When Is the Best Time to Run the Contest for Your Business?
Running contests to amplify a brand and gain new leads is no longer a fancy new trend. Businesses use contests of different types and flavors to promote their products and services either online or as onsite events.
Even though some experts state that the approach is slightly moving towards the “dime a dozen” line, successful businesses know that contests can help reap great benefits as long as two essential aspects are being considered: an out-of-the-box idea and good timing.
Why do you need to run the contest for your business?
Because there’s a whole bucket of strategies you can use to address your marketing challenge through contest organization. If you need some proof, check out these four benefits that a business contest can give you:
#1. New hype.
We all know that sleeping client segment: people who show, from low to medium activity, and their contacts are getting covered with dust in your customer database. With the help of contest organization, you can drag them out and boost the engagement in one go. In other words, generating bright contest ideas may give your clients an incentive to start interacting with the brand again.
#2. New people.
Apart from spicing up your relationships with the existing clients, you can also reach out to new audiences and capture new leads. By promoting your contest on social media, realizing interesting sweepstake ideas, and offering lucrative prizes, the odds of your client database expanding are nicely sized.
#3. New data.
The businesses that give exceptional value to long-term contacts, can gain some data like email addresses or phone numbers by making it obligatory for contest entrants to provide this required information.
#4. New promotion.
High-performing businesses know that random users and clients can be the best allies in terms of brand promotion. So, here is the idea: build a business contest and empower people to do real marketing for you by using votes, reposts, and other hype-promoting tools.
Why time is so important?
Do you know the feeling when a perfect coat appears in a shop window and you want it so much that you’re rushing in without noticing anything or anyone on your way? Maybe you decided to buy it on the way back, after work, and then couldn’t find it again? Well, the task of a business is producing the right coat, just in time, and delivering it to buyers within an established timeline.
Timing in contest organization relates to two core aspects: the time when a contest has to be announced and its length. By setting your foot on the right time track, you gain stability in terms of timely interaction with clients, optimize your contact-base building, and catering for the most urgent needs of customers.
The best time to run the contest: Statistics
To start your own business contest, equip yourself with some general statistics on contest timing. This Hubspot infographic on social media posting provides some valuable insights on when to promote or post your business contests:
- To get the highest clickthrough rates, use Facebook for contest communication in the timeline from 1 to 4 p.m.
- Give preference to the middle of the week (Tuesday – Thursday) when using LinkedIn for contest posts.
- Consider that the top of retweets on Twitter falls into the time range from 3 to 6 p.m.
Apart from that, you can run a business contest that wins competitive priority relying on the experiences of major brands. Master statistics on online contests success, and you will find out what the optimal duration of a contest is, which industries and themes perform better with online competitions, and what the best time of the year for starting a contest is.
How to determine the best time to run a contest?
Every company has its own “best time” to run a contest for business, which is why any one-size-fits-all recipe that you might find out there is wrong by definition. Here are the major indicators that will give you some valuable insight. Check it out and become a time manager with super(duper)powers, who can ensure that business reaps the benefits just in time:
- Interaction. Obviously, businesses don’t rush into contest organization right from the get-go. Prior to organizing business contest, brands gain some experience in terms of interacting with clients. Building a strong timetable for contest organization has to be based on analytics. It means you have to track on which days and parts of the day the target audiences show top activity to adjust contest communication accordingly.
- Time zone. This is the point that you would hardly miss, but we emphasize: live, according to your client’s time zone. To bring fruitful results, interaction has to take place at a time convenient for the client, not the business.
- Statistics. Subjective as it is, timing in contest organization still has some patterns to rely upon. This particularly concerns social media contests or promotions on social networks. You have to consider that each platform governs its own timing statistics. For instance, if you post on Facebook, note that this one is an early bird and loves morning contributions. In contrast, Twitter draws more engagement after 5 p.m.
Still, even though statistics can be helpful, it’s worth nothing if you can’t make it clear what works best for your company. Here’s the key thing: you should know your business inside and out to run a contest that resonates. To make it more specific, even a small business contest has to be based on the detailed research in terms of:
- Days when you get the most sales.
- Time of day when your blog posts get read the most.
- Time when you generate the highest number of email sign-ups.
Once you have this data in your pocket, you get the answers to all the “whens” that relate to contest organization.
Conclusion
The right time to start a business contest is the time when your brand gets top engagement, due to enhanced user activity. To maximize the chances for success, consider using a reliable software for contest management with the analytics module and consulting statistics. Voila: a brand-spankin’ new timing guru is good to go!