Sweepstakes, giveaways and contests — they’re so much fun for generating awareness and leads for your brand.
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- The key ingredient for doing social media marketing well is having a strategy. Without a strategy, you might be posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting. Without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it’ll be hard to achieve results on social med.
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- Three Simple Rules Poor Teens Should Follow to Join the Middle Class. The more the media will cover the debate, and the more the nation will have the opportunity to reflect on what is at stake.
- Use social media to promote Web content or start a conversation with community members who have joined your social media channels. Plan to Rewrite Your Web Content for Use in Social Media It’s a good idea to use Web content as source material for social media communication, but it’s not a good idea to use the Web content verbatim as tweets.
Writing the sweepstakes or contest rules? Not quite as fun, in all honesty. That simple or cool idea to drive brand awareness and new leads just turned into a little headache because you’re trying to figure out what to put in your “Official Rules.”
Fear not, readers. We’ve put together this resource to help you on the path to putting together contest rules for your social media promotion.
That said, neither the author of this post nor Woobox is giving you legal advice here. Use this information to educate yourself on why contest rules matter, and what they could look like.
Advice on Researching Relevant Contest Rules
Before launching your online sweepstakes, giveaway, or contest, you should do a little research on the following issues and how they may impact your promotion.
Look into the Laws
International Laws
Will you allow entries from countries outside of your own? Look into any regulations and laws that may govern giveaways in those countries before you launch.
Federal Laws
In the United States, different federal laws and regulations affect what you can and can’t do with a sweepstakes or contest. Additionally, multiple federal agencies regulate sweepstakes and contests in the U.S. including:
- the Federal Trade Commission
- the Federal Communications Commission
- the Justice Department
- the IRS (you may need to request a W-9 from the winner(s) and file a 1099-MISC form for each winner)
- the United States Postal Service (when sweepstakes include a mail component)
State & Local Laws
You have to comply with your state or province’s laws concerning sweepstakes and contests. That’s a given. However, did you know that you must also comply with the local laws of each state or province where you plan to run your contest?
Ugh, right? Ugh or not, you have to ensure your promotion is not going to get you into legal trouble. Some states rules are more stringent than others. Here’s an overview of a few states’ contest/sweepstakes requirements:
Florida: for any random drawing where the prize or cumulative total of prizes is worth $5,000 or more, you must register and bond the sweepstakes at least seven days before the start of the promotion. You must also file a list of the winners with complete names and addresses.
New York: requirements here closely mirror those of Florida except for the timing. You must register and bond the sweepstakes 30 days before the promotion begins
Rhode Island: for any contest or sweepstakes offered at a retail location that includes prizes with a cumulative total over $500, you must register the promotion with the state. Even if you provide an alternate method of entry (in other words, you don’t have to visit the store to enter), it must be registered.
Michigan: a requirement to visit a store or retail location to enter a sweepstakes is prohibited in Michigan. The condition of a visit to a site is interpreted as “consideration” and is not allowed in a sweepstakes. Additionally, you may not run a sweepstakes related to tobacco products.
California: there are strict regulations in California regarding alcohol-related sweepstakes.
Check with Marketing and Legal Experts
Review resources at each of the authorities mentioned above and state government websites, but don’t forget to look for other marketing and legal expertise to guide you.
You can find valuable resources by:
- visiting the ANA
- connecting with the American Marketing Association or your local chapter
- asking questions in one of the marketingprofs.com forums
- visiting a site such as LegalZoom or Rocket Lawyer to get access to legal advice and templates online.
A note on Rocket Lawyer: this site offers a free contest rules wizard to help you build Official Rules for your sweepstakes or contest. The document is free with a one-week free trial.
We also recommend finalizing your official contest rules with the aid of a lawyer.
Understand What Each Social Media Platform Requires
Before you launch your promotion, be sure to research the social media contest rules for each platform where you plan to promote your contest or giveaway. For your convenience, here’s a quick list of where to find rules for each of the major platforms:
Do’s & Don’ts for Your Social Media Contest or Sweepstakes
Now let’s look at some of the Do’s and Don’ts for your contest or giveaway.
Don’t Create an Illegal Lottery
Let’s start with the legal definition of a lottery. A lottery consists of three things:
- Consideration — the participant must “offer value” to enter (purchase a ticket or product, invest time or resources to enter — in Michigan, traveling to a store to enter a sweepstakes is “consideration,” for example)
- Chance — the winner is chosen at random, no skill required to participate
- Prizes
Federal and state laws prohibit private entities from running lotteries. If your promotion includes the three elements above — consideration, chance, and prize, you may have created an illegal lottery.
