My competition wasn’t successful – what now?

It’s happened to everyone… you launch with the best intentions and this shiny vision of all of your adoring new fans and followers, but now the competition is over and you didn’t achieve your goal… in fact the whole thing was a bit of a mess from start to finish, you wonder ‘what was the point?’.

Check out our video on how to salvage something from your competition, even if you feel it was unsuccessful.

Spoiler alert: there’s no such thing as a ‘failed’ competition.

Why wasn’t your competition successful?

First of all, don’t beat yourself up. We’ve all had successful competitions and we’ve all had unsuccessful competitions (note how I don’t say ‘we’ve all failed?’). You’re not the first and I can assure you, you definitely won’t be the last. So don’t beat yourself up.

The key thing here, is to learn from our mistakes.

So first of all, ask yourself why you feel your competition wasn’t a success this time around? Did you not achieve the goal that you set out to achieve? Perhaps it was because the goal was a little unrealistic or it wasn’t achievable in the time that you set yourself? There’s a great goal-setting acronym:  SMART, which will help you set more realistic and achievable goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic and Time-bound.

Making sure that your goals fit all of these criteria is going to result in a more successful competition next time, as you know what ‘successful’ looks like and when you’ve achieved it.

What have you learnt from this competition?

Secondly, you need to ask yourself what you’ve learnt from this competition. Every single learning is going to be valuable to you for your next competition and for your marketing in general.

Perhaps you discovered that your demographic is slightly more male-skewed than female as you previously thought? Or maybe your audience hangs out more on Twitter than they do on Facebook?

All of these are really valuable insights which you can carry forward in your marketing and your next competition.

What would I do differently?

Thirdly, ask yourself what you would do differently next time. Don’t give up just because you weren’t successful this time, look at what you would change for next time and look at what you have achieved with this competition.

You set out to achieve a goal and I’m pretty sure you would have achieved at least part way to your goal, so all of these are successes in that sense. Make sure that you remember that you have achieved something with this competition attempt.

Get a second opinion.

Finally, get a second opinion. There are people out there who have run many competitions (ahem) and they’ve had a lot of successful competitions and a few unsuccessful ones, so ask the experts what could you salvage from this competition, where did you go wrong and how they can help next time.

If your competition wasn’t a success this time, why not book in a 15 minute, completely free strategy session with our giveaway gurus and we’ll look at where the competition possibly went wrong and what you can do differently next time – as well as what you could adapt and what you could salvage to make sure your next competition is a smashing success.