11 Smart Ways to Promote Contests and Handle Algorithm Changes
Are you having a super team to work with using effective ways to handle contest algorithm changes? If you are an admin for a big brand, you need to have such a team. For small marketers, we have other ideas.
Big brands have to face tough competitors for their contests. When they have a low number of fans on social media, they need to work 3 times better than their competitors to keep the lead. So what is the first step to follow?
1. Find the contest algorithm
At first, you have to spend more time finding the right contest to join. Choosing the right contests to join is really a big job. You need to analyze many factors like the following ones.
- Value of the winning prize.
- Duration of contest length.
- Server speed quality.
- Should have a low number of contestants.
- Need to study your competitor’s social media power. (Fans, followers, like vote count.)
- The domain trust level of the admin.
- Is there any fee to join? Great contests never ask contestants to pay for joining.
- Analyze the contest algorithm.
So to analyze the contest algorithm, you need a top tech professional. Why should we analyze the contest algorithm? Let’s look at them deeply in the coming paragraphs.
2. Understanding the uniqueness of contest rules
Every contest has different rules. Why is it because they are run by a different admin? Brands conduct contests often to improve their business ROI. So they plan to find and eliminate fake contest votes from their contestants. They want to create strong contests as much as possible to track the perfect results.
The strong contest should have unique contest rules to filter the fake unwanted votes. Few contestants make the poll results to crazy. When we check a contest last week, a contestant had 50,000 votes for his entry.
It is a video singing contest. The admin of the contest checked the number of views received for the video. It had a total of 1500 views only. But, how did the contestant gather 50,000 votes for his entry?
Now you can understand how fake votes play a great role in making winners for contests. Few contests admin have great security features to filter fake votes. Some of those contests are:
- Woodbrook’s Facebook plus captcha verification based contests.
- DJmag top 100 DJ contests: It requires voters to have a Facebook account or mobile verification to confirm votes.
- Survey type contests with 20 plus steps.
- The high-security contest with email verification plus one country only targeted votes.
3. Power of video contests
There are many types of contests available online. And why we should choose video-based contests to join? The answer is: Hard work makes us unique from others. 90% of the time, every contestant chooses an easy contest to join. They don’t like to spend time creating great videos to join the contest.
Video contests are only for the top people who need big prizes and brand popularity. To create a top-quality video, the contestant should spend more time and money. Great quality videos deserve to collect more organic traffic than any videos. The admin of the video contest gives good value to the videos with great quality.
So you can easily get more likes and votes naturally for your video. Even if you purchase votes for your contest, the admin has no idea what to suspect. Note these factors before you plan to join any contests online.
Note: People love to share videos on social media platforms. Getting more attraction using video is easy. The key is the video should be an outstanding one.
4. Strategies to create great videos for the contest
From a recent study Facebook tells that, video contents drive more targeted traffic than any other form of content. This is a great idea for marketing professionals who want to join video contests. People love to watch videos 80% of the time to find out about a product or guide.
You can see many marketers now release videos on Instagram regularly. On average, the ideal length of any great video is 2 minutes. These short pieces attract more eyes to generate big sales for your product. Also, it helps to increase the votes count for your entry.
You should give the right directions to your video creator to make the video looks perfect. You can try freelancer sites to find video creators who do a project at competitive prices. Basically, you can get such a quality video from 50 USD to 80 USD on freelancer sites.
Note: You can also search for gigs for video creators on the Fiverr site. Their gigs just start from only $5 USD. Spend your time smartly to find the right gigs to get more benefits.
5. Speak with your audience to understand their needs
- Impress your audience during the first visit. So your video title and the first introduction part should be high level to impress your fans.
- Show super examples and tell interesting short stories to explain the methods. It will give great results to your contests.
- Big brands like TED tells a story to their audience through video promotion.
- You can make the audience in the right mood with perfect videos.
- When you present the video filled with super interesting points, they remember the points you told and give votes to you as a return favor.
- Ask questions within the video presentation and tell your visitors to comment on their queries below the video.
- When answering your customers, use attractive Emojis to impress them.
- Interesting images also give great results. Many marketers smartly share relevant motion images to get the eyeballs of their fans.
6. Post a new article on your blog
Blog posts are providing a great opportunity to engage with your audience. You need to post relevant niche articles regularly. After you post the article you can share the link on social media to make the most viral. You need to create a team to manage the following things:
- Keyword finding professional.
