or annoying sales talk. Well, that is what makes contests so popular among marketers. So, if you have not run any contests so far, it could be the best time to do so. Best of luck!