Marketing Technology for Sweepstakes and Contests: Build a Martech Stack for Better ROI

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The martech stack approach to marketing technology for sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways starts with defining your business goals. The martech tools that you need to drive your giveaway marketing strategy will depend on who your customers are and how your giveaways work.

Building a martech stack to sweepstakes and giveaway marketing strategy is rapidly becoming the standard for brands. With hundreds of different software technologies available to help you track, analyze, legally comply, and administer sweepstakes and contests, the number of choices is increasing delay.

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A recent Gartner survey of CMOs found that a majority of them (61%) felt that they lacked the marketing technology in-house to effectively execute their strategies. In fact, a recent study conducted by the CMO-Council-KPMG found that CMOs who have the most effective relationships with IT have the largest martech stacks (42% reported having more than 100 solutions in a martech stack). They also spend the highest percentage of the budget on martech, with 53% spending over 30% of the budget on martech.

Read on to learn why martech is important for sweepstakes marketing, how to update your giveaway marketing strategy to include a modern martech stack, and the benefits of martech for attracting contest participants and retaining customers.

IN THIS ARTICLE:

• What is a martech stack?
• What are the tools for an ideal marketing tech stack for giveaways?
• How do I choose a martech stack for sweepstakes marketing?

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Why a Martech Stack Is Essential for Sweepstakes and Contests

The total number of martech solutions has grown by more than 2700% in the last decade. In fact, the goal martech market was estimated at more than $334 billion in 2021. As a result, it makes sense to establish best practices now for sweepstakes and contest management so that you can replace the tools in arsenal as you like.

For example, if you want to do marketing automation to follow up with leads, you can consider a sweepstakes platform to streamline your follow ups. However, if you also want to do email marketing, you may also need another platform for following up with customers who aren’t yet participants in your sweepstakes.

The goal of having multiple martech tools working together is to streamline information. This allows you to deliver a better customer experience for your sweepstakes or contest.

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Build an Interoperable Martech Stack for Your Sweepstakes Marketing

A martech stack for sweepstakes and contests depends on both out-of-the-box integrations as well as APIs. Giving the cost of integrating APIs it’s essential to ensure that your sweepstakes company can integrate with popular automation connectors and tools. Being able to leverage your sweepstakes participant data across your entire martech stack.

Whether your sweepstakes or contest is aimed at consumers or B2B, your sweepstakes martech stack should create a feedback loop that keeps data organized so that it’s actionable and available for use in other solutions. This is called an interoperable martech stack and will help you maximize your results while also allowing you to connect new martech solutions as they come on to the market.

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What Are Martech Tools for Sweepstakes and Contests?

A martech stack for a sweepstakes or contest needs to be able to reach your audience across multiple digital channels including the sweepstakes or social media contest platform, social media, SMS, CMS, CRM, web analytics, search engine marketing, and advertising platforms.

Here are the key components of a martech stack for sweepstakes and contests:

Content Management System (CMS)

A content management system for your sweepstakes or contest might only involve hosting your sweepstakes entry form, Official Rules, and Privacy Policy website pages. Alternatively, a sweepstakes company may host your landing page on their sweepstakes platform. It’s a good idea to choose the CMS to host your sweepstakes that integrates as seamlessly as possible. It also should require a little in-depth training as possible to ensure that you can make any last minute chances to the CTAs on the pages to improve participant conversion rates.

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Digital Asset Management (DAM)

When it comes to content management for contest entries, it’s recommended that you don’t host them yourself but have users submit their content to a video platform your choice such as YouTube or TikTok. This will free up your digital asset management (DAM) resources and ensure a seamless content delivery experience for your contest participants. However, you may still require DAM tools as a part of your martech stack to permit you to store and obtain permission for user-generated content from your participants.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A CRM is used to help you manage your customer relationship. A good CRM tool is essential for retail, ecommerce, and service-based businesses. By having a comprehensive CRM tool, you’ll be able to easily retrieve information about the entire lifecycle of your existing customers. For sweepstakes and contests, this data is invaluable as you convert participants to new customers and boost sales. It will also help you to determine the quality of your sweepstakes leads to determine if your participant audience includes qualified leads and opportunities.

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Legal Compliance

A sweepstakes administration platform and your CRM should also have solutions to help you automate document creation, manage participant experience content, accessibility, and more. Legal compliance is an essential part of a martech stack for sweepstakes and giveaways to ensure that every participant’s experience complies with the laws of the state in which the participant resides. For example, brands that offer giveaways in California have to comply with California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

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Social Media

Social media is essential for building brand awareness and attracting participants to your sweepstakes or contest. However, in order to use social media effectively, you need social media management tools that allow you to track the success of your sweepstakes marketing, review social media analytics, monitor brand mentions, and monitor participant sentiment. Use social media tools that provide social media ad management, analytics, and dashboards that allow campaign planning from a central location. All social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have paid advertising platforms built in for social advertising.

