Read This Article and Win $1 Million Dollars! - Gain Sponsors
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Creating the contest is only one part of the process. The journey of contest sponsorship and promotion just began at that point. However, having a real prize to offer a market of tens of thousands made it a lot easier to gain sponsorship. I approached businesses that weren’t direct competitors who also market to bands and artists and found that there existed a gigantic pool of opportunities. Just by sending an email or making a phone call, the doors opened to many avenues where I could market the contest, not to contestants, but to contest sponsors.
I contacted the Dewey Beach Music Conference and Festival where thousands of musicians perform and attend industry meet-and-greets. We both have a market of bands in our resource pool but offer different services. By cross-promoting each other we were able to double our reach. I promoted the festival to my bands and they promoted my contest to their bands. Everybody wins.
Usually gaining sponsors will have a snowball effect. When you approach other potential sponsors and they see that you have already enlisted other businesses in your venture, they will have a tendency to see more value in your contest. By gaining extra sponsors this leads to more publicity and attention than if you just try to run the contest on your own.
Don’t limit yourself to just marketing your contest to Internet users. Even on a low budget there is a lot you can do to increase the success of your venture. For my contest I had to think of where I could find my market audience off-line. I wanted to think of central locations where groups of my market audience could be found. There were really only two places that I could think of: music venues and music stores. I knew that hanging flyers in music venues may not be the best place since many times they are dark and the inhabitants aren’t necessarily going to remember the URL of my site in a dimly lit room after a few cocktails. I realized quickly that if I made flyers about the contest and mailed them as many music retailers around the country as possible, I could reach thousands and thousands of my offline market and bring them to the site using the contest as the means of creating enough excitement to draw them online. In exchange for hanging my flyers, I offered the music stores a listing in my database of national music retailers for my users to search for a music retailer near them.
So now the main pieces are in place. There’s a market niche, a prize, sponsors and offline marketing. Now the key is to publicize the contest with press releases. For more information about that, read Wayne Hurlbert’s Promote With Press Releases.
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