The x5 most effective ways to promote raffle sites

Digital marketing channels to ignore when promoting your competition business

First, let’s talk about what NOT to do when you’re launching a new competition business.
Note: Eventually, you will want to pursue these channels, but when starting a new competition business, ignore these marketing channels, they will only drain your budget which could be better spent elsewhere.

SEO

I work with all sorts of entrepreneurs launch new websites for startups in all sorts of niches. Normally SEO is my go-to marketing strategy. I firmly believe SEO services are often overlooked.
But for competition sites, SEO won’t help you much.

Google ranks pages, not websites. By the time Google crawls your new pages, and you rank the page for your latest competition, the competition will be finished anyway.
You will of course want to rank for your brand name,
But people searching for your brand name already know about you, and want to play. They are just using Google as a way to navigate to your website, so this can be considered as “navigational” traffic, rather than “growth” traffic.

 

Also, consider the intent:

Few people go to Google and search for competition sites to play. Instead, they play on impulse, usually from an ad they see on social media.
SEO for ecommerce businesses, or for local service businesses  works great, but for a competition site it’s not worth investing time and money in at this stage.

Google Ads / PPC

Similarly, once you scale to a certain level of success you’ll need to start running ads on your brand name, in order to protect yourself from your competitors placing ads under your brand name and stealing your traffic!

But for now while you’re new you can ignore this strategy.

 

Case Studies: what digital marketing methods work for raffle sites?

Ticket sales don’t happen by magic. You MUST drive traffic to your raffle site to be profitable.
Here’s the top x5 marketing channels I recommend for promoting raffle site, based on REAL raffle sites we’ve worked with:

1 Social Ads

This is the most tried and tested way to drive traffic to your site.

You run ads on Meta (facebook and Instagram) to drive traffic to your most recent competitions.
This uses a blend of promotional posts, organic content, and user generated content to build interest and drive traffic to the site.

One of our clients has used this method to succesfully launch at £20k/m straight out of the gate.

Note that ads MUST be paired with a really strong stream of consistent, high production quality organic content too.

Advantages:

• Fast
• Effective
• Reliable (if done well)
• Scaleable. Take your profits, put it into more ads, repeat.

Disadvantages:

• Adspends can require some hefty budgets in the competition niche. Adspend will depend on…
  • Your niche
  • Your prizes
  • Your creative and content quality
  • Your pricing
  • Your strategy
• Success can fluctuate depending on algorithm changes.
• Creating content and creative is labour intensive

2 Work with a trusted affiliate or influencer

Pick a celebrity with clout in your niche.
This affiliate can become the driving force of your business, they may even be a partner or be the face of your business, driving viral growth.

This is why picking a niche for your competition business is so important.

Ignore the vanity numbers.

“Likes ain’t cash!

Pay attention to if your influencer has a track record of turning followers into customers.

Approach an influencer agency if necessary to find the right partner.

We can build competition sites with an affiliate system so affiliates can sign up with an online dashboard. Every £ they earn for you is tracked so everything is transparent, and you can even set up automated payouts for the commission.

Advantages:

• If you don’t have your own audience, you can piggy back off of someone else’s social media audience instead.
• The affiliate does all the heavy lifting in terms of content creation, promotion.

Disadvantages:

• Your affiliate will take an agreed % of any earnings they make you. (but remember 20% of £100k, is better than 100% of £0) 😜
• Your affiliate could become a vital part of the business if they are the only face of the business. If this is the case, consider making them a partner.

 

3 Nurture a private group

We have another client turning over £100k/m who spends 0 on marketing.
That’s right, zero!

Launching with a small group of 2000, this group has quickly grown to 13,000, through recommendations.
Customers are incentivized to share the site with some small reward like site credit or a discount.

This turns your audience into your own private sales force.

Private groups also have a far more intimate setting for building loyal communities, instead of churning through a cold audience with ads.

Advantages:

• Free
• High level of trust and loyalty

Disadvantages:

• Requires a lot of labour to nurture a genuine community
• As you scale, you may need to hire a community manager

 

4 Transition an existing CRM database / Email / SMS audience

Many of my clients have an existing business, and transition into competition businesses as a new business model, but using the same audience.

If you have an existing business, in the same niche as your competition business, you have a huge advantage:
You already have a customer list of people who know and trust you enough to buy from you!

These lead lists can come from…

• Customers from a previous business
• An email list
• A CRM
• You can buy a database of leads (not recommended)

You can take your existing audience, and transtition them into a new audience for your new competition business.
Note: This must be done correctly and legally for GDPR. If you want more details on how to do this properly, you can book a consultation.
We’ve helped one of our clients transition 150,000 email leads to a new competition business, which led to them turning a £25k profit in their very first competition, and taking in over £20k in their first month after launch!

Advantages:

• Cheap (you only pay for the emails and email marketing software)
• VERY effective, as you’re selling to leads that already know and trust you

Disadvantages:

• Requires a previous business for your mailing list
• Depends on the size and quality of your existing mailing list
• You can buy an email list but this is less effective

5 Promote lotteries in person at live events

I don’t just help entrepreneurs launch a succesful competition business, I work in all sorts of niches with entrepreneurs to launch startups, such as e-commerce websites, online booking sites, paid membership communities and more.

In almost every niche, my advice is that digital marketing outperforms traditional marketing. But competition businesses are the exception.
Live events can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, because they bypass the trust barrier needed for customers to buy tickets.

You can display the prize in front of them in real life at an event, and sell tickets directly through the website on a laptop.
This form of marketing can be very powerful if done at the right event with a relevant audience.

You just can’t beat the buzz of an inperson event!

Advantages:

• VERY effective, as you bypass the online trust issues.
• The energy and excitment is unmatched

Disadvantages:

• Time intensive, not awfully scalable

Summary

There are lots of ways to promote competition sites and drive ticket sales.

The x5 most effective forms of digital marketing for competition businesses (in no particular order)

1. Social Ads
2. Affiliate / influencer marketing
3. Private communities
4. Email lead lists
5. Live events

All of these methods can work, either individually, or in combination. The effectiveness will depend on your particualr niche and audience.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with these and others together until you find the right fit for you.
Once you find what works, double down!

Good luck, and if you want a peresonal 1-1 call with me to guide you to the right strategy, just book one of my competition clarity calls.