How To Run The Perfect Facebook Competition S5E1

Welcome to the Boost Hospitality podcast. My name is Mark Simpson and this is season five. In this season, I'm going to show you how to run the perfect Facebook competition. I've been doing this training and this formula for the past three years now, and every single time that I have run it within the Boostly community, it has had fantastic results. Hospitality owners have increased their direct bookings. They've gained over a thousand likes. That means more eyes are on their business and there's more people talking about it on online as well. I'm going to show you the step by step, day by day instructions on what you need to do to not only run the perfect Facebook competition, but how you can get bookings on the back of it. So all you need to do to take part, go to www.boostly.co.uk Facebook and I will send you step by step video tutorials to back up the audio that I am going to send you, as well as some bonus material. So it's www.boostly.co.uk Facebook to join in. Okay, Episode one is going to be all about the preparation. How you prepare for your Facebook competition will decide on how well it will do. What I always recommend is before you run it, you give yourself a week. Because what you've got to do is you've got to do these three important factors. Number one, get a terms and conditions for your competition on your website. Number two is make sure that you get the prize sorted. Number three, make sure that you create an image that is going to cause a pattern disrupt. Now let's break these down. Number one, terms and conditions. You can get templates easily. If you want to go look at an example, go to granary.co.uk terms and conditions or. Or if you want me to email you a document that you can use to copy, amend and paste onto your own website, email markoostly.co.uk, and I'll send you over the Google Docs reason why this is important. You've got to cover your back, you've got to have it in writing. The rules to your competition, how people can enter the end date and how people can claim. If you don't have this, then you're setting yourself up for a potential PR disaster. Just in case somebody questions how you drew your competition, you know, how you decided who the winner was, etc. So before doing anything, get the terms and conditions. Number two, make sure that you decide on the prize that you're going to give away. Now, this is pretty obvious, but so many people Fall down at this. A good competition is one that people will get excited for. The best ones are the ones where you can give away a stay. So, so if you've got a rental property, maybe a two or three night stay there, if you've got a B and B or a hotel, maybe a weekend break, two or three night stay again in your hotel, guest house or rental. Now there may be people watching, sorry, listening to this and thinking, well, I don't want to be giving away accommodations days. That's absolutely fine, you don't have to. Other options that I've suggested in the past could be hampers, gift hampers. So for example, if you live in an area that is well known for a certain type of food, or maybe there's, there's something that's very stereotypical about your town, city or location, then you could do a gift hamper for them. So you could approach the local shop, tell them that you are going to be doing a giveaway. Would they like to join in on the competition and explain how it would work? You would pay them for the hamper or the local shop may go, well, hang on, we'll do a joint competition where we'll do joint exposure and we'll give it for free as long as you run it on the site. That has been known to happen. Then what you would do is your competition prize would be a gift hamper in association with the shop or even if you know quite a few other independent properties in the area, shops, etc, you could do a joint gift hamper which would make the competition go even further and further and farther because you'll be putting yourself in front of a whole new audience that won't even know about you. If you don't know people in the area, if there's nothing local that you can think that stand out, you can do national gift hampers. For example, if you go on Amazon or if you go to some of the national chains or not on the, on the high street, you can do that as well. That has been done. The beauty of that is that you don't have to worry about packaging it up yourself and posting it. You can do it all through all the all via their websites. Another option, and this is the fail safe. If you can't think of anything and you want to just fall down on, fall back on the easiest option. That's an Amazon gift voucher. People you know use Amazon. A 50 pound or 100 pound Amazon gift voucher will get people excited and they will like and share because at the end of the day people love to win competitions. What types of competition prizes shouldn't be used vouchers. So, for example, win a gift voucher for 10 pounds to spend in a local restaurant for hospitality. That doesn't really appeal because the person on the other end, say that you're based in Scarborough and somebody from Nottingham sees it. They're not going to drive all the way to Scarborough just to spend that £10 gift voucher for a restaurant meal. It just doesn't appeal. Same as, you know, get a voucher for three nights instead of two. That's a special offer. That's not a competition prize, that's not a giveaway. So really think about your prize. If you want to find out examples, again, go to facebook.sorry, boostly.com Facebook and in the guide that I will send you, it has got a full video showcasing some competitions that have been used in the past. Finally is the image. And again, the image is everything. Once you've decided on your prize, then you got to get a really nice image to put out. I mentioned at the start, pattern disrupts. What pattern disrupt is, is basically you've got to stop the scroll. People are sat on their phone, whether it's at the end of the day or they're on lunch or they're on the bus or wherever, and they're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. You've got to have an image that stands out and stops to scroll down. And a good image which tells everybody exactly what's going on does that from the start. So in the image and Again, go to boostly.co.uk Facebook I will show you the image that I use for my competition. You have your unique selling photo, your best image that really sells your property with a very clear competition time. And then have the like button to enter. Simple as that. You can create one on Canva. If you're not very technological advanced, I can't even say that word. Then if you've got upwork, you can outsource it or fiverr, you can outsource it. Get someone to do it for you. So that's the preparation. Like I said, give yourself a good week to get ready for this. The final stage of the preparation is to get a prep post out on your Facebook page. What I've done recently, which has gone down really well, I've put a poll on our Facebook page, de granary. So facebook.com, facebook.com granary G R A I N A R Y. And it was a poll and I said, would you like us to run a competition. Yes or no? Once you've voted, comment below with the word farmee. If we get over 100 people then we will run it. This got so much exposure. We had over 10,000 reach. We had loads of comments, loads, loads of likes. And even better is that when they mentioned the word farming in the comments, our chatbot got involved and then they had a pop up in their messenger saying if they were to they could subscribe to our chatbot. I will explain more about chatbots in future episodes, but for now that is how you prepare for the Facebook competition. The next episode I'm going to show you how to start your competition, how to create a post that gets attention and what to do next. So thank you very much for watching. Again, if you want to join in 24th of September to 28th September, we're going to be running this competition. You go to www.boostly.co.uk Facebook to find out more. And if you're watching this or listening to this in the future and you've missed those dates, still go to that website because I'll show you everything that we did with day to Day video tutorial.