Archive for Competitions
Friday Five - Prize Ideas for Service Businesses
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There are many opportunities to promote your business by offering a prize. This could be by having a competition for your own business, or by donating a prize to one of your strategic alliance partners for their competitions.
If you have a business that sells products, it’s a lot easier because you can use something from your product range. If, however, you have a serviced based business, it can be harder. There are only so many free consultations or free time designing you can give away.
This weeks Friday Five will give you some ideas for prizes you can use if you run a service rather than a product based business.
- Report - Have you written a report based on your topic of expertise? Depending on how much you sell it for, you could give away one of your reports. If it is an eBook and you are at an event or somewhere you need to send a physical product, print it out and have a copy bound that you can present to the winner.
- Buy something - Do you have a book or favourite product that your customers would find useful? Then buy a copy and use that as a prize. If it is something you actively recommend to your clients, you may be able to do a deal with your supplier to purchase the item at a reduced rate.
- Gift voucher - Do you have a favourite restaurant or service that you recommend? Purchase a gift voucher to use as a prize. Again, if this is a place you visit regularly or that you actively recommend, you may be able to get a discount on the voucher or the owner may throw in something a little extra with the voucher.
- Strategic Alliance Partner - Do you have an awesome strategic alliance partner who may be interested in some publicity? If you are running a competition on your own site, one or more of your alliance partners may be interested in donating a prize for your competition.
- Promotional products - You can get your logo printed on just about anything these days. If competitions and having prizes is something you are adding to your marketing strategy, one option for prizes is to get some items created with your logo on them. Depending on your business, it could be anything from mugs to diaries to t-shirts. These can then be used as prizes as well as giveaways to clients.
I hope this gives you some ideas for your service business. There are other ideas out there you could use, these are just a start. Whatever you do will depend on your business and the competition you are running or donating a prize to.
As with any marketing exercise, set yourself a goal and then test and measure your results.
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Running a competition is a great way to promote your business as well as businesses of your strategic alliance partners.
The sort of business you run and your desired outcome of the competition will have a huge impact on the sort of competition you run.
So, why should you have a competition?
There are many different reasons, including:
- Rewarding your current customers
- Boost sales
- Grow your email newsletter list
- Promotion for your business
- Show off your products (especially if it is a photo competition)
- Reviews
- Referrals
These are just a few ideas of why to have a competition. Before deciding to have a competition, work out what you want out of it, so you will be able to see if your competition achieved its purpose.
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Please vote for me
I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. It’s currently the middle of school holidays & life has been crazy.
Yesterday I found out I am a finalist for The SMART Business Networker’s SMART Business Makeover awards! I’m very excited, especially as it means someone else has nominated me.
Voting is currently open, so I’m asking for votes.
To vote, simply click here, read the post and vote for me in the poll.
Thank you in advance for voting for me.
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- Amazing giveaway - on NOW!
Your Cheeky Monkey is having a fantastic giveaway on their blog, and all the goodies are for MUM!
Simply head over to their blog, and follow the instructions. All you need to do is go to their site, then add a comment of what you would buy for a baby and why.
Get in quickly as entries close this Friday.
Go to http://yourcheekymonkey.blogspot.com/2010/07/cool-things-for-you-giveaway.html to enter.
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Posted by: | CommentsToday I’m going to share a cool tool that I found - I found this through a number of my Facebook friends and fan pages I’m a member of.
It’s a random number generator and you can find it at www.random.org
If you run a competition based on Facebook fans (this is against the Facebook terms & conditions, but I’m using it as an example), or any other list, this an easy way to do it.
Simply enter in the maximum number, for example, you may have 973 on your list, and it will generate a random number - whoever is at that spot on the list is the winner.
You may want to include a screenshot image of the result when you publish it.
This makes drawing a competition easy, and also shows entrants it is truly a random drawing.
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Posted by: | CommentsIn my travels, I came across a fantastic blog post - “7 Cross Promotion Ideas to Boost Traffic and Sales“. There are some great ideas in this post to boost the traffic and sales from your site, more specifically your blog.
