Of all the many marketing options available to modern businesses, from social media posts about new products to ads on streaming platforms, one that’s seemingly underutilized is the deployment of a competition, tournament, or event that leans into one of the two. Of course, there are good reasons for this. For one, many businesses looking for a new marketing plan covet efficiency and scope to make the most of the costs.
With all of the digital options out there for advertising and branding, investing the time and money to plan, run, and offer rewards for a competition or tournament may not seem worthwhile at first glance. Here, however, we’re going to explore the many benefits of incorporating such an event into your marketing plan, as well as some fine examples of where running a competition or tournament has worked a treat.
Contests and Tournaments That Have Worked
At their core, contests and tournaments within a broader marketing effort help to gamify and increase the entertainment value for customers of engaging with a brand or product – even if the competition itself isn’t an actual “game” as such. But just creating a sense of competition, or a chance to win prizes over others, is ample fuel to create a gamified and incentivized connection with an audience. Across brand marketing, we’ve seen this done very well on several occasions.
For physical product competitions, you can look to McDonald’s and Coconut Bowls. The former’s Monopoly game competition helped to drive sales to such a tremendous degree that the cross-brand promotion and competition for an array of prizes has become a staple of the fast-food vendor’s calendar. The latter ran a competition that gave winners one of their products, along with an already popular product, a Vitamix blender.
In these examples, competitions are used to encourage customers to engage with a product to have a shot at a desirable prize. Elsewhere, tournaments can be a big selling point on their own. With this gambling site, in addition to the random cash drops and casino welcome bonus on their promotions page, the daily tournaments listed offer an additional selling point. Once the welcome bonuses are used, customers can then compete for more prizes by engaging with the platform’s various other offerings. So, contests and tournaments can be successful as one-off events, annual events, or for ongoing promotions.
Benefits of Running Contests and Tournaments
As noted above, gamifying an experience, even if the end goal is to fulfill a marketing quota, makes the effort much more appealing to potential customers. These events inherently increase engagement and promote good relations between brand and customer, in turn, growing sales and allowing you to collect priceless insights into consumers’ activity. In fact, running a tournament or competition can get you the most valuable data points and bits of feedback.
People can sign up and then directly use your products. Not only will this offer feedback on the best-sellers, buyer preferences, and the like, but in some framings, it’ll stress-test products. Pose a creative challenge for customers and see what they do with the product. Even if this isn’t the angle, running a tournament around a new product or where new products are the branded prizes will help to get the word out about the new range.
Engagement is the currency of the day, and if set up with the goal of promoting a product or brand through an interactive or competitive experience, engagement can be brought in en masse with a competition or tournament. Given how relatively niche this still is as a marketing approach, it’ll also help to make your brand stand out at the very least.
So, if you want to try something a bit different and drive brand engagement and data acquisition, see if a competition or tournament for your would-be customers would work for your next marketing campaign.