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SMS

For a text to win or mobile marketing via SMS, you need to obtain express consent from participants. As a result, it’s recommended that you use SMS tools in your martech stack to enable your mobile permission marketing and manage your subscriber lists. In addition to having SMS marketing tools to send sweepstakes campaign content, SMS tools that integrate with other parts of your martech stack will allow you to personalize messaging to each of your sweepstakes participants.

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Marketing Automation

Most sweepstakes companies offer marketing automation tools to allow you to follow up with sweepstakes participants. However, in order to have a marketing automation system that is effective no matter where a participant or customer is in your brand’s sales lifecycle, you need to make sure that it’s part of your martech stack.

The main advantages of this is that it significantly reduces the chances of getting it wrong when it comes to personalization with your customer nurturing and outreach efforts. Furthermore, you’ll also be able to segment participants and customers in real-time to optimize your lead generation efforts.

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Analytics

For sweepstakes and contest insights, marketers make use of website analytics tools, Google Analytics, sweepstakes company analytics, and their own business analytics. A combination of in-house and third-party tools are ideal for a sweepstakes martech stack. Using a Business Intelligence (BI) tool can help you analyze data and optimize your giveaway campaigns in real-time time by making it easy for marketers to digest data with customized dashboards and visualizations.

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Data Protection

Your participants and website visitors expect that their personally identifiable information will be handled in a manner that they agree with. In addition, you are required to comply with all data protection regulations in all of the states where your sweepstakes or contest campaign is available to residents. With legal compliance for sweepstakes extending to website data privacy, using a specialized tool for sweepstakes website governance can help you to safeguard participant’s personal data.

According to Forrester, companies that use data-driven decisions to optimize their businesses grow at an average of 30% year over year. As a result, building a martech stack for sweepstakes or contest marketing makes it possible for your business to gain a competitive edge. A martech stack will eliminate underutilized tools, fragmentation of your workflows, and miscommunication among your team.

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Advertising

Advertising technology for a sweepstakes or contest martech stack can include everything from Google Ads integration to ad management that will allow you to plan, set up, and manage your paid advertising for your sweepstakes or contest. Given that the platforms that you use to get customers are likely the same ones you’ll use to attract sweepstakes participants, it’s a good idea to use martech tools that give you access to SEM (search engine marketing), retargeting, ad management and tracking, display ads, retargeting, and customer attribution. Also consider adding tools for integrating print, TV, radio and other traditional advertising channels with your martech stack.

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Marketing Technology Yields Better Contest and Sweepstakes

Marketing technology is no longer a time-saving or cost-saving tool. Instead, martech serves to deliver a more effective contesting experience for your participants. Furthermore, by understanding where different vendors can add value to your giveaway campaign with measurable insights, you can leverage data that allows your sweepstakes or contest marketing to take on a life of its own as it’s continuously optimized.

Here are a few of the benefits of using a modern martech stack for sweepstakes and contests:

Seamless Customer Experience: You’ll be able to interact with sweepstakes participants and customers by sending behaviorally triggered emails. You’ll also be able to follow up with participants after they visit your brand site to convert them to customers with personalized recommendation.

Embrace a Giveaway Marketing Strategy: Sweepstakes, contests, and other giveaways are not intended to be a one-off event. In fact, the goal is to treat each sweepstakes or contest as a single campaign, part of your overall giveaway marketing strategy. To effectively monitor and measure the sweepstakes KPIs defined in your marketing plan for each campaign, you need a martech stack to ensure that you can scale your campaigns over time through data-driven insights.

Empower Your Teams to Improve Results: Your social media marketing, customer success, and sales teams will benefit from the data insights that your martech stack gathers from your sweepstakes or contest campaigns. With data in hand, you’ll have all of the information your teams need to make decisions and set performance goals for engaging and converting customers.

Increase Customer Loyalty: The purpose of running sweepstakes and contests is to reward your existing customers, not just acquire new customers. By integrating your martech stack with customer loyalty tools featuring CRM integrations, your martech stack will be able to increase customer lifetime value on virtual autopilot.

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Next Steps

Every brand has its own approach to sweepstakes and contest marketing, which means that every brand’s martech stack for sweepstakes and contests will vary. It’s important that you define your goals for giveaway marketing so that your martech stack reflects your requirements, business goals, and the size and structure of your brand’s marketing team. Remember that the best martech tools are the ones that your marketers can use easily and fully understand.

Looking for a martech company to help you with your next promotion? Sweepsify helps you find top martech companies in seconds. Create your free Premium account now to get started.

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