Facebook Contests

Facebook can be a very powerful marketing tool for each of us to utilize in the growing of our business market. Facebook is an extremely interactive and engaging social network for both brands and consumers. If used properly Facbook as well as the other social platforms available coupled with a great product or idea you can start to level the playing field with brands that have multi-million dollar marketing budgets and sometimes into the billions. As a small start up company or brand we often don’t have these really deep pockets, so it takes creativity to get us to the goals that we desire to achieve.

As we lead up to the Thanksgiving holiday we wanted to reward our fan base as well as grow our base. We also wanted something that would be shared across the social platform. Gathering leads for us would be a great bonus as well. We felt that 2 weeks would be the best option to keep it time sensitive and not go stale as well as give people a chance to enter and spread the word.

Organization

A solo contest was not going to be enough. We wanted to award more than just a pair of shoes so we sought out some industry partners and surrounded ourselves with great companies in the running space. These included socks from Injinji, compression wear from CEP Compression, apparel from Freemotion Fitness, a hydration setup from UltrAspire, awesome earbuds & iPhone holder from Yurbuds and of course awesome new kicks from Altra Zero Drop Footwear.

Process

With these partners in our corner we worked with GroSocial‘s app builder to create a great landing page that would allow each individual to go through our 3 step entry process.

These steps included the following:

• 1. Like the pages
• 2. Enter a valid email address
• 3. Share on Facebook

As a consumer completed these three steps they were then entered into our random drawing to win the entire kit of goods worth over $600. We then awarded one random male and one random female winner.

Cost

We did not spend any money on this contest for the first 9 days and then over the final 5 days we spent about $150/day in promoting the final push post, ppc sidebar advertising that directed right to the app and sponsored stories on Facebook. We also had each brand push it out to their followers on Twitter and Facebook. Each brand directly benefited from this contest.

Success

The success of this contest was profound. Over the 14 days that we ran the contest we received over 8,000 entries with their email contact information to enter into our database for our weekly Running Tips newsletter and promotional offers. For Altra’s Facebook page we saw an increase of nearly 30% in total likes over this 2 week period of time going from 24,500 to nearly 32,000 total likes. During the contest period we were able to maintain an engagement of 5,000+ talking about us which was 15-20% total engagement on Facebook.

With all of this success we have been able to get our brand out to more people and create a greater awareness of the new, hot running shoe brand on the market. We are being disruptive both in the running market as well as in social media. We will look to do many contests like this in the future.