Do Ensure Your Promotion is Either a Contest or a Sweepstakes
A contest is a promotion where winners are, presumably, chosen based on skill. There is little-to-no random chance involved.
A sweepstakes, on the other hand, is a promotional drawing where winners are selected at random.
Ensure that your promotion is a legitimate contest or sweepstakes — avoid creating an illegal lottery.
Don’t Require A Purchase to Participate in Your Sweepstakes
You’ve probably already got this, but it bears repeating. Do not require your participants to purchase anything to enter your sweepstakes. This point goes back to the whole idea of “consideration.”
Do Create and Publish Official Rules
Make your official rules widely available and ensure they comply with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
Don’t Forget Your Privacy Policy
People and governments are getting more and more serious about protecting their privacy and understanding how businesses plan to use the data they collect from consumers. You should include a link to your privacy policy or craft one specific to your campaign. You need to ensure that your privacy policy complies with the laws of the country, state, or province of your promotion’s participants.
The “Check-with-Your-Lawyer-Before-Use” Sweepstakes or Contest Rules Template
The example below is just an example of what your social media giveaway or contest rules could look like. Bracketed fields represent areas you could replace with information specific to your promotion. We can’t stress this enough: this is merely a template and should not be construed as legal advice. If you decide to use this template, you assume all of the associated risks. Consult with a legal expert to ensure your final set of rules is compliant with current state and federal laws. Neither Woobox nor the author is providing legal advice.
Preface your rules and conditions with a statement regarding no purchase necessary.
NO PURCHASE IS NECESSARY TO ENTER. YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING DO NOT INCREASE WITH A PURCHASE.
1. Eligibility
In this section, define who is eligible for the contest or sweepstakes. Be thorough and specific. Be sure to mention who is NOT eligible as well. For example, you may say “void where prohibited by law” and specify that your employees, as well as your subsidiaries, affiliates, suppliers, advertising and promotion agencies, employees’ immediate family members, etc., are ineligible participate in the contest/sweepstakes.
2. Sponsorship
List your company name and address in this section. If you’re partnering with any other organizations, list them under the sponsorship section, too. Explain how the sponsor(s) will conduct the promotion as described in your Official Rules.
3. Agreement to Rules
Ensure that you specify that by entering your contest, participants agree to abide by the Sponsor’s (your) Official Rules and decisions. Include verbiage that talks about your right to refuse, withdraw, or disqualify entries at your sole discretion. You should also incorporate language that participant agrees to accept the decision of the Sponsor as final and binding.
4. Entry Period
Define the promotion period by giving the start date and time (include your time zone) and the end date and time with the time zone. These are the dates that you will receive and accept entries.
5. How to Enter
Explain the accepted methods for entering your contest or sweepstakes. Define things like the number of entries allowed per person, how to earn bonus entries, any limitations on bonus entries, etc. You may want to include a statement about fraudulent methods of entry or circumvention of the rules may result in the Sponsor invalidating a participant’s entries.
6. Prizes
Provide information about what the winner(s) will receive and include the estimated retail value. Determine if you need to include information about whether or not the prize is transferable, how prizes may be substituted at your sole discretion, how acceptance of the prize grants you permission to use the Winners entry, name, and likeness for advertising, promotion, and trade without further compensation or remuneration unless prohibited by law.
If your prize is worth more than $600 and you are conducting your giveaway in the United States, you will need to collect the winner’s social security number and issue a 1099 for tax purposes.
7. Odds
Provide participants with a statement about how the odds of winning is dependent upon the number of eligible entries received.
8. Selection and Notification of the Winner
In this section, explain how the winner will be selected (random drawing, a panel of judges if a skills-based contest, etc.) under your supervision. Tell participants how and when you plan to notify the winner. Define the timeframe that the winner has to claim his or her prize and the prize may be forfeited if he/she doesn’t contact you within the time limit.
You may also want to add language about how the Sponsor (your company) isn’t liable for the winner’s failure to receive notification of winning if he or she provided a wrong email address or incorrect phone number or if their email security settings caused your prize notification to go into the spam or junk folder.
Additional considerations include 1) circumstances under which you may select an alternate winner, receipt of the prize is upon the condition of compliance with federal, state, and local laws, etc.
9. Rights Granted by the Entrant
Here, you should explain the rights that the participant grants to you, the Sponsor, upon submission of an entry into the sweepstakes or contest. This section may include the right to use the participant’s submission, voice, likeness, image, statements about the contest, etc., for publicity, news, advertising, promotional purposes, trade, and so forth, without any further notice, review, consent, compensation or remuneration.
