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Looking for some inspiration for your summer giveaway or competition? We’ve got six of the best, tried and tested, perfect-for-summer competitions ready to go:
- In-person competitions
- Collaboration giveaways
- Photo competitions
- Holidays and travel prizes
- Seasonal products and services giveaways
- Holiday-based prizes and competitions
So flip the fan on, pour yourself an icy drink and dive in.
In person competitions.
Summer is the perfect time to get out and about with your business, whether it’s a festival, market, event or expo, nothing beats meeting your customers face to face.
Competitions are a great talking point and perfect ice-breaker when meeting your ideal customers in person.
When it comes to competitions, you’ll want to make it as quick and easy as possible for your audience to enter; so avoid the pesky paper forms and dodge the dusty old card drops.
Instead, opt for something more engaging, such as asking them to take a photo at your stand and tag you on social media, or simply grab an iPad and set up a Mailchimp subscribe page like our clients East Forged did.
Collaboration giveaways.
Summer is better when spent with good friends. Why not partner up with a business that has the same target market as you, but isn’t a direct competitor?
Prize packages are perfect for summer – think ultimate summer wardrobe packages, summer bride photography and video competitions or winning everything you need for the perfect backyard BBQ.
By collaborating with other businesses to create a sizzling summer prize package, you’ll also benefit from the phenomenon that packaging up your prizes can increase the appeal of your prize and therefore the number of entries you’ll get.
Check out our guide to finding a non-competing, complementary competition partner.
Photo competitions.
It’s a universally accepted fact that everything is more photogenic in summer. OK, maybe it’s not universal, but it’s true 99.9% of the time.
You can take full advantage of this for your user-generated content competitions. These are a great way to collect photos, videos and marketing material from the people that matter most – your customers.
Take a leaf out of Kennards Hire’s book and ask people to submit their photos for a chance to win. Not only have they collected months of great content to re-post on social media; but they know exactly which of their products their entrants are actively using and which projects they’re currently tackling – which is perfect for sending post-competition summer specials that are highly likely to convert post-competition.
Enjoying these summer competition ideas?
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Holidays and travel prizes.
Summer + holidays = match made in heaven. Be the business that sends its clients to summer holiday heaven by giving away a travel prize.
That’s just what Mitsubishi Heavy Industries did with their Cruise through Summer promotion. By purchasing an air conditioning unit, customers had the chance to win one of four South Pacific cruises.
Not only did the entry mechanism itself generate sales, but four very grateful winners sent some fantastic photos of their trip for the client to use across social media and their website.
Think travel prizes are too much work?
We take the pain out of giving away travel prizes by managing the whole process for you from itinerary ideas to terrific testimonials (and images of happy winners enjoying their holiday!)
Seasonal products and services giveaways.
If you’ve got a perfect product or sizzling service made for summer, now is the time to show it off.
Create the competition around your product or service, featuring it – and your business – as the star of the show. Not only will you gain brand awareness and generate seasonal sales, but the promotional messaging and marketing material practically writes itself.
That’s exactly what we did with Intelligent Home’s Sounds of Summer competition. Partnering with Sonos, they gave away a Sounds of Summer home entertainment package, perfect for all the activities we love to do in summer.
Holiday-based prizes and competitions.
In the northern hemisphere, summer encompasses school holidays, Independence Day, Canada Day and Labor Day. In the southern Hemisphere we also have school holidays as well as Christmas and New Year as our major holidays.
Christmas, for us southern hemisphere countries is a double-whammy and definitely an opportunity for some major marketing and promotion. Theming a competition around a holiday gives your competition a finite timeframe and encourages your audience to act.
They’re also more likely to be surfing social media with the extra time off work.
So there you have it, six competition ideas perfect for your next summer giveaway.
If you’re ready to turn the heat up on your summer competition, get in touch with us for some custom competition ideas..
