How do competitions work

How much you spend is really up to you and your bank balance. The biggest cost is going to be the prize and the legals and licences , followed by advertising if you choose to incorporate paid advertising. You could spend as little as the cost of the prize or as much as your bank balance will allow.

The key is spending your budget wisely. How much should I spend on my competition? Competition timing is a balance between giving yourself enough preparation time, giving your competition time to gain momentum, but stopping before competition fatigue hits your audience as well as leaving yourself enough time to manage the winner make the most of the results from your competition.

How long should you run a competition for? Some would argue the most important part of a competition is the prize. On the other hand, a modest prize suddenly becomes incredibly appealing with the right marketing and promotion. When starting out or growing your business, keep the focus on your own product or service; creating awareness for your brand and amassing a following of people interested in what you do or sell. You can always create a package based around your business and include other brands in there, but make sure yours is the star attraction!

WIN an iPad! There are hundreds of different entry methods, which is both a blessing and a curse. The key is choosing the entry method that best fits your competition and business, this depends on a whole bunch of things:. Check out the flowchart below for a quick decision or our ultimate guide to competition entry methods , for a thorough review of each competition entry method. The two main contenders are on your website or via social media.

Like the ultimate life partner, you want your entry page or post to have both brains and brawn, good looks and substance. Design is a key element to successful engagement and conversion. Types of marketing material you might want to consider for your competition:. Your schedule is going to be your best friend during your competition; so you know exactly what to post and when and more importantly, maximise competition entries.

Who do you think Facebook will shut down to make an example of? The huge brand who spends hundreds of thousands in advertising on a weekly basis and has millions of followers who would be very pissed off if their favourite page was shut down… or your page with 1, likes and a tiny ad spend?

Yup, you guessed it — little old you. Little to none. You might just find yourself forking over cash for something that was just going to cost you your time. Permits, licences and social media rules are the most common questions we receive. NSW Fair Trading have finally changed the laws around the permits required to run a competition or trade promotion.

You can read in full about the update here. Do I need a licence or permit for my competition? By now, you should have nailed the following things about your competition:. There are just a couple more things to take care of before you can go live with your competition.

The final thing you need to do before you go live, is benchmark your current stats. Calm down, these are all normal questions and reactions. Hit publish on your page, post your competition post, hit send on your email and send your competition out into the world! We both know that the only way to achieve your competition goal is to get people to enter your competition. How do you get people to enter your competition? By shouting about it from the virtual rooftops, of course!

Entrants will come from two main channels: free and paid. I know, right? There are two key things to keep an eye on whilst your competition is live: traffic and conversion. Conversion refers to how many of those visitors who see your competition actually enter the competition and is heavily influenced by the design of your entry page and the prize on offer among other things. How to run a successful competition, maximise your ROI and keep your costs down.

Keeping an eye on your stats not only highlights any potential issues with your traffic and conversion , but also gives you valuable feedback about marketing tactics that work really well for your business. For example, if you notice one promotional post gets heaps more traction than others, ask yourself what was unique about it? Did you post at a different time of day or day of the week?

Try to recreate that — the spike in your stats is telling you your audience liked it, so keep on doing it! OK, enough with the dad jokes. Finally, d o a little happy dance note: this step is not compulsory. Well done on running a kick arse competition!

I advise you to do this ASAP, the last thing you want is your winner chasing you for their prize! For example, if you are giving away a city break, you need to contact them to book it in within 6 weeks but they could have up to 12 months to actually complete their travel — these are the standard terms we offer in our travel prize packages.

This makes for great material for social media and another brilliant chance to create engagement with your audience. Back at the beginning of this guide, you set a goal for your competition. You can also use your benchmarked stats , to compare your results to and see if you achieved the results you set out to. I promise you it has happened to the best of us. Be mindful of any barriers-to-entry for the type of contest you want to run. In addition, different social networks have their own rules and regulations regarding contests.

Here are a few examples:. Facebook contest guidelines Twitter contest guidelines Instagram contest guidelines. GDPR for European customers. Try to tap into their willingness to engage with your brand, share information within their social networks, and even their likelihood of making an actual purchase. Set some benchmarks that you want to achieve with your campaign. This should tie back to your contest objective and involve metrics that are clearly quantifiable.