NOTE: if you’re conducting a contest based on participants submitting photos, writing, or other work, you may want to consider adding language about how entries must be original work and not violate anyone’s proprietary or intellectual property rights. You could also include the consequences for entries that infringe upon the intellectual property rights of others (disqualification of the participant) and any claims that arise as a result of infringement (“You shall defend or settle against such claims at your sole expense, and You shall indemnify, defend and hold harmless the Sponsor from any suit, etc.)
10. Terms & Conditions
Under the Terms & Conditions section, list everything that you as the Sponsor reserve the right to modify, suspend, cancel or terminate in the event that non-authorized human intervention, a bug or virus, fraud, or other causes beyond your control impact or corrupt the security, fairness, proper conduct, or administration of the contest/sweepstakes.
Discuss your rights to disqualify anyone who violates the terms, as well as your rights to seek damages to the fullest extent permitted by law in cases where a participant has caused deliberate damage or undermined the legal operation of the promotion.
11. Limitation of Liability
Specify how the participant’s entry into your contest or sweepstakes constitutes his or her agreement to release and hold harmless the Sponsor (your company) and its subsidiaries, affiliates, employees, etc., against all claims liability, illness, injury, death, loss, etc., that occurs directly or indirectly from participation in the contest or use/misuse of the awarded prize.
12. Disputes
This section should cover how disputes will be handled. Carefully define how the entrant agrees, as a condition of participating in the promotion, that disputes not resolved between the participant and your company shall be individually resolved exclusively before a court located in your state, without resorting to any form of class action. Think about verbiage that states that the entrants waive all rights to punitive, incidental, or consequential damages, and they waive all rights to have damages multiplied or increased.
13. Privacy Policy
Tell your participants how their information is subject to your privacy policy and where to find the privacy policy on your website. International and even state governments within the U.S. have adopted privacy laws that you need to comply with when it comes to collecting consumer data. Be sure your privacy policy complies with those laws where you plan to execute your promotion.
14. Winners List
Tell participants how they can request a copy of the list of winners.
15. Social Media Platform Rules
In this section, you should directly address any rules specific to the channels where you plan to promote or administer your promotion.
For example, Facebook requires that you include the following verbiage if you plan to use Facebook to communicate or administer your contest or sweepstakes: The [Sweepstakes or Contest] hosted by [your company name] is in no way sponsored, endorsed, administered by, or associated with Facebook.
16. Affirmation of Acceptance of and Agreement to All of the Official Rules
Wrap up your Official Rules by explaining that by entering the contest, the entrant has affirmatively reviewed, accepted, and agreed to all of the Official Rules. Also consider including a checkbox on your entry form that states something like, “By checking here, You, the Entrant, have affirmatively reviewed, accepted, and agreed to all of the Official Rules.”
How to Include Your Official Contest Rules in Woobox
We made it through the rough part. From here on out, it’s smooth sailing. Woobox makes it easy to display your sweepstakes or contest rules with your promotional landing page. Let’s check it out.
Once you create your campaign, you can add your official rules directly in Woobox. Go to your campaign, and click Settings > Advanced > Rules.
Next, you’ll see the Rules set-up page. Here you can directly enter your Official Rules.
Or you can opt to direct people to a page on your website.
Now, visit your promotion’s landing page. Voilà: a link to your official rules has been added. A link to your official rules will also be included with the Rules Checkbox field if you add one to your form.
Wrapping Up
Whew! I know; we covered A LOT of information here, so let’s do a quick recap. We talked about:
- Research tips. Consult with the websites of different agencies and states to understand the laws that govern sweepstakes and contests. Also, consult with marketing organizations like ANA and the American Marketing Association, sites like marketingprofs.com, and legal resources such as LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer to educate yourself on sweepstakes and contests.
- The Do’s and Don’ts for these types of promotions, including one of the most important: never create an illegal lottery.
- Our starter template/structure for sweepstakes and contest rules. The most important takeaway here? These rules are a framework to help you think about what you need. Work with a lawyer to create your Official Rules.
- Use Woobox’s super-simple Rules option to ensure your Official Rules get linked to the contests and sweepstakes you run through Woobox.
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Everyone is familiar with the adage ‘content is king’, which is more relevant than ever in today’s content-driven world.
Content marketing can have a significant influence on everything from the marketing output of a small business to a whole country’s presidential election result. It’s difficult to even comprehend how much content is produced on a daily basis – with two million blog posts written every day.
All over the world, brands are united by the same goal: to generate unique content that their customers can relate to, and thus, help them earn better business outcomes. They spend infinite time, money and resources on this objective, and develop complex buyer personas to help them achieve optimal results.
However, intangible questions remain, including what are the basic pillars of content marketing? How do brands create compelling content that can be used to attract customers and ultimately boost sales? What is the secret to a truly successful content marketing strategy?
