Kate Waite is Dot Tourism’s newest recruit and takes on the position of Digital Project manager. Passionate about travel she brings nine years marketing experience to the role with particular expertise in email and search marketing.

If you are looking for an effective way to market your brand, product or destination, running an online competition can offer a great way to bring a flood of new visitors to your site. The notion that it “could be you” is a strong motive for consumers to sign up to your newsletter, become a follower on twitter or even generate content for your site.

Keep it simple

When running a competition the best advice is also the most obvious; keep it simple. This means both for you and the participants. Your audience needs to be able to enter quickly and you will want to be able to administer the competition relatively easily.

There are of course exceptions to this. If your prize has a high value or is unusual then it will attract a higher level of interest and participants will be prepared to work harder for their opportunity to win. Perhaps harder to achieve, making the competition entry method particularly fun or innovative is more likely to engage visitors and remain memorable.

Prizes of caretaker jobs on paradise islands don’t come along too often, it’s important to get the balance right with what you have to work with.

Entry methods

Effective simple methods for entry include becoming a follower on Twitter, commenting on a blog post or entering details onto a short form. You will want to ensure that you can pick and get in touch with the eventual winner easily.

Facebook is an effective platform for running competitions, however under their regulations you must receive permission to do so and the terms of entry must abide by their rules. You aren’t allowed to administer your competition through Facebook (for example select or contact winners) but should use a third party application to gather data. You can however make it a condition of entry to become a fan of your group or page.

We are currently running six weekly competitions through Facebook as part of an online marketing campaign for Countryside 2010 whose website we recently launched. Setting up a tab to administer the competition through, we’ve built the fan base up quickly with only 3% opting to hide news feed updates and over 2,000 page views in the first three weeks.

It’s essential to look at the long term view of using a Facebook page. Posting regular meaningful content will retain fans, while poorly planned or low-quality material will lose fans and subscribers. A good indication of this will be the fan interaction with your posts through likes and comments.

Seeding the competition

There are several dedicated sites and forums which exist as competition portals and will send high volumes of eager entrants to your site. It’s free to submit competition details and links to these sites, they just ask that you respect their community guidelines and provide a reciprocal link when possible.

Quality of traffic

With entrants coming from competition portals there is some question over the quality of traffic being delivered with many entrants having little or no interest in the brand. An opt in for a newsletter on an entry form allows you to filter out interested visitors for future marketing campaigns while building your database at the same time.

Adding the option to recommend a friend in return for an extra entry can also help reach a more targeted audience as entrants are more likely to recommend somebody with a genuine interest in your brand offering.

Other examples

We run a monthly photo competition on the Mahindra Homestays blog. Entrants can enter via the blog, Twitter, Facebook or Flickr. This has proved very popular with the February competition generating 750 votes.

Capital Region USA – A competition played a key part in the success of an online campaign we ran for Capital Region USA partnership. Read the case study

If you are thinking of running a competition but aren’t sure where to start get in touch and we will be happy to offer you some advice.