It’s harder to give away Free Money then you would think

reprinted from: https://medium.com/@sarahnadav/its-harder-to-give-away-free-money-then-you-would-think-74ef7aa2560b

While it may seem obvious that people like it when you give them money, running a contest is actually pretty hard.

We’ve been planning this campaign for a few weeks (and F**k You very much, John Oliver for stealing our thunder)

The single hardest problem when you are giving something away for free is convincing people that it is legitimate. When you are a new company (like us) and people haven’t heard of you- this is the hardest scenario. We also have the added challenge of being a service for people in debt, so people are naturally skeptical.

You need to combat this by using clear messaging and being totally transparent. Have the contest embedded in your site, make sure people can get to the FAQ and About page. They need to be able to get to know you in order to trust you.

A contest is a great way to reach people, but it is also a hard way to introduce people to your brand. We choose to do it anyway because people in debt have a clear need- to pay down a debt. At Civilize, we want to reach people to help them with what they need and then show them what we can do.

The second hardest thing to wrap your head around is that contests take a lot of time. Running a contest is a significant time commitment. You need to spend a few weeks preparing. It’s not just about what you are giving away, it is about your messaging, your branding, your look, your feel, your marketing. If you don’t have a good strategy in place, than it is likely to be a colossal waste of money.

Before you do a big push, do a soft launch. Once you have planned, prepared, designed, and targeted. Your work has only just begun, because you don’t actual know if your message is going to resonate until you test it. No different than launching a new company where you need beta testers- you need to think of the first people coming to your campaign as beta testers. Expect to tweak, change, improve and generally monitor how the first people who come to your contest respond.

We created 4 different Facebook ads and first tested how many people clicked through. The winner was this image:

I have literally NO IDEA WHY. I mean, we tested generic Fireworks, People, and a talking BBQ but this ad got 4x the amount of clicks to our website than all the others. (again, no idea why)

We also created 3 different “splash pages” on our website. If you want to you can see them here- “4th of July”, “4th of July A”, and “4th of July B”. We all love the first talking BBQ, but then we saw that people didn’t like it as much as generic fireworks (go figure!)

We’re still trying to improve these pages so we’re open to your ideas- you can leave them in the comments here or send us a message on our page.

We have done all of our testing on Facebook. I used to think that free traffic was best, but the truth is- that when people are coming from all over the internet, it is very hard to learn what works and what doesn’t. There are tons of sites to post contests, but you don’t really want to do it until you have perfected your conversion rates. Sometimes, something as simple as the color of you buttons can make a difference.

We’re a work in progress. The contest runs for another few weeks- so I am sure that there is more for us to learn. We’re also super interested in hearing what works for you- Help us give away some money!