How to Create a Successful Competition Business

There is no doubt about the competition industry booming.

It has seen a massive increase in popularity through 2021 as more and more people are realising about the business opportunity.

This in turn promotes the industry to customers thus making it more and more popular.

In previous years the competition industry mainly relied on Facebook to carry out their prize draws and to provide updates to their community.

In more recent times the competition industry has expanded into the website world and now most of the top dogs in the competition industry, such as Nitrous Competitions & Bounty Competitions now also have a website as well as a Facebook page.

With the ticket sales and prize draws now being managed by the website and Facebook only being used for updates.

The business in itself is relatively easy to setup compared to other business ventures, however gaining the audience to ensure the business is successful is undoubtedly the hardest part of the startup process.

If a competition business fails, from our experience it has been because the business has not managed to retain its audience or, it has not had a big enough audience to start with.

There are many tips that we will be providing in this guide to help ensure that your business manages to have an engaging audience.

Step 1 – Get a professional competition website created

Whilst Facebook was a good place to start a competition business back in the day.

It is no longer the best strategy to create a competition business. You will be needing a website that has the capabilities to run your competitions, allow users to select ticket numbers and draw the competitions at the bare minimum.

The best competition websites also have marketing tools, buy one get one free deals and an easy method to export the competition information into a spreadsheet.

It is still common for competition businesses to go live on their Facebook feeds to draw the competition, so it is essential that your website has the capacity to export such data, so the winner can be identified.

As you can see from the graph above our software can easily provide your sales reports and clearly identify which months your business did better and worse.

This information can be used to alter the type of competitions that you run and ensure that your target audience has the best range of competitions that they will be interested to enter into.

Without this software you would have to rely on customer feedback, which is very useful, but often customers will not leave feedback unless requested to.

We have seen the greatest success in competition businesses that have a high quality website instead of just using social media platforms.

However, social media is very important to a competition business, but we will get into that in the coming steps.

If you are in need of a website we offer bespoke website solutions and we specialise in competition websites.

Please refer to our competition page for more information.

Step 2 – Gain an audience through social media

The key to a successful competition business is building a great audience from the very start.

Before you ever post your first competition you need to have the confidence that people are actually going to buy your tickets, which comes down to organic social media posting.

This is a very simple concept at first glance, but actually thinking of what content to post can be a little bit harder.

Don’t worry though we will be using our client’s social media posting as an example later on to show you what to post.

Social media is your best friend when starting a new business because it is an easy and free method to advertise your new startup.

This is especially important when creating a digital business because there is a much greater chance that people will be looking at your social media compared to if you had a physical building to sell your products.

Often, social media marketers will make you overthink your strategy to post on social media, however we believe that as long as the post is related to your business or a product/service you sell, post it.

It is always better to post more often on social media rather than not at all.

Here is a post from our client GTR Fast Lane Competitions, they post frequently on their Facebook page to advertise their business.

In this post they shared a group dedicated to GTR fans.

This is the type of content you will want to be posting on your social media to advertise your business because it doesn’t require any design software, it was related to GTR’s business and their customers would be interested and engage with the post.

Step 3 – Setup a Paid Advertisements with Google

Paid ads are a great way to kickstart your business venture, whether you are using them for brand awareness or to sell your products/services.

Google’s advertising platform can be expensive, but the return on your investment is very good because of the amount of people that use Google.

You are bound to be able to find your target audience to run ads to.

But, how can you use this in relation to a competition business?

Well, there are many ways that Google Ads can be useful.

After you have uploaded your first competition to your new bespoke website, you should create a campaign on Google Ads to advertise the competition to people who are interested in competitions or related to the competition, such as cars if you are giving away a luxury vehicle.

This will help you gain traction on your first competition, and who knows, your users that have came from those adverts could really enjoy your competitions and stick around for more.

A great way to ensure that your ads are being targeted to the correct people is to use retargeting. This method takes into account your past website users and creates a profile of your average user who is likely to purchase tickets.

It then uses this profile to select previous users who were close to purchasing ticket, but didn’t, then it will display adverts to them.

This means that your advertising budget is spent on people who are most likely to convert on your website rather than new people who may or may not decide to enter into a competition.

Step 4 – Create anticipation for the competitions

This is one of the key steps in building a successful competition business that is often overlooked.

For your customers to be remotely interested in a new competition you need to make it sound worth it to them.

But, how?

The first step is to release details about the competition on social media.

This will give all your devoted customers that are following you the notification about the new competition.

By posting this on social media you are also completing step 2.

Announcing it on the website this will gather massive hype around it.

The website is where all ticket sales will be made, so posting on the blog page or even creating a countdown on the website to the new launch will mean that all customers who frequently go on the website will see it.

This is especially important because most of the time customers will be going on the website with the intention of buying tickets, these are your best customers, so having them see the new competition is great.

Our client Fast Lane Competitions advertises all of their new competitions via their Facebook page and has seen great success with their competition business.

By posting their upcoming and new competition, they have successfully gained anticipation within their customer base which will improve their ticket sales.

Step 5 – Keep customers happy with new deals

A great way to keep customers happy is to make them feel like you are giving them the best deal possible.

By advertising your deals on social media and on your new website it will ensure to make customers feel like they should enter into your competitions rather than a competitors.

A great deal is buy 5, get one free on tickets because usually customers buy 3 tickets on average, so this deal incentivizes them to purchase 2 more tickets.

It is always worth giving away 1 ticket to gain 2 back. This deal can be easily implemented into your website by us.

It is becoming more and more popular to implement a business strategy which includes deals such as 10% and BOGO, make sure you do not miss out on this opportunity.

It will help to keep your customers returning for more tickets on your latest competitions.

If you need a bespoke website solution for your competition business – Check out our competition page.