One of the suggestions is to join a “Comment Club”. There are many programs that exist, one that I’m a member of is Blog Whammy. This is a great way to increase comments, links and get inspiration for your blog posts. As you are told each week which blog is being “Whammy’d”, you don’t need to remember where you are up to.
Another way to cross promote is with your Facebook Fanpages. You can recommend other fanpages in exchange for them recommending you to their fans. This is easy to do and can help you get more fans, it is then up to you to turn them in to customers.
Running a competition is another great way to cross promote. You can swap prizes, or run a joint competition that runs through both your databases.
There are many ways you can cross promote with businesses that share your target market. If you have done something brilliant, or has brought great results, please add a comment and let us know what you have done.
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Posted by: | CommentsI have seen a few business mums running cool competitions lately. They are aimed at raising sales, growing databases and raising awareness of their business.
One I’ve seen on a few sites is the Mega Mums Giveaway. A few business mums have got together and each are offering a prize. To enter, you visit any or all of the sites and buy something to the minimum qualifying value (each site has a different minimum) and answer a question and you are in the running to win some great prizes.
Each of the businesses involved is promoted on the others websites, as are the details of the competition, raising awareness of each business. As entrants must buy something, they will be raising sales. In this competition, participants are not added to a newsletter mailing list, just the list for the giveaway so they can be notified of the winner.
This is also a great idea for a Strategic Alliance. Each of the businesses involved has a similar target market.
If you would like to find out more about Strategic Alliances, come to the SAS SMART Networking Event on 1 May. You can find all the details here. I have 10 tickets available at the discounted rate of only $57. Simply enter the code MEKH1024 at checkout to get your ticket. This is an amazing event and well worth attending.
Do you know of another Strategic Competition running at the moment? Can you think of something like this you could you for your business?
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Posted by: | CommentsOn the weekend, I went to a quarterly business planning morning through Time Retrievers. I was brainstorming some marketing ideas for the network when the suggestion came up about school newsletters. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, however never did anything about it.
Some schools allow advertising in their newsletters, others don’t. Those that do generally charge a small amount to include an advertisement. Sometimes you may be able to supply fliers the school can staple to the end of the newsletter. The requirements are different from school to school, however if your target market is parents, especially parents of school aged children, this can be a good way to get your business in front of this market.
Every family in the school receives a newsletter, and most parents read it. Often, they like to support the businesses that support the school - giving you a better outcome.
As with any form of advertising, you will want to put an ad in more than once. Parents are busy and often need reminding you exist. Plan to include your ad in at least 3 newsletters, if not more.
If possible, see if there is any other way of sponsoring the school or a school event, giving you more exposure to the school community. There may be raffles you could donate a prize to, give a gift to the “Student of the Week” or similar, or sponsor a sausage sizzle by providing the sausages or the bread. Most schools would be happy to talk with businesses who want to support them.
An ad in a school newsletter can get you some fantastic promotion. Don’t forget to test and measure your results so you can plan campaigns later in the year as well.
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Posted by: | CommentsI found this competition/giveaway on the EP Designs blog. It’s a very simple idea, and a great one for getting more traffic to your blog.
Elena posted details of the giveaway on her blog in early December. You can see the post here. Basically, participants needed to follow EP Designs on Twitter, retweet the post, and then post about her blog and the competition on their blog and leave a comment with the link. The winner was picked with a random number generator and whoever made that comment won the goodies.
This is a great competition idea, and judging from the comments was popular.
If you run a competition like this on your blog, make sure you list the terms clearly, as Elena has done, and maybe have some strategies in place for those who don’t tweet and/or have a blog of their own.
If you don’t have any products you can give away as a prize, contact one of your strategic alliance partners and do a competition as a joint giveaway through your blog.
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Posted by: | CommentsIf you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I love hearing stories of how business mums have got their kids involved in their business.
Over at Your Cheeky Monkey blog, Monique recently shared winners of her December giveaway. She got her son to help do the prize draw, so she accompanied the post with photos of her son drawing the winners. You can view the post here.
This is something I get my kids involved in as well. For most competitions I run, they draw the winners out of a hat. They love getting involved and doing something with Mummy.
Do you get your children to help with prize draws?
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