Your goal should be something you can measure, such as new social media followers, email list subscriptions, number of shares, discount code redemptions, or the number of contest entrants. Identify the most important metrics you want to track beforehand. The prize itself is crucial to the success of a contest campaign. It will directly influence how incentivized people are to join the contest and thus, how well the contest does. It should excite people, get them engaged, and motivate them to take the required steps to enter the contest.

This will tie back to your budget and how expensive a prize you want to offer to attract quality leads and audience engagement. One option is to offer tiered prizes based on varying levels of engagement, as this will differ significantly across different customer segments.

This strategy allows you to gain insights about your customers without nudging them to opt-out earlier than desired. Be sure to align your prize to your product or service. One simple way to do this is by choosing a product or service you already offer as a prize.

Alternatively, you can think about analogous products or services that would appeal to your ideal customer and use those as prizes. What you learn from one marketing contest should feed into your larger branding strategy and inform how you run future contests. Not just the prizes but the good value your brand gets from contest marketing is what makes it an excellent strategy. From heightened brand awareness and increased customer engagement to low-cost promotion and insight about your users, contest marketing boasts many benefits for your brand.

To get contest marketing right, you need modern contest management software like Submittable that empowers you to run contests without any headaches. Missouri and federal antitrust laws protect competition. The antitrust laws seek to ensure that industry is competitive, with a number of manufacturers or distributors of products and services all striving to attract customers.

Vigorous competition requires businesses to strive to lower their prices and improve the quality of their products and services. Competition stimulates firms to lower their own costs and run their businesses as efficiently as possible. But when competition is restricted — such as by one company acquiring most competitors or reaching agreements on prices with other competitors — prices are likely to increase and quality is likely to also suffer.

I can clearly see in my family tree many of my ancestors moving from the fields of Derbyshire to Manchester. All signed their name with a cross. I undoubtedly have an affinity to manufacturing, as do many from this part of the country.

I am a strong advocate for actually making things in a major economy like Britain. That is not to say I have anything against services. I do not.

But I believe that a robust, balanced economy requires a healthy manufacturing sector. We spend a good portion of our income on goods of one sort or another, from washing machines to handbags heaven knows why so many are required , and it is common sense that we are better off making some of these goods than importing them.

Britain has suffered a collapse in its manufacturing base in the past 20 years. A typical economy splits three ways: agriculture, manufacturing and services. Twenty years ago, Britain lagged behind Germany by a small margin, maybe 2 or 3 per cent.

The obvious questions are, why this collapse, and is it important? For me, it certainly is important. An over-dependence on services leads to a fragile economy. Equally important is the geographic divide here.

The Midlands and the North are much more heavily biased to manufacturing, and communities have suffered from high unemployment. London is clearly services-based, and very successful for it. But they are not the only game in town. We should take some lessons from Germany, where they have a strong attachment to their thriving manufacturing base and recognise its key role in a balanced economy.

Britain has expensive energy, skills are not at the levels of other countries, pensions are expensive, and unions can be difficult. Historically, government was not switched on to manufacturing in Britain. In contrast, the USA has excellent skills, most of our sites there are non-unionised, energy is a fraction of the cost in Britain, and they have an enormous market. Germany is simply good at manufacturing — as we used to be.

There is no reason that manufacturing should not revive in Britain. The present Government is becoming more attuned to its importance in maintaining a healthy economy. We should never forget that the Brits invented manufacturing.

By contrast, Siggi, the convenor in Germany I mentioned, is in the 21st century. A good union is good for employers — and for employees. For years America had to watch as companies migrated overseas.

For those companies, which chose to leave US shores, the grass was much, much greener on the other side of the world. Now they are coming back and America, thanks to shale gas, is at last reaping the benefits. A new unit to produce , tons of high-density polyethylene a year will also be built before the end of Dennis said all the investment was being driven by access to cheap ethane, which it used to produce ethylene.

