Marketing Quick Tips: Contests

By Rich Harshaw

Pretty much all remodelers hate contests.

When I bring up the topic of home improvement giveaways during seminars, I can hear the collective (non-verbal-but-clearly-evident-in-the-body-language) groan from the audience. Nobody wants to mess with them. Nobody sees the point in them. Nobody wants anything to do with them.

And I keep right on preaching that you should have one.

So before I hop into the quick tips for contest best practices, let me first overcome a few contest objections in an unconventional FAQ format:

Q: When You Say Contest, What Exactly Are You Talking About?
A: I’m talking about a one-time per year giveaway of your products or services. The amount should be big enough to make people feel like it’s worthwhile to enter. I recommend a $5,000 minimum and a $20,000 maximum. The giveaway should be used in two places: home shows (or other events) and on your website. I’ll cover those below.

Q: It Costs Too Much. That’s Not A Question, But Still.
A: Nope. First of all, most contractors have 50% margins, which means your $10,000 giveaway is really only going to cost you $5,000. Granted, that’s a lot of money. Only give it away once per year, and allocate the cost to your marketing budget. If you escrow money monthly to cover it, you could pull this off for about $400 a month.

Q: Won’t This Just Generate Trash Leads?
A: Some, yes. But it will also generate tons construction and home improvement leads you never would have gotten otherwise. You just have to position it right.

Q: Won’t This Just Jam Me Up At The Home Show?
A: The main benefit of the giveaway at the home show is as a mechanism to stop traffic, start conversations, and follow up with people after the show. Definitely worth the extra work involved.

Now onto the quick tips:

Call It A Giveaway, Not A Sweepstakes: I knew a girl in college who won a car in the McDonald’s Monopoly Game—honest to goodness. It was a maroon Malibu, and even though it wasn’t anyone’s first choice of automobiles, it was FREE and everyone was jealous. Besides that, I’ve never heard of anyone who actually won anything in any sweepstakes before. Sweepstakes sounds like a giant bottomless-pit contest that nobody actually ever wins.

Instead, you should have a “home improvement GIVEAWAY” and emphasizes that local winners are guaranteed. Here’s a pop-up banner to show you what it looks like:

Make It A Show Stopper: I covered this strategy in detail on my home show quick tips post last year, so no need to rehash it here in detail. The Cliff’s Notes version is that you create a Big Bill that coincides with the contest amount that you use to interrupt and engage people at the show. It works like a charm every single time… and is one of the main reasons to use a giveaway in the first place.

Award Multiple First Prizes: I covered this on the previous post too, but it bears repeating. Or at least summarizing: The real value of the contest comes in the follow up: Once you’ve pulled out all of your best leads from the home show and set appointments, the contest gives you a great excuse to contact everyone else on the back end. Instead of calling and saying, “Hey, do you want to set an appointment so we can sell you stuff?”… you call and say that you have chosen their name as a first prize winner in your giveaway, and that the prize is a gift card for (some amount smaller than the original giveaway). This puts the person you’re calling at ease because you’re simply calling to tell them they’ve won instead of trying to sell them something. They’re then much, much more receptive to the rest of the call where you walk them through the qualification questions and attempt to set the appointment. Let me put it to you this way: would you rather try to set an appointment with somebody who has just won a valuable prize from you or somebody who hung up on you the instant they realized it was you?

Leverage Your Winner: You may want to make it your business to make sure that the actual winner of the grand prize is somebody that you can use to your advantage when you announce the winner. Sure, Bill Stephens will be excited if he wins $10,000 of free windows, but practically nobody else will. But if the winner is Joe Johnson, retired Veteran… or Susan Davis, single mother of a chronically ill child, your press release might be more interesting to more people. Everyone is pulling for the underdog. Everyone loves when a hard-luck case catches a break. Somebody’s gotta win your contest. If legally possible (check your state rules, and consult your attorney), make sure you have a lovable winner.

Once the winner has been chosen, present them with one of those giant checks (they’re not that hard to make nowadays) and have a video crew present when you award it to them. Put it on your website. Email your database. Alert the press. This is news. You’re paying $2,500 to $10,000 for this, get the absolute most out of it that you can. While you’re at it, award another round of first prizes. Squeeze this for all the juice you can.

On Your Website: Okay, even if you hate the idea of a contest for your events and home shows—or if you don’t participate in home shows, you should still have a giveaway on your website. You don’t even have to make it prominent… in fact, you don’t even have to have a link for it at all if you don’t want to. But here’s what you should do at the very least.

• Program your site to pop up a box when somebody IS LEAVING YOUR SITE and ask them if they would like to get a free report (Free Sunroom Idea Guide, Homeowner’s Guide To Replacement Windows, Remodeling Portfolio, etc.).
• This will give you one more chance to capture information from that person.
• If they say yes, give them a form to fill out, and send them on their way.
• If they choose “no, I would not like a report,” then have a second box pop up and ask them if they would like to enter your “$10,000 Whole House Of Windows” Giveaway.
• I’ve seen as high as a 15% form fill-in rate on these last-ditch effort contests.

There’s no risk involved for you, no extra cost involved for you, and you get free home improvement leads that you would have otherwise missed. Of course, you have to have the systems in place to deal with those leads, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today’s lesson is getting the lead using the contest.

There you have it: Contests 1-2-3!

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