Customers love huge sweepstakes;

No one can guarantee a response from consumers, but yes, a brand can always drive their marketing impact with the help of online contests. 

An effective contest marketing strategy can not only drive brand awareness, but it can also promote your products and services, strengthen your customer bound, improve market research, and get new leads to your sales pipeline. 

Top global brands use this marketing gimmick to not only engage with their customers, but gain new customers as well. The modern digital environment is already saturated and unique online contests give you an opportunity to interact with your audiences and stand out from competitors. 

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Online contests can vary, most brand contests now run on social media, here are a few tools that help brands run effective online contests: 

• Sweep Widget

Sweep Widget is a full-stack tool to help launch social media contests or giveaways or sweepstakes, things like leaderboard competitions, reward milestones and so on. The top feature of this platform is that you can choose from more than 90 entry methods and spread word about the contest on 30+ social media platforms. With their drag and drop builder SweepWidget helps you build your online contest very easily. 

• Outgrow

Outgrow is not only a good contest tool, but it also gives brands the opportunity to connect with clients using interactive content to stand out from the crowd. It has an interesting feature of numerical calculators, for instance, a brand from the health industry can use Outgrow to create calculators for its customers to count calories, check for health risks and so on. The pre-built content templates for quizzes, giveaways are great to drive conversions. 

• ShortStack

There is a buzz around social media contests, where every brand tries to leverage the latest interatcive techniques. Amidst all the gung-ho, ShortStack discreetly brings basics on the plate by putting its focus on the core capabilities of the brand. Use this platform to create unlimited landing pages from its set of templates. The platform also offers you a choice to embed your contest or form to appear as a pop-up on your website. 

• Gleam

Gleam offers a massive growth-hack for B2C and B2B businesses alike. It has a discreet way to help gain followers and achiever greater audience. With the tool’s four apps, Competitors, Rewards, Captures and Galleries, a brand can run seamless competitions combined with 1-click action features and viral sharing. Brands can also reward  participants with online coupons. 

• Woorise

Behind any contest, a brand aims to build relationships with the audience, and Woorise offers you a comprehensive list of features to strike the perfect conversation. Create quizzes, social contests, forms, surveys and others with the help of its responsive templates and drag-and-drop builder. 

Once the contest is created, it can be embedded into your Facebook page, blog or website. You get features to track the engagement level from your audience. 

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Some (pretty neat!) examples of B2B online marketing contests:

• Woorise’s contest leaderboard

Woorise, a SaaS company, approached its other SaaS companies to create a massive product bundle giveaway. The content leaderboard kept showing how people were participating and this feature helped the brand to show people/users how close they were to the award. 

The contest leaderboard offers people other actionable things to do like sharing the contest, referring to others and so on. 

• Photo contest by Hootsuite

Undoubtedly, Hootsuite’s #workfromhome hashtag worked well when they organized a photo contest for  clients. They asked companies to let their employees participate and show how creatively they are using their WFH space. This had to be done by downloading the Hootsuite mobile app, posting a picture from their workspaces and uploading it with the relevant hashtag. 

• Cisco’s innovative competition

One can stimulate B2B lead generation by holding a contest and give other brands an opportunity to show their innovative capabilities. Cisco did the same thing and invited brands in its Grand innovation Challenge. This happened in 2016 and accounted for more than 5,700 entries globally. 

Final Word

B2B brands must continuously boost efforts to come up with cutting-edge strategies to hold up their image in the market.