Marketing Your Business With Text-to-Win Competitions

Running a creative-minded competition, or one with minimum product purchase requirements, can be one of the most effective PR events around. One of the easiest ways of administering competitions is with small business tools like text message services. Today we take an overview of the positives and negatives of marketing with competitions for small business.

The pros and cons of competitions for SME promotions

Competitions are as prone to ups and downs as any other SME marketing tool. However, when you carefully structure them, most of the weight is on the positive side. Competitions can:

• Get heartfelt, positive reviews and recommendations for your product from the people announcing or advertising the competition.
• Create media interest, especially if the prize is large. Press releases could get coverage in local media when the competition is announced, when the winner is drawn, and when the winner has received their prize.
• There are quite a few industries where prizes will not cost the business anything extra -- for example, free nights in a hotel and free flights (if the seats or rooms would be empty anyway) cost nothing but gain great exposure. For many businesses in service industries, SME promotions with free services cost very little to fulfill.
• There is the opportunity to gather marketing data about your audience, by requiring demographic information to be considered in the competition.

Some things to watch out for when SME marketing with competitions:

• There is an entire subset of professional competitors who will enter thousands of competitions every year. Little thought goes into these entries. For best effect, make your competition related to something that forces people to think about the brand.
• Depending on the format (for example, quiz shows), your product may get limited exposure. Run your own competitions rather than sponsoring part of a game show, for better SME marketing effect.

Text message scheduling services are invaluable in administering competitions. They allow you to digitally collect names, addresses and phone numbers, as well as easily validate entry criteria (for example, when people must text in a barcode to win). They also give you a guaranteed method for contacting the winner -- a large proportion of competition prizes actually go unclaimed!