Prize promotions can be powerful promotional tools – helping you sell more of a product or service, generating leads and opt-in information, even gaining you public awareness and press coverage. But they need careful planning and execution.
Here are our tips, and advice from some UK experts in prizes as promotional tools.
Some prize promotion tips we sourced from our experts:
Make sure you understand the advertising regulations in the UK relating to prize promotions (the CAP code is what you need).
Ensure terms and conditions are clear, contain all necessary information, and are accessible from wherever you access the promotion.
Try and choose prizes that will specifically appeal to your target audience – generic prizes like cash or electronics can appeal to anyone, and anyone can potentially enter. For example: if you’re a fishing shop running a prize promotion, offering angling gear means you’re more likely to attract fishing enthusiasts.
Think carefully about what you want to do with your entrants. Are you looking to market to them? If so, how? What information would you like from them. Do you want to qualify who can enter – i.e. only allow specific people?
Prize draws and competitions are different things, a prize draw is a random selection of a winner, a competition is the selection of a winner based on skill or merit (i.e. a high score, or the selection of a panel of judges). Different mechanics work better for different campaigns, competitions clearly involving more effort from the entrant. Think about quality vs quantity.
If you are looking to run a purchase necessary promotion (i.e. the entrant buys a promotional item), consider how the entrant will redeem or register their entry. Will it be automatic (e.g. from website purchases in a given promotional period), will there be a barcode scanned, or an SMS sent, or a receipt uploaded? There are both high tech and low tech solutions available.
We asked our experts for one tip each
Iain from The Competition Agency:
If I could offer one tip it would be to differentiate and give your entrants a different experience. It’s fairly uncontroversial to say, but so many businesses just look to what everyone else is doing – which is usually a fairly low effort entry requirement for a commonly found prize. Think carefully about what you can do to make your prize promotion actually interesting to the entrant – a treasure hunt, an interactive game, mixing offline and online – all of these things stand out a mile against a retweet and win prize draw on Twitter. And the best thing is: the more effort you put into making a campaign actually fun, the less you need to give away in prizes.
Jo from Contest PR:
We find a lot of B2C clients are hesitant to tie a prize draw to a purchase. In the UK this is perfectly allowable to do (providing you tick a few fairly simple compliance boxes) and can be really effective. Providing your promotional item is the same price as it usually is, there’s really little downside, and if you’re an FMCG business, you really should be using prize promotions to gain leverage in retail, both on the shelf and with retailers themselves.
If you’re looking for some examples of interesting prize promotion ideas, Contest PR has a run down of their favourite 25 campaigns – you will likely recognise a few.