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Are you struggling to engage your audience with your lifestyle brand? Running a competition with your following is a hugely successful tactic that can be employed through social media and beyond!

Everybody loves a freebee! If you are battling to create cut through in a busy marketplace, running a fun and interactive competition, with an attractive prize given by your lifestyle business is one sure-fire way to direct attention from your target audience to your brand. Let us give you the run down in our step by step guide to creating a successful competition for your lifestyle brand!

1. Planning the competition

No matter what activity you are implementing to scale interest and drive engagement with your audience, a well thought-through plan is fundamental to ensure everything will be in place when the competition runs. The last thing we want is for the competition to look unorganised, or even worse, for it to be costing you an inordinate amount of precious time, money and resources due to a lack of planning!

2. Ts&Cs

You need to identify what exactly the terms and conditions are for entry, ensuring there is no room for error or mistake by the audience. This includes stating easy-to-follow entry requirements, close date and winner announcement date. Following this, there needs to be an idea of cost – what are you willing to give away or have as the prize for the competition, and is this cost-beneficial to the interest you think you will receive? Being generous is great to build interest for a competition, as long as it doesn’t leave you too out of pocket!

3. Choose the platform to run the competition on

Your next step is to choose which platform you want the competition to run on, this might be your website, or it could be a social media platform. Whichever you choose, this should be where the traffic is directed to, in order to enter. If you are looking to gain a larger following on your social channels, one trick is to outline in the Ts&Cs that the audience will need to be following your channels to be eligible for entry!

4. Content

Once all of the practical elements of the competition are in place, you need to start thinking about content. The competition must be branded attractively to get the message of your competition out there to reach as many people as possible. Here we have listed some of our favourite content ideas to generate interest in a competition:

• Themed graphics for use on social – these are essential!
• Blog
• Video content
• A competition hashtag
• A competition widget
• Social media posts
• A unique webpage design
• Prize photography/video content
• Press release copy
• Email design and content

5. Budget

Now you have created all of your content for the competition, prepared the terms and conditions and decided on the platform to run the competition, it is time to prepare for the competition announcement! Having additional budget to drive greater reach for your competition launch will help put you in front of new audiences and lead to higher levels of engagement. This could be in the form of social media advertising, sponsoring posts, or outsourcing the activity to professionals to conduct the outreach for you.

Communication is critical to business success, and when done well, it is one of the most cost-effective ways to build trust and credibility for your lifestyle company. Our Confident Communication Planning service will create a bespoke plan for you to follow to help raise awareness for your lifestyle brand.

Social media is one of the most impactful and cost effective ways to tell the world how brilliant your company is. Now is the time to save yourself precious time and energy by signing up to our Social Media Engagement Success service. We’ll do the hard work of managing your channels leaving you free to sit back and reap the rewards.

If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at some of our lifestyle PR campaigns, or read ADPR’s guide to maximising your lifestyle brand’s PR campaign or contact us for a no-obligation chat about how we can help.