Every business needs marketing to survive, especially online, where competition is fierce, regardless of how it is achieved or the channel used. As a result, having a marketing budget for your online business is crucial if you want to stay ahead in an already competitive market.

There are various ways to start an online marketing campaign for your business and get great results. However, social media has evolved into the marketing focus for many businesses due to its capacity to engage with a larger audience of customers and generate organic traffic for your business.

Therefore, social media marketing is an effective way for your business to reach a larger audience and be discovered by the right customers. A good social media marketing strategy can help your business increase brand awareness, generate quality leads, and record more sales. Indeed, social media marketing is essential for your online business if you want to thrive in today's competitive market.

However, getting great results from social media marketing requires more than just posting about your business a few times per day. It entails having a brilliant strategy with measurable goals that distinguish you from the social media noise and generates your desired goal, which could be establishing a social presence and gaining more visibility, promoting a new product, or building an online following.

Whatever your business goal is, you can achieve it by implementing an effective social media marketing strategy. You can use various social media marketing strategies to achieve your business objectives. However, paid advertising and contest marketing are two strategies that guarantee a faster result.

So, what precisely is the distinction between paid advertising and contest marketing? Which produces the most results? Which should you choose for a faster result?

Let's find out!

Paid Advertising vs. Contest Marketing: What is Paid Advertising?

Paid advertising is an online marketing model in which you bid in real-time auctions to display your ads to online users on a specific platform or network. In other words, you compete with other businesses to show your company's content to many online users. As a result, the more you're willing to pay, the more your ad is displayed.

Paid advertising is also known as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising because you typically pay whenever someone clicks on your ad. Paid advertisements employ a bidding methodology in which you enter your maximum bid per ad, and the platform's algorithm works to place it in open slots.

There are numerous types of paid advertising; the common ones you can adopt are:

• Native ad: appears on other websites with content similar to your business's.
• Search ad: appears at the top of search engine result pages.
• Banner ad: appears on your web pages' top, bottom, or side.
• Social media ad: appears in social media feeds such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and others.

Benefits of Paid Advertising

Target specific audience

One of the most significant advantages of paid advertising is targeting a specific audience and defining who you want to reach. As a result, you can control the type of leads you receive through paid advertising by specifying parameters such as age, gender, location, earnings, and so on. This way, your business is only shown to the exact audience persona you've created, making it easier to grow.

Expanding your reach

Paid advertising is an excellent way to reach a large number of people who are unfamiliar with your business. With so many targeting options, such as data, keywords, and custom parameters, you can reach the right audience at the right time and place with paid advertising.

A faster way to generate traffic

Unlike other marketing strategies, paid advertising can reach your target audience as soon as you launch it, allowing you to continue bringing in revenue and improving your business performance with targeted leads.

Easier to measure success

Paid advertising allows you to control and track how leads are generated, making it easier to measure the success of your marketing. As a result, you can see which of your ads generates the most leads and how well they perform.

Paid Advertising vs. Contest Marketing: What is Contest Marketing?

Contest marketing is interactive marketing that uses prospects' desire to win freebies to capture their attention, pique their curiosity, and persuade them to take action. Contest marketing is a marketing strategy that uses contests, giveaways, or sweepstakes to increase brand awareness and reach out to new potential customers.

Contest marketing can assist you in achieving various common marketing objectives, such as lead generation, increasing brand awareness, increasing sales and revenue, establishing an online customer base, and many more.

Contest marketing is usually a win-win situation in which one or more of your audience members receive a prize for participating in the contest, and your business receives growth based on your contest goals.

Benefits of Contest Marketing

Contest marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for generating quick results. This is because the excitement of winning motivates many people to enter contests despite the low chances of ever winning.

Build a Strong Fan Base

People are more likely to participate in contests when they believe they have a good chance of winning. As a result, contest marketing allows you to build a large number of fans and followers for your company on social media. A simple retweet contest, for example, is an effective way to build a large Twitter following.

Boost Reach and Engagement

One of the ways to generate engagement for your business on social media is to create captivating content. However, with contests, you can boost the reach of your content and generate more engagement by attracting new users. Creating contests with no entry barriers will increase the reach of your content, and participants will be more than happy to like, share, and engage with your content, resulting in greater reach and total engagement, which are essential for growth.

It's a Word-of-mouth Marketing Strategy

Contests typically require participants to share to increase their chances of winning, resulting in them doing your marketing for you. As a result, having a contest with a high reward potential encourages participants to spread the word about the contest, giving you more visibility and exposure. In other words, contest marketing is beneficial because it increases your credibility among participants through word-of-mouth marketing.

Gain Valuable Details About Your Prospect

Participants are motivated to provide information and answer questions as part of the entry process when there is a chance to win a prize. As a result, contest marketing is a great way to obtain valuable information about your followers. For example, you can obtain prospect information such as email addresses by making it the contest's entry mode.

Paid Advertising vs. Contest Marketing: Which Should I Do?

Although paid advertising is an excellent way to drive more traffic to your business and increase sales, it can quickly become costly if not properly done.

On the other hand, contest marketing is a cost-efficient marketing strategy, as you can launch a contest with a shoestring budget. Hence, you can launch a contest regularly and achieve results faster only by offering a simple reward.

While both marketing strategies produce faster results, contest marketing brings you closer to your prospect. It lets you build more connections through engagement, as opposed to paid advertising, which requires you to take the content to your prospect through a bidding methodology.

How Can I Succeed With Contest Marketing?

The most common mistake in contest marketing is not knowing how to launch a contest campaign properly or without proper planning. As a result, creating a contest marketing campaign that includes proper marketing strategies and tools is critical to ensuring the campaign's success.

So, if you want to get started with contest marketing, one of the must-have tools to ensure a successful contest campaign is the Cwallet Giveaway Tool.

The Cwallet giveaway tool eliminates the need to verify if a participant meets the requirements manually, complete the campaign task, and select a winner from the multiple entries. Of course, manually doing everything would be a time-consuming process that you might not complete efficiently.

With the Cwallet Giveaway Tool, you can efficiently manage your contest campaign without manually setting up the process. The Cwallet Giveaway Tool streamlines the process from start to finish while allowing you to customize the giveaway as you see fit.

The Cwallet Giveaway tool automatically validates your giveaway across any social platform, selects winners in a random draw technique for a provably fair outcome, and automatically distributes prize rewards for a proper and more straightforward procedure from start to finish!

The Cwallet Giveaway Tool was created to aid in the growth of your business by allowing you to create custom social tasks that drive engagement and traffic to your brand. You also don't have to do anything manually because the tool verifies all tasks automatically and only considers participants who follow the rules for the draws using a provably fair algorithm.

You can run a successful giveaway campaign that increases brand exposure and engagement with the Cwallet Giveaway Tool.

Click here to learn how to successfully run a contest campaign with the Cwallet Giveaway Tool.

Why wait any further? Download the Cwallet app today!