One of the oldest marketing tricks in the book is to run a good, old-fashioned competition. This not only boosts brand awareness but can also be used to grow an active audience. The question is, can this old dog learn new tricks? Well, of course, it can! With Facebook widening the WhatsApp Business API, it has unleashed powerful marketing strategies along with it. Integrating competitions into this is uncharted territory that you need to take advantage of.
Why Use WhatsApp Competitions
Reasoning Behind The Methodology
Competition Ideas To Get You Started
The wonderful world of WhatsApp chatbots in South Africa is worth exploring. It gives businesses the opportunity to boost the growth of their contact list and generate new opt-ins to load into the top of their marketing funnels.
To make things even cooler, we will share 9 specific WhatsApp chatbot contest ideas to get the ball rolling.
Contests are a very effective strategy to acquire new leads, gain fans and followers and expand your reach but chatbots take it further. They make it easy and fun to participate, capture the lead information instantly and make overall management and follow-up a piece of cake.
Off the bat, it's new territory for a lot of companies and you could be breaking ground with this, leaving your competitors in the proverbial dust. Besides, who doesn't like cool content every now and then? They gamify brand interaction and get consumers involved in something much bigger than a transaction - an experience.
The Facts Speak For ThemselvesWhile the numbers are quite catchy, there are other more qualitative benefits to running a WhatsApp contest:
Running a contest is a powerful tool for building an audience base. According to Hubspot, companies running contest-driven marketing campaigns gained an average of 34% new fans/contacts per campaign.
Just by launching a basic opt-in-to-win contest, that’s easy to join can provide a significant amount of contacts and WhatsApp engagement. But, thanks to chatbots, your WhatsApp contest can go much further...
Contests are the perfect way to learn more about your customer base.
Why?
When a prize is involved, consumers are far more willing to answer questions and share information. Hence, it’s a perfect opportunity to make some good old research and collect a lot of valuable information on your target audience at scale.
On a more basic level, you can collect more personal data like email addresses and other contact information you might need to reach customers in the future.
But, more importantly, you can ask qualitative questions about consumers’ habits and interests which you can later leverage in the creation of hyper-personalized marketing and outreach strategies.
The key role of bots in all this?
Let’s put it simply. When it comes to collecting information, chatbots have a much better conversion rate than any online form. Furthermore, they are able to save responses in real-time, even from incomplete conversations and so, enabling you to send reminders or retarget the “almost-participants” later.
One of the best aspects of contests is their ability to engage an audience. A contest is often more interactive than the rest of the content brands usually put out. So is messaging. And so are chatbots.
All of the channels above push users to interact with your brand not only because they anticipate fun or instant gratification but also because these approaches are interactive by default. They require the action and reaction that make up engagement.
So, no wonder combining all of them has the potential to take your engagement rate to a whole new level. It’s a great way to get your audience responding and creating positive content related to your brand in an environment that encourages conversation.
Contest marketing - compared to other marketing methods and despite requiring you to offer a free prize - can be executed at a fairly low cost and offer a great value.
Contests bring exposure to your brand and raise your value in the eyes of your (potential) customers for just the cost of the prize and a little bit of time investment on the part of your team. Even if you do invest in campaigns to give the contest an initial boost, it’s likely to spread on its own.
Still, not every contest will end up being inexpensive. Like with any campaign the success depends on your research, prep, and execution.
Having a WhatsApp bot in charge of the competition means having 24/7 user support available to all participants. In other words, people can use the bot not only to submit their entry but also to get more information on the underlying terms and conditions, deadlines, winner announcement date, etc.
With the power of contests in mind, here are 9 WhatsApp-chatbot-driven competition ideas that will get you well on the road to dream up yours.
Remember, there is no single type of contest that works better than others. What works depends on the objective of your campaign, so it is important to have your goals in line with the mechanic you use.
Want to reactivate not-so-active contacts on your business profile as well as go viral on the dark social?
“Share-to-win”, “Invite-to-win” (or improve your chances of winning) and other variations of the contest can really super-charge your contact acquisition as invited friends will be asked to opt-in and then share the promo further.
As you’ve seen above, there’s a 99.31% probability people will share a promotion or contest incentivized by recruitment.
Compelling landing pages, especially the conversational ones, are a great way to engage people, get them to answer the follow-up questions to participate, and earn the chance to win! This strategy can easily be adapted to any WhatsApp chatbot contest scenario as the opt-in is part of the conversation on the landing page.
Prompting people to guess the outcome of a specific event is a great way to engage your audience, not just via WhatsApp but pretty much any channel.
The good news is you can create a conversational contest entry on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger as well as various formats on the web. Also, the conversational format allows for easy implementation of rich features like images, videos, gifs, and (outside WhatsApp) button and carousel responses. As the contest progresses you can share some of the most daring guesses in your WhatsApp and Facebook stories.
Product launch is an excellent opportunity to improve your engagement as well as generate new leads.
Running a WhatsApp contest can help capitalize on that opportunity and build hype around the product/product line. For instance, you can employ a WhatsApp bot to run a “help us name it” contest giving your customers a chance to build a more personal relationship with the brand. If you want to push the engagement through the roof, you can use the bot to run a post-deadline poll letting your audience vote for the winner from the top three entries.
Want to have some fun as well as build a greater sense of community? Captioning some silly, strange, or disarmingly cute pic, GIF or video can be a really fun way to entertain and engage your customer base.
Well, this one is quite self-explanatory.
Fill-in-the-blanks contest is fairly fast to create and easy to deploy.
Plus you can take either the educational one-right-answer approach or more fun, looking for the funniest or the most clever submission.
You can promote:
Another great way to get people involved and interacting is riddles and visual puzzles. They are attention-grabbing as well as easy to adapt to any industry or product range just by changing some of the elements AND people are proud to share if they crack them!
And, WhatsApp is a great way of deploying a riddle or puzzle-driven contest as you can further reinforce the fun by chatbot personality.
In this type of contest, there is/are the right answer(s) but it’s not exactly common knowledge.
This piece of knowledge can be something related to your company, past campaigns or products to help you zero in on the true fans and grasp a chance to turn them into ambassadors.
Alternatively, you can make the contest about something your customer base finds interesting and so would feel prompted to test their knowledge for a promise of a prize.
Last but not least, there is the most creative of contests, a one where you don’t have to be the one to do the creative thinking.
WhatsApp contest driven by user-generated content is a fantastic way to inspire unique engagement and build hype around your brand.
The best part is, there are plenty of formats to choose from. You can launch a photo, video, gif, or drawing contest. Or leave a loose format and focus on the theme.
If you want to discuss setting up an exciting Whatsapp competition, please don't hesitate to contact Velocity Media.