Now that more companies are using contests, special promotions and offers tied to their social media marketing campaigns, the challenges are becoming even greater for how to stand-out and have a way to capture the attention and interest of your target audience. It’s clear that the bar has been raised by many companies and that to keep up companies need to be creative, offer enticing prizes, and in the end, have a good takeaway message. To have the most successful experience you’ll also want to think about the goals you are trying to achieve with your campaign and to assess at the end whether you obtained them, this will help you in creating future programs. 
In this post we’ll take a look at some sample campaigns and their takeaway messages, a list of goals for businesses to consider and we’ll check-in too with some business people for their opinions on what makes for a successful offer.

The good news for businesses these days is that there are many exciting new ways to market your business. And, many of them cost significantly less than the traditional ways which had been our only options until not too long ago. The challenge of course is keeping up with all the new means at our disposal and assessing when it’s time to jump into the arena or not. While many businesses have already flocked to the likes of Twitter and Facebook, and using strategies such as contests and Facebook ads—location-based marketing which has been around now for a few years, has not yet hit its critical mass.