This article is part of a special educational series published by tbk Creative that helps home renovation companies grow their revenue.
Are you the owner of a home renovation company and looking to ramp up your marketing and generate a pot full of additional leads?
A type of online campaign you may not have tried yet (most home renovation companies haven’t) is called an online sweepstakes.
At tbk Creative, I’ve been involved in three online sweepstakes for home renovation companies in the last three years and in all three instances these programs generated our clients over 2,000 leads (twice it generated over 5,000 leads).
How it works is you have a landing page setup that offers one big prize to a randomly selected winner and a user form in which visitors can insert their information into. You then go out and promote the campaign through the right mediums (more on that below).
Why online sweepstakes work so well is whereas programs like Google Adwords generates bottom of the sales funnel leads, online campaigns generate leads at all stages of the sales funnel. So by introducing one into your marketing mix, you naturally create more leads than you regularly would without it.
You can see a campaign that tbk Creative setup for Brock Doors and Windows:
The Checklist For Success
Here’s a 5-point checklist that will help you successfully run an own online campaign:
1. Landing Page
Have a landing page created for your online sweepstakes. I recommend it goes on a subpage on your website such as www.[insertyourcompanyname].com/sweepstakes.
As a content management system (CMS), I recommend using WordPress.
2. Pick a campaign title
You’ll want to come up with a clever, catchy, and brand-oriented name for your campaign.
3. Come up with a prize
Obviously, the better the prize, the more entries you’ll receive. These campaigns don’t need to break your bank though. In a different industry, we ran a an online sweepstakes that generated over 5,000 leads for the client and their prize was the winner’s choice between a $5,000 travel voucher or $5,000 cash.
4. Create a form
You’ll want to have the essentials such as name, phone number, and address on the user form. You can also include a check box that has people notify you if they wish for a salesperson to contact them to provide a quote. We find around 10% of entrants request sales to contact them.
As leads come in, you’ll want sale to follow-up with qualified leads and migrate 100% of the leads that provide consent onto an email marketing program.
5. Length
I’m not sure if there’s hard or fast data for the perfect length of an online campaign. You’ll want to make it long enough that your brand gains an optimal amount of exposure and number of leads but not too long that the excitement wears off.
I’ve watched online campaigns that tbk Creative has run work well anywhere between 2 and 11 months in length.
For a home renovation company, my feeling is that 5-6 months is likely a good length and if successful you can repeat annually.
6. Remember the legalities
When running these types of campaigns in Canada, there are laws you need to comply with such as any provincial gaming laws, the Criminal Code, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL), etc.
You’ll also want to create a set of terms that you require entrants to agree to before their entry is accepted.
For lawyers who can help you with these laws, there is Steve Szentesi, a competition and advertising lawyer based in Toronto and David Canton a business and IT lawyer with Harrison Pensa LLP based in London.
A tip: In drafting your terms, limit the winner to your main geographic markets you serve. That way you can promote a winner who’s local and don’t get stuck doing a home renovation job (if that’s the prize) that’s outside of your catchment area.
7. Market
Building the landing page, picking a catchy name, offering a good prize, etc. isn’t enough. You’ll also want to drive traffic to your new landing page.
Here’s some avenues that have been shown to work well:
i. Promote it on your website. You can include mentions of it on your main page. In the screen shot below, you can see at the bottom of the North Star Windows & Doors website a WordPress plug-in tbk Creative developed previous called Footer Floater™.
ii. Buy Google General Display Network (GDN) including Remarketing. This will give your campaign wider exposure in your marketplace.
iii. Buy Facebook advertising. In our experience, Facebook advertising has demonstrated a cost per acquisition (CPA) that’s less than Google Adwords.
iv. Supplement your print. If you buy print media, you can add a lesser secondary message promoting the campaign. A word of caution though: as print media can be quite costly, if you are promoting a different sales offer you want to make sure that the primary focus of your ad stays on your sales offer.
v. Email Marketing. If you have an email marketing list built (prospective and past customers), you can deploy email campaigns to them.
>Post Campaign
Once your online sweepstakes is over and you’ve selected the lucky winner(s), there’s more PR and marketing you can do.
Ideas can include:
Conclusion
In most mid to large markets, there’s a handful of home renovation companies all vying for consumers’ attention and business.
If you want to ramp up leads, companies like yours need to go beyond your typical website, Adwords, and print campaigns. By effectively implementing an online campaign such as a sweepstakes, you can dramatically increase the number of leads you gain in a given year.
Need help implementing an online sweepstakes for your business? You can contact me here if you’d like to discuss.