For although many parts of the world are sitting on vast reserves of shale gas, only America has so far managed to commercialise production on a large scale. Europe, which is one of the most expensive places in the world to make petrochemicals, has the same breakthrough technology to unlock the natural gas trapped in shale rock, but is dithering over what to do about it.

In the UK, where some drilling has taken place, there have been protests over fracking. The American Chemistry Council said during that time an estimated 66, people lost their jobs in the chemical sector alone as demand for their products slumped. Construction — a key market for the US chemical industry — came to a virtual halt.

Spending on cars, furniture and electrical appliances — major markets for the chemical industry - massively dropped as people tightened their belts.

The silver lining for us was that we were able to recruit a lot of talented people. And they brought in new ideas. With shale gas, that figure is expected to rise. The shale gas boom has also led to an insatiable appetite among banks and individuals now keen to invest in chemical companies. In addition to the new linear alpha olefin unit on the Gulf Coast, it also intends to increase its polyalphaolefin PAO production to satisfy the demand for high performance synthetic lubricants, which lower carbon emissions, improve fuel consumption and protect engines from wear and tear.

PAO is also used as an industrial lubricant. Most of the extra capacity will be destined for the North American market to support the rapid expansion of polyethylene production and rapid demand for synthetic lubricants.

Before the shale gas boom, America relied heavily on imports of liquefied natural gas. In , the US was so worried that it might run out of natural gas that Houston-based Cheniere Energy built five massive gas storage tanks in coastal Louisiana. Bob and Dennis are both full of praise for their European colleagues who spotted, then seized, the opportunity to strengthen their own competitive position as an ethylene producer In Europe — by importing cheap US-derived ethane for their European gas crackers.

The process is extremely clear. We just have a good discussion. Graduates also enjoy the freedom to make a difference by being given a real job with real responsibility from their first day at work.

Chemistry makes a world of difference to the world we live in. Only time will tell. Europe is now one of the most expensive places in the world to make petrochemicals.

The Middle East is marginally still the cheapest place — but, thanks to its exploitation of shale gas, America is catching up. And it shows. Cefic, the Brussels-based Trade Association which is the voice of the chemical industry in Europe as a whole, believes the situation will get worse this year before it gets slightly better next year. It specialises in making polymer that the French use for milk bottles. The plastic has to be able to stop chemicals seeping into the milk.

But still, there is no margin for complacency. Cefic is currently urging the European Commission not to impose additional environmental regulations in isolation from the rest of the world.

It warns if the EU pursues its environmental objectives and thereby drives up energy and carbon costs, it will undermine competitiveness and result in carbon leakage and a reduced level of investment in the European Union. What it does not agree on is how to achieve that.

And that was without taking into account the carbon needed to transport it. They will operate in China, the Middle East or America. Cefic believes the European chemicals sector, which employs 1. Despite protests in the UK — such as happened in July at Balcombe, West Sussex — the British Government does support the search for shale gas, and has promised to hand control over important, complex, technical planning issues to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Defra and the Environment Agency EA instead of local councilors.

Cuadrilla is one of a dozen UK companies, which have licenses to drill for shale gas. INEOS — with a cracker at Grangemouth in Scotland that needs to find a long-term source of ethane gas to run it — is in talks with all of them. In a report published by KPMG in October , Mike Shannon, global head of chemicals and performance technologies, forecast that it might cause some economic disruption. In September, Total announced it planned to shut down a loss-making steam cracker in Carling, France.

The naphtha cracker, which uses crude oil to make chemicals and has been struggling for the past five years, will close in It will come as no surprise to KPMG, which, in , forecast that 14 of the 43 crackers in Europe would become uneconomical by due to stiff competition from the Middle East, Asia and America. Meanwhile, in America, with low-cost and abundant ethylene coupled with a slowdown in the growth of domestic demand, US companies are looking for expansion opportunities.

The US is already a net exporter of ethylene derivatives and the volume is expected to increase significantly. With Europe facing pressure from outside and within, it has never been more important for management and unions to work together to find solutions. They say marriages are made in heaven. That may well be the case for the defence. But anyone who is married knows they can also be fraught with difficulties.