- Filter keywords from high competition level to low.
- It’s time to write well-analyzed content filled with LSI keywords to rank better on search engines.
- Analyze the images, and videos to use on the post.
- Check grammar errors and post the article at the right time to get more visitors.
- When you follow these all correctly, you can easily get more votes for your vote entry.
- Add comment options to your posts and allow visitors to share their thoughts in the comment area.
- Respond to them quickly to show your active action to impress your readers.
- Also, you can share your contest entry to get more votes from your blog readers.
Note: To get quick traffic for your post, you can share them on Medium and Quora social sites. Also, you can post unique content on Medium and share a link to your content from that post.
7. Share content in real-time
Recent case studies from Vapulsemedia said that sharing content live through Facebook featured live video helps marketers to get more visitors. Real quality videos receive lots of shares and are like organically. So your ultimate aim should be to create top quality content for your video.
Also, include smart images with your posts. There is no need to create a unique image every time. You can use sites like Canva and stencil. Using these tools you can create a unique image in 5 minutes. If you have enough money to invest, you can hire a professional designer to create images for your content. For long-term audience engagement, people use Facebook live video techniques.
Linkedin also provides you with a great opportunity to share new content with your niche people. You can easily find your industry people on the LinkedIn group.
Note: 27% of marketers send emails to their list of people after they post a new article. You need to right fantastic titles to your emails to get a high open rate. Remember to add high-quality snippet words to make your list of people visit your new post.
8. Twitter tweet test
To share the new idea in real-time, marketers use Twitter’s social media platform. Not only marketers, but also politicians, journalists, and celebrities use Twitter to share ideas. 11% of marketers love to get statics from Twitter for their contest promotion.
They share new content on their page with fans. And they use tools to track the retweets count. If a post gets reasonable retweets, then they use that content to promote contests.
Twitter results are not accurate though, but they help marketers to understand the working strategy to advertise to their audience. When you regularly post quality tweets on your wall, your followers count also increases gradually. Marketers also share special images to impress their audience. And 81% time they win and get more visitors to their contest promotion page.
You can use great templates to write your tweet. 70% of people forget to add relevant hashtags to their tweets. Superbly written tweets with the best hashtag bring super engagement to your business. If you find a relevant popular tweet from any other people, you can simply retweet it manually.
Instagram influencers help small marketers to spread their messages to the right audience. When you choose the right influencer, you can enjoy quickly targeted visitors to your contest page to get more votes.
9. Google Ads
Great marketers know well how to bid perfect keywords to use for their campaigns. Setting a bid with the correct amount is very important to get a better ROI. You can test using multiple ad groups to know the well-working keywords. Your landing page should be great to make the visitors happy.
Always choose exact match keywords. Using broad matching keywords you can’t get exact stats. To promote your contest using Google ads, you should have enough experience. When you have more clicks for your ads, you can get more votes for your entry. Some marketers love to test negative keywords too. 24% of the time, it works well for simple businesses.
Do you have any experience with a double click or with analytics 360? They are Google ads platforms. 99% of marketers accept that Google Ads is the number 1 ad platform among others. It is very neat and effective. Every step and stage of Google Ads helps marketers to reach their targeted audience.
You can also use Google places to list your service to your local area audience. Register for Google places and verify your business. Yahoo and Bing search engines also have local listing services. Remember to create an account for it too.
10. Press Releases
Do you have the best writing team at home? If not, it’s time to hire a few professionals to handle this task. You can tell your customers about your new product launch or about your new online contest. To promote your audience with specific people at a specific time, press releases help a lot for sure.
You need to share your exact contact details with your press releases. Like you give ads in newspapers, press releases also need your location and contact details. You should write interesting short notes about your contest and tell your readers to connect with you to get more details.
Using this press release method, only 14% of marketers get benefits. So only do this strategy if you have a good budget to test all strategies.
11. Connect with the same niche popular bloggers
You should have an idea about similar niche bloggers. It’s time to connect with them to advertise your contest to get more votes. You can request them to post your guest post on their blog. Once they accept, you can write an excellent post to help readers. Also, you can share your contest link to market it.
To start this correctly, you have to arrange many tools to scrape sites list, contact emails, and mobile numbers. Once you make the list ready, you can start to reach them. Offer them free products or services to get their interest. This method is really not easy like others, but it gives great value for sure.
Using these top 11 methods, you can promote your contest online to gather more votes even if your contest algorithm changes anytime.