Article by Jane Tweedy, Business Advisor, Western Sydney Business Centre
The original 4 P’s of marketing: product/service, promotion, place, pricing are now joined by the 5th yet probably most important P – people. One of the key P’s of marketing is promotion, and today I want to cover one part within this giant area – prizes.
Prizes in your own competitions
There are many options to use prizes to promote your business. First and most obvious is to run your own competition, typically linked to your social media pages. There are a number of considerations, and you need to adhere to the platform guidelines (for instance Facebook and Instagram need to follow Facebook Page Guidelines which prohibit the use of tagging and sharing as a condition of entry).
It is preferable to use your own prizes, because this lowers the cost of the prize to you, and also makes sure the people entering are more likely to be actually interested in your prize and therefore your other products or services. Offering something like a movie ticket may appeal more broadly, but if they’re not your potential customers there may be little point in accumulating their likes.
All competitions are governed by state and national laws, so think about where your audience are located. In NSW this currently means a trade permit is required for all chance based/randomly chosen competitions. Running a skill based competition gets around this issue (eg tell us in 25 words or less …). There will possibly be some relaxing of this requirement in 2018 for small value competitions but this currently applies to all.
Prizes for publicity
If you see an advert in a magazine or a competition for a new product, which one do you think would get more engaged views – the competition of course. Finding out who offers competitions can be done manually by you – for instance contacting The Western Weekender directly. However, there is a free service prizepig.com.au which you can sign up to and be matched with media partners needing prizes that fit their audience and your target customers.
Vouchers as prizes
The NSW Government has announced changes in 2018 to gift card and gift voucher expiries to extend to 3 years and address consumer issues. So far the intention is to exclude charitable gifts, but other prize options haven’t been clarified. So please keep an eye out for the changes if this impacts you.
Giving vouchers or prizes can be a great way to get low cost promotion. Make sure you will receive public announcement at the event, and/or ahead of time in promotional material or social media posts to get the maximum exposure. Showcase your involvement by sharing the event and your prize on your social media, but tagging them to increase your reach.
Need help?
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