Finding the right prospects for your business can be a challenge if your digital marketing efforts don’t pan out. Aside from figuring out where your ideal customers like to spend time online, to capture leads on social media, you must first capture their attention with content that resonates and tempts them into your sales funnel.
While social media is considered the Holy Grail of digital marketing, there is no cut-and-dried formula to follow to ensure successful lead generation on social media channels. Fortunately, many social media users love a good brand-sponsored contest.
Here, 14 members of Forbes Agency Council share their best advice to help you create a social media contest that boosts engagement and achieves your lead-generation goals. See their ideas for social media contests to inspire your next lead-gen campaign below.
Forbes Agency Council members share original ideas for social media contests that attract leads.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Partner With Influencers To Implement Contests
Our team has success partnering with influencers to implement social media contests. First, we make sure that the prize is compelling. Second, we align with the influencer’s brand and audience. Finally, we create engaging campaigns using photos, stories, reels and videos to build excitement. We ask contest winners to become our ambassadors and spread the word about the brand. – Alana Sandel, Marketing For Wellness
2. Ask Your Audience To Submit Ideas For Contests
You could have your audience submit ideas about what type of contest they would like to see in return for rewards. Create a set of criteria to show what a rewardable contest idea would look like. Give those who submit the top 10 contest ideas a larger reward. Use a tiered system where the person whose idea was chosen as No. 1 gets the largest reward and the reward for every next-best idea gets smaller and smaller. – Tony Pec, Y Not You Media
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3. Build A Social Promotion Contest To Promote Your Value
Promoting the value that you’ve brought your customers is incredible content. While leads may not yet believe in your brand’s value, they’ll recognize sincere customer testimonials and use cases when they see them. Build a social promotion contest where your customers can win gifts, event tickets, discounts, upgrades and other prizes. – Douglas Karr, Highbridge
4. Team Up On A Contest With Another Instagram Account
Instagram recently launched its newest feature, which allows for dual posting on two different accounts. The likes, comments and so forth will be mirrored on both pages, thereby showing double the engagement all in one place. That being said, I would suggest teaming up with an account of similar or larger size for a contest using this new feature to help new audiences discover your brand! – Olivia Ormos, OO & CO
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5. Find A Livestreamer To Partner With On A Contest
Livestreamers have loyal followings, and the opportunities for contests are innumerable. Whether it’s a contest to meet the streamer or one to receive a training session from a livestreamer in their realm of expertise, brands can partner with creators to create new leads. Using artificial intelligence, brands can find the streamer who best matches their needs and create new moments that fans will remember. – Ricky Ray Butler, BEN
6. Get Contest Entrants To Share Something Personal
The secret to a successful social media contest is getting someone to share something personal about their lives. A large university, for example, may host a “best graduation cap” contest on Instagram during commencement, allowing students to share something personal or degree-related. Seeing these inspirational images may motivate other college-aged prospects to learn more or apply. – Marc Hardgrove, The HOTH
7. Tap Into Your Audience’s Creativity
On most social media platforms, you can see that quizzes and competitions are extremely popular, but a contest doesn’t have to be about having one right answer. Rewarding your audience for the most creative or most unusual submissions can not only encourage more people to get involved but also help generate user-made content. – Lisa Montenegro, Digital Marketing Experts – DMX Marketing
8. Encourage User Action With An Interactive Social Campaign
If the goal is “more leads,” then having an interactive social campaign where people need to tag other accounts, sign up, interact with others and/or share a part of the campaign is important. Also, add a celebrity, influencer or big “prize” to the contest. Just ensure you are collecting data (email addresses and so on) through a landing page so that you can work on those new leads at a later date! – Zack Teperman, ZTPR
9. Create A Daily Puzzle For Followers And Offer Prizes
Tap into the Wordle craze and create a daily puzzle for your followers with prizes attached. The key is to make it fun and to tap into areas of interest to those in your industry. Never promote your product or service; just use the promotion to associate your brand with good feelings and relationships. The leads will come in time. – Scott Baradell, Idea Grove
10. Host A Digital Scavenger Hunt That Lasts Up To A Week
A digital scavenger hunt starts with a landing page that outlines three, five or seven days of tasks that involve sharing assets (photos, videos or stories) as entries to win a prize that is dependent on the brand. Then, the brand needs to find three creators with the desired audience to drive traffic to that landing page and the three-, five- or seven-day exercise. This increases list size, engagement and the number of followers. – Vix Reitano, Agency 6B
11. Ask For Photos Of Followers Using Your Product In Creative Ways
Social contests should drive engagement beyond likes. Ideally, you want a contest to put your product in front of more eyes. You can ask followers to upload photos of themselves using the product in the most creative ways or in the most unique locations, and then tag your brand’s page in their post. This way, you’re leveraging their followers to grow awareness while also demonstrating value. – Tellef Lundevall, Accelerated Digital Media
12. Entice Users To Submit Contact Info To Join Your Loyalty Club
If leads are the goal, host a contest that focuses less on the medium (social media) and more on engagement. This can be a perfect platform to A/B test offers to entice consumers to submit contact info to the brand’s loyalty club. – Patrick Nycz, NewPoint Marketing
13. Utilize A Giveaway SaaS And Offer Multiple Prizes
It goes without saying that prizes should fit your target market. A contest that has multiple prizes instead of one can help capture hesitant leads. Instead of the typical contest that is limited to a single channel, utilizing a giveaway software as a service will help maximize your campaign through the power of referrals and by allowing more actions to be completed by each participant. – Joon K Lee, Inquivix
14. Run A Contest To Become ‘The Face Of The Brand’
To drive engagement, leads and growth, run a contest to become the “face of the brand.” This can really excite a captive audience and helps drive that all-important user-generated content (UGC), which is absolutely priceless. Then, utilize the UGC in your ads, emails, social and other marketing channels. – Christopher Tompkins, The Go! Agency
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
