What makes this approach to marketing so uniquely powerful is that customers both have to and want to partake. It’s not a passive form of marketing like online or TV ads, which can be ignored. Instead, if the prizes on offer are appealing enough, a tournament or competition can suddenly draw in heaps of new customers.
Many renowned businesses run regular contests to spur customers to engage, be it with physical promotions or through ever-accessible social media platforms. Here’s a look at those who have mastered this marketing approach and the benefits of just about any business following suit.
Market Leaders in Marketing Competitions
Easily one of the most famous competitive marketing campaigns around is the McDonald’s Monopoly run. Each year, customers are tasked with peeling little tags from the side of their food containers to see if they’ll win a holiday, cash, TVs, or just more McDonald’s food. Without rankings, all customers are competing for the prizes.
Online, tournaments and competitions are much more frequently deployed than the famed annual event above. As detailed on the page of slots bonus offers and promotions, slot tournaments and competitions add more rewards to the gameplay. Players compete by playing a selection of slots, and the top winners get more prizes.
Businesses can host tournaments on their own site or bring the contest into the real world. They can also leverage social media. National Geographic utilizes the image-centric Instagram to invite people to send in their favourite photos of the year. The Best of the World 2026 challenge saw more than 3,000 Instagram posts sent their way.
Why Make Your Customers Compete?
To boil things down, customers like tournaments because competition is fun and the prospect of being more creative or skilful than your peers to end up the winner is even more enjoyable. More importantly, customers usually don’t need to pay anything to compete or get to compete for paying what they’d usually pay.
This is reflected in the stats. It’s been found that the conversion rate for contests within marketing campaigns achieve a conversion rate of around 33 percent. This is a higher conversion rate than any other branded marketing effort. Best of all for the business, it offers benefits beyond a possible uptick in customer purchases.
Simply by engaging with the competition, the customer will likely need or want to submit their contact details and possibly follow and engage with social media pages. If competitions have a solid prize, a clear path to compete, and occur regularly, a business can grow a large following that has a favourable view of the brand.
Gamification is the aim as it helps people to forget that they’re being advertised to. Make the competition fun and engaging, promote winners and prizes, and your business can benefit from this top-tier marketing format.
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