By Bruce A. Love
The title of this column is bound to attract a lot of attention. It may be a cheap marketing ploy to get you to read this column, but I promise that this column will provide powerful resources that will increase your chances to win valuable prizes. First, however, I want to provide a quick lesson in Marketing 101.
Every first-year marketing student can tell you that the 4 Ps of marketing are product, price, place, and promotion. Marketing professionals work with these 4 components of the marketing mix to develop strategies that will entice their intended audience. The “product” component can be ideas, services, or actual goods. “Price” is the selling price that an organization establishes for the product, service or idea they are marketing. “Place” refers to the place or distribution channels that are used to move the product. These can be an actual store location, the internet, or some other medium to get the item into the hands of the consumer. Promotion is what people associate most with marketing. The promotion component includes all advertising options (newspaper ads, television and radio commercials, spam, etc.), personal sales efforts, public relations activities (such as publicity and press releases), and sales promotion (which is where the possibility of winning valuable prizes comes in).
Sales promotion involves any activity that offers incentives to induce a desired response by salespersons (i.e., sell my product), intermediaries (i.e., sell my product), and/or final customers (i.e., buy my product). Sales promotion activities include several interesting tools that typically are used to boost sales in the short term and complement other promotional activities as part of the master marketing plan.
Two sales promotion tools that customers enjoy most are contests and sweepstakes. Contests, by definition, require the use of some sort of skill to win a prize. Bake-offs and essays submitted with the hope of winning a prize are good examples of contests. In contrast, sweepstakes merely require filling out a form and dropping it in a box (or clicking “send” if you are doing an online entry). Sweepstakes have become a big part of American culture. As a child, I remember my mother entering a variety of sweepstakes. Over the years, she has won a television set, a movie camera and projector, and a brand new 1968 Pontiac Catalina! I’ve not been so fortunate.
By definition, sweepstakes are advertising tools by which prizes are awarded to participants by chance with no purchase or fee required to win. Let me stress this point – No Purchase Is Necessary! It’s the law. Even when you mail in entries that ask you to indicate on the envelope whether or not there is a “Purchase inside” it will not affect your chances of winning if you don’t purchase anything.
Both contests and sweepstakes produce increase brand awareness and ultimately quick revenues - which is the whole reason for why organizations use sales promotion tools! It’s truly a win-win for everyone!
If you enjoy entering sweepstakes, the following Web sites are both winners:
o CashNet Sweepstakes
o Online-Sweepstakes
