6 Takeaways for Online Promotions

Zsuzsi Szabo

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Filed under: Guest Posts, Social Media

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Tags: facebook application, facebook applications, facebook apps, facebook promotion apps, online promotions, promotion app, promotion app builders, promotion applications, promotion apps, social media apps

How do you engage your Facebook fans? There’s a good chance the last Facebook post you published contained an image or video. With information being more and more abundant, businesses are making use of visual tools to engage their fans.

But sometimes, it’s not enough, the engagement you were expecting is not materialising. And even if it is, you might want to engage fans even more, get to know them, talk to them directly.

Promotion applications can take you to the next level and deliver astonishing results. This post will focus on the essentials of these promotion builders, becoming increasingly popular.

In recent times, online promotions have made wonders. EA Sports received 120,000 additional Facebook fans from a promotion they ran during one month. So Delicious saw a 74% increase in sales by running daily sweepstakes designed to encourage fans to embrace positive personal change. Prizes included yoga mats, treadmills and a grand prize trip to Thailand.

Promotions help you to raise brand awareness and generate leads on your website or Facebook page. To have such promotion apps you may hire an agency, or you may use a promotion application builder platform. If you choose the latter, it will save you time and money. You will have already heard of Wildfire, recently acquired by Google. However, there are many other promotion builders that could suit your needs: Antavo, Woobox, Votigo, Offerpop.

Here’s what you should know about promotion app builders:

1. Promotion builders DO NOT build the promotion app for you. They usually provide a self service platform, so you may build your app by yourself. It’s in your interest to try the different platforms available, choose the one you feel the most comfortable with, and learn how to use it..

2. Promotion builders DO save you time. Once you know the type of promotion you want to run, you can simply follow the steps to edit, publish and monitor your promotion. Instead of working with an agency or developer, the promotion builder will do all the coding for you,

3. Promotion builders DO help to raise brand awareness and generate leads. People may need to “like” your Facebook Page in order to enter., and they may spread the word after entering. Such features increases the “Talking about this” number on your page. On the other hand a single promotion may drive several thousand Facebook users to your website and/or fan page.

4. Promotion builders DO NOT perform a market research for you. To run a successful social marketing strategy, brands must have a clear understanding of their fans and consumers. For example if you sell books, then you need to know whether giving away an iPhone will get you quality leads and fans.

5. Promotion builders DO NOT guarantee traffic to your app. In other words, they don’t advertise your app. You may post the link of the promotion to various social media channels many times during the day, run Facebook Ads, write a blogpost about it or send it out in a newsletter.

6. Promotion builders DO save you money. The price for a promotion to generate leads varies from around $15 to several thousand dollars for large campaigns. Building a custom app with an agency will cost you at least $600 and the opportunity cost of your time talking with the developers about how it should really look like.

Your turn:

How often do you run promotions on your Facebook Page? What are your tips to drive traffic to a promotion?

About the author: Zsuzsi Szabo is a cofounder of Antavo responsible for marketing and customer development. Antavo is a marketing software to create viral promotions with no IT knowledge, in a marketer-friendly way.

Posted on: September 3, 2012