These questions may be intangible but they are still ones that every content marketer today should ask and strive to find answers to.
3 Simple Rules For Social Media Success Napoleon Hill
Strap yourself in to learn my 12 simple rules for successful content marketing.
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The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Business
1. Make your content unique
As far as content is concerned, uniqueness is the main parameter that allows you to stay above in a competitive world. Rehashing content and taking inspiration from existing content is definitely a thing, but adding something extra to it is fundamental to your content marketing success.
Try using the following infographic to get fresh inspiration for your writing.
2. Make your content format-specific
Social media is an undeniably powerful tool, and companies who are utilizing its power are the ones who are surging ahead in the content marketing race.
Tailor your content according to the medium – short and graphic for microblogging sites such as Facebook, and detailed and in-depth for long-form sites such as Medium.
3. Make your content relevant
If you are a local brand which wants to tap into the local market, your focus should be on answering the key questions asked by your local target audience. Incorporate any customer concerns into your content, and you will experience a shift in engagement. You’ll also reap the rewards of greater user interest and a more personable reputation.
4. Create a content schedule
Spontaneity works in a theatre context, but not in content marketing. Creating and publishing content without a proper plan in place can affect your long-time goals and make your brand look feeble and unstable. In addition to creating a long-term plan, successful content marketers should have weekly and monthly content schedules.
Check out this marking plan calendar from Rebecca Vandenberg below and use it as inspiration to create your own.
5. Think beyond blogging
A lot of digital marketing campaigns rely on blogging as the sole focus for content and engagement. Diversify your content in the form of videos, infographics, presentations and images. Your audience interaction will automatically rise.
6. Look at the metrics
There is no point in pressing ‘Publish’ if you don’t know how your content is performing. Taking an occasional glance at its traffic from social media is not enough. Consider traffic from all avenues and adjust your content marketing strategy accordingly.
7. Optimize content for mobile
Simply focusing on desktop traffic can kill your content marketing’s chance of success. According to Makesbridge, mobile-friendly websites achieve significantly more in terms of conversions than their counterparts. For example, it’s a smart idea to create videos which can be viewed vertically rather than horizontally on a smartphone, as more than 85% of mobile users watch videos in the vertical mode.
8. Take creative risks
The courage to take risks will help you create unique content, as well as set your brand aside as one which innovates instead of depending on traditional methods.
Success is hard to find without taking a few risks so view risks as content enhancers. While a safe strategy may offer a relatively consistent return, a risky strategy can offer a less certain but significantly higher result.
9. Treat simplicity as a virtue
SEMRush suggests that content marketers should take inspiration from Apple, which is renowned for its use of simple, minimalistic content to drive a single point across. Look at its advertisements for its range of iMacs, iPhones, and even the new AirPods to see how well this strategy works, then consider how a minimalistic approach can help you make your content marketing appear more concise and iconic.
10. Stay true to your brand
It’s one of the biggest cliches of all time, but staying true to your brand identity is vital. An example of a big brand that does this well is Nike. Its marketing strategy concentrates all its content – videos, images and texts – around its world-famous tagline, “Just do it!” As a result, its customers connect automatically with the content and respond to it positively, regardless of its context.
11. Be responsive to feedback
Dealing with negative responses to your content can be challenging. Negativity is inevitable, but successfully circumnavigating it all depends on how well you handle criticism.
In a world where there is no shortage of trolls, businesses must learn how to deal with negativity. In this regard, taking notes from Domino’s can be helpful. The pizza delivery giant chooses not to delete any negative comments/reviews from any of its owned accounts. Instead, it keeps them and tries to solve the issues, giving additional reasons to the loyal, non-troll customers to love them even more.
12. Create standalone content
3 Simple Rules For Social Media Successful
One of the biggest mistakes a brand can make when creating content is to market it solely as a conduit for their service/product, rather than something that is a standalone marketing asset. You should assign just as much importance to your content as you would to your main service/product. If you take it seriously, your audience will follow suit.
Conclusion
Following these simple rules will help you expand your horizons and the quality of your content marketing. They will not only boost your sales, but assist you in the aim of building and retaining a loyal customer base.
In today’s world, where sales are driven primarily by content that consumers are exposed to when online, tapping into their core areas of interest is a smart way to make your brand known.
If you have a unique idea that you think can help people solve problems, then remembering these 12 rules will help put you way ahead of your competitors in your content marketing objectives.
Guest Author: Bria Pierce is a freelance writer at 123writings.com. She has an unquenchable thirst for writing and believes in the necessity of personal development as well as having a passion for one’s work. You can follow her on Twitter.