Your options for bringing participants to your contest or sweepstakes are varied. Existing mailing lists, in-store promotions, street marketing, advertisements, social media channels, e-mail and even receipts and invoices offer opportunities to promote your campaigns to customers.

Adding pay per click (PPC) ads to your promotion strategy allows you to target a specific geographic and demographic market, while only paying for results. You can place your ads on targeted websites and ensure your impressions are directed at your intended audience only.

With PPC ads that clearly outline the aims and rewards of the contest, you can better position your campaign for success. Here’s how to decide whether a PPC campaign makes sense for you.

Review Your Goals

Before you launched your social promotion, you likely set goals for the contest or sweepstakes. Now, take a look at those goals and consider how your PPC campaign will fit in. Then set measurable goals for the PPC campaign. By using measurable goals, you can figure out what worked and what didn’t. Some of the ways to measure your campaign’s success include:

• Click-throughs
• Visitors
• E-mail addresses provided
• Shares
• User-generated content submissions (photos, posts, essays, videos)
• Links generated
• Sales

Sales may seem like the key metric for your campaign. But people who enter contests are often motivated by a great prize. Aim to turn that interest into an ongoing relationship with an eye to sales later on.

Explore Where to Place Your Ads

Your PPC campaign can take place on one or more websites, alone or in conjunction with your other campaigns.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo-Bing, Chitika, Kontera and many other ad networks offer the opportunity to run PPC campaigns. Take a look at the audiences, reach, results and costs associated with each network.

For example, take the Get Skittles Rich campaign. It has ads on Google, YouTube and mobile banners, too - likely the best places for Skittles to reach its audience. Developed by BBDO Toronto, the campaign rewards social sharing, offering virtual candies in exchange for shares. Participants with loyal, engaged followings with their own social media power rocket to the top of the leaderboard, which you can check daily.

Review Your Budget

Most PPC campaigns allow you to split test, vary spending and make other adjustments on the fly. If you have already calculated the return on investment from a campaign and can do some work to predict the value of each lead generated from your contest or sweepstakes, you can set your budget accordingly.

For example, let’s say you estimate that 5,000 clicks to your contest result in 750 entries and that 10 percent of those contest participants become customers who then spend $500 over the next five years. And let’s estimate that those clicks cost 75 cents each and that you give away a $500 tablet and had marketing costs of an additional $3,000. Your marketing return on investment for the social media campaign is more than 517 percent.

And, with a cleverly designed campaign, you may be able to trim costs, increase conversions and improve customer lifetime value, increasing ROI even more.

We can help you get your contest or sweepstakes started! Our social promotions platform makes it easy to generate leads and engage with customers. Contact us for more details.

Andrea Coutu is a Vancouver marketing consultant and business plan writer. She runs Trustmode Marketing and is the founder of Consultant Journal. She has also written a series of books on consulting, including her most popular on consulting fees.

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