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Your competition goal is the foundation for your whole competition. It’s the reason you’re running a competition in the first place, so it’s crucially important to have one… But how do you decide on a competition goal? Close your eyes and pick from the list below? Go for more followers because it’s fun to see your follower numbers skyrocket? Not quite.
It’s not easy deciding what you want from your competition, so let us make the process that little bit easier for you…
Common competition goals.
Let’s start is with examples. Here are a whole bunch of common competition goals we’ve seen over the years:
- to help launch a product/service
- to relaunch a product/service
- to bring attention to a product/service that may already be well-established
- to educate a target audience
- to gain more followers
- … or to keep followers
- to engage followers
- to build a connection with followers
- to reward followers
- to expand to a new target audience
- to conduct research
- to get feedback
- to improve a product
- to boost low sales of a product/service
- to kickstart sales of a product/service
- to kickstart a kickstarter/crowdfunding campaign
- to create brand awareness
- to build up to a larger campaign
- to validate a business idea
- or to create user-generated content
As you can see, competitions are the Swiss army knife of the marketing world, adapting to perform whatever function you need them to, from brand awareness to cold, hard sales.
If none of the above goals jumped out at you in a ‘pick me, pick me!’ kind of way, then we need to delve a little more into the mechanics of your competition.
What about my competition goal?
Even if one of the above goals does appeal to you and you’re 90% certain you’ve got your competition goal, you’ll still need to work through these questions in order to come up with a definitive, send-to-print goal.
What do you want to achieve?
When all is said and done, what results do you want to see?
Be as specific as you can with with numbers/percentages, so your goal becomes measurable. I’m going to be using an example to answer these questions so you can see how it all comes together.
Our example aim is ‘to reach 3,000 likes on our Facebook page’.
Who are you targeting?
Most businesses have an idea of who their ideal client is, even if it’s not written down on paper.
Your target demographic is a specific description of the person who will enter your competition – for the purposes of our example, let’s say 18-21 year old males, living in Sydney looking for their first house-share.
How are you planning to achieve your goal?
Less heavy than it sounds, this simply refers to the way in which you will get people to enter your competition and complete your desired action (in this case like our Facebook page).
In this example, we could run a like our page to win competition. Just remember to stay away from tagging and sharing as your entry method on Facebook.
Where will you run your competition?
Do you have a bricks and mortar store or hold a weekly market stall? If not, will you use social media or your website to host your competition?
In our example, we’re looking to attract Facebook fans, so we’re obviously going to host the competition on our Facebook page. We also know our target market uses this channel, so it’s a good match.
When will you run it?
This includes both the time of year and the duration of your competition.
An in-demand time for house shares may be before the start of the university year, so our time of year will be Summer and duration will be 3 months as the process of deciding to house-share, finding suitable properties and being accepted to a house-share typically lasts a couple of months.
Why are you running the competition? What’s your end-game?
I know what you’re thinking, you think we already covered this in the ‘what do you want to achieve’ question above.
Think of your ‘end game’ as the reason behind the reason – yes, you’re getting fans to your Facebook page, but you’re not going to stop there, what do you want to do with these likers once they’re following your page?
In our example, Facebook might be where we post our updated listings on a daily basis or showcase new rentals when they become available, so it’s the perfect place to generate enquiries.
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Final reality check: is your goal realistic given the time and resources you possess? Do your homework.
If your page currently has one like (hi mum!) then 3,000 page likes is a pretty lofty goal.
Assuming our example page is currently sitting at 2,549 likes and is averaging 1-2 new likes per day, with enough promotion, it’s realistic we can push this up to more than 5 likes a day and achieve our goal within the 2-3 month period.
Great, now what?
Now you have a much clearer idea of the specifics of your competition and what you hope to achieve, it’s time to bring these ideas together in a single sentence – your competition goal. I’ll even give you a little template for formulating your goal:
“To [insert what do you want to achieve and (optional) who are you targeting] by [insert how are you planning to achieve your goal and where will you run it] during [insert when will you run it] in order to [(optional) why are you running the competition]”
Coming back to our example:
“To reach 3,000 likes on our Facebook page from 18-21 year old males, living in Sydney looking for their first house-share, by running a like to win competition on our Facebook page during Summer for 3 months in order to convert followers and likers from our Facebook page to rental enquiries for our house-share listings.”
Voila! Just like that, you have a bona fide competition goal!
A couple of parting tips on competition goals…
- Align every aspect of your competition to this goal – you can even print out your goal and stick it on your computer (I do!)
You didn’t believe me, did you?
- If you ever get sidetracked during your competition, always ask “is this going to help me achieve my goal?”
- Check your ‘where you will run it’ choice actually permits competitions and if so, remember to follow the rules
- Remember 100 quality leads/entrants are better than 10,000 irrelevant entrants who are just after a free prize. Focus on quality, not quantity with your goal.
Congratulations, you now have a competition goal to help you shape your competition. This will help keep you, your marketing efforts and most importantly, your competition budget, focussed on the same outcome. Feel free to jump into our Competition Creator’s Facebook Group and share your goals so we can keep you accountable to achieve it!
Ready to carry on planning your competition? Book in a free strategy session with our giveaway gurus!
