Contests are a great way to add buzz to any marketing you do for your business. You can use contests to boost your marketing efforts for both getting new prospects or clients and also for adding new buzz and promoting to existing clients. Contests are a proven and very effective way to get leads and generate sales for any business.



Let's look at a few great examples of ideas to use contests in your marketing for both lead generation and also for client promotions and marketing buzz.

If you are looking to use contests as a lead generation tool in your marketing mix, here are 3 ideas to get you going.

The Trade Show Fishbowl
You've seen them before, the fishbowl or box with a sign to drop your business card in for a drawing.
This is a great way to collect leads for your business. You could offer a free dinner for two to a local restaurant, movie tickets, or even better, a product that you offer for free. Let's say, if you are a carpet cleaner, you could offer a free cleaning of the winner's living room.

The kicker here isn't just to collect the names but to give a Second Prize award to everyone that didn't win the first prize drawing. Make it a big deal. Send out an email or better yet, physical letter announcement congratulating the winner to EVERYONE on the list.

Then, you can include a Second Place prize to all the other names on the list that is a nice discount on your products or services. Make it something that looks like a prize though. Include a certificate that id designed nice to look like a real prize and not just a typical coupon of filler. Make the discount something significant. 24-50% off if you can do it. You could offer a free upgrade from your basic package to the deluxe option here also. This is a great way to make the person that receives the letter feel more special and excited about winning the prize.

Guess The Number
Have you seen the jellybean jars that some businesses use at trade shows or events? This is also a great contest you can run at an event or even in your retail store or shop. Find a number that fits in with your business and is a large number that you can have added up in jellybeans. This could be the number of dollars your company has saved your customers of the last year, the number if customers you have, number of people that have downloaded your life changing report, etc. Be creative with this and try to use something that will not only mean more to the customer but also impresses prospective customers by the shear number.

Then, get a jar to hold enough jelly beans for that number and fill up the jar with that number of jelly beans. Seal it up and have people at your event fill out a form guessing the number of jelly beans in the jar. Be sure to have them fill out a complete form containing their full contact information.

Once the event is over, find the person that guessed closest to the correct number and announce them as the winner with their guess and the correct number in the jar. Be sure to include a sales letter explaining the significance of the number of jelly beans and why that is important to them as customers or potential customers.

Again, include a Runner Up prize with the announcement to everyone else that entered with the same type of special offer that you would with the fishbowl. Many of the people that didn't win will still use they're Runner Up certificate as they still will like that they won something and if they were in need of your services already, they'll be excited about the offer.

Best Of the Best Contests
If you run a Business To Business company and your products or services save your clients time, money, etc, you can run a Best Of The Best Contest for your existing clients and not only promote the use of your product and other products they might not have yet, but also built a ton of case studies and testimonials on how great your product is. Send out an announcement to your customers that you are running a Best Of the Best contest and that you are looking for the customer that has had the biggest effect by using your products or services.

Set some guidelines for the contest. If could be an essay, a journal of how they use the product and including before and after results.

If you have enough entries, you can even narrow it down to the top 3-5 entries and then have your other clients vote on the finalize from there. You not only get great testimonials and case studies from the entries but also get other users of your product or service to think about additional ways to use your product and how they can get the same great results that they weren't getting before without your product.

Using contests in your marketing mix is a great way to promote your business to both existing customers and clients but also to help to promote your business and make it more fun for prospective customers also. This can help build a new list of prospects and even fire up your existing customers to help talk about the great results that have had from your products and services. Great testimonials, new clients from trade shows, and great customer case studies from raving fans are just a couple of things you can get from using contests as just piece of your marketing mix.