Competitions containing a prize incentive are a great way to bolster engagement with your audience. With product-focused content often written off as dull or boring, competition marketing can help build excitement around a finance brand and capture the attention of an otherwise uninterested audience. And given many brand awareness and marketing campaigns are a long game, competitions create a sense of urgency, motivating larger volumes of potential customers to connect at a faster pace.
Monetary giveaways
Monetary giveaways are one of the most enticing competition formats. For instance, in a Mountain American Credit Union Competition, the chance to win a $1000 prize was available merely through liking their page, sharing content, commenting, and other such engagement behaviours. Such activities only take a second to complete and provide next to no inconvenience if a person doesn’t win. For finance brands, competitions with monetary giveaways can be a low cost way to build your following fast, giving you an engaged audience that you can continue to nurture with relevant content over time.
“ competitions with monetary giveaways can be a low cost way to build your following fast, giving you an engaged audience that you can nurture over time.”
Appeal to your audience’s interests
Hosting competitions unrelated to finance content can be a way for finance brands to provide value in a different way, appealing to the interests and passions of their target audience rather than focusing the competition solely around the brand or product messages. These types of competitions can also be a way for finance brands to play a role in their target audience’s lives more broadly. During the pandemic for example, many finance brands used competitions to raise morale and capture the attention of people looking for things to do to get them through lockdown. Take the Bank of America’s Speech and Essay Contest, The World Bank Group and Financial Times’ Blog Writing Competition, and the Heritage Bank Photographic Awards for example.
Such innovative competition ideas provide a creative outlet, but also give individuals the chance to in some cases win a monetary prize or in others a valuable opportunity. For instance, the winner of the Heritage Bank competition received $15,000, with many other cash prizes offered for both the runners up, and other entries deemed to be of notable merit. The submissions for these competitions also provided fresh content for these brands to share across their social channels which served to humanise the brands, diversify their content mix and create a point of engagement with followers beyond the competition entrants.
But what about competition regulations?
There are several regulations that must be adhered to when advertising across different social media platforms. The main thing across these different platforms is that your competition must not act as a medium for gambling, so you can’t ask for money to go into the draw to win a prize: it must be free. Companies must also clearly provide a link to the terms and conditions of their competition, and demonstrate they have the relevant licence to legally host it. You must also indicate that social media companies are not associated with your competition, thereby releasing them of any potential liability. While competitions can be a great way to engage a stagnant audience they need to be run with full transparency.
For a complete list of terms and conditions across the major social media platforms, see below:
