Ask IH: How to Promote A Competition?

Hi IH,

At heart, we’re a group of designers and engineers. Together, we are Mobile Jazz(1) - a devshop for mobile apps and websites. We have a product called Bugfender(2) - a tool to help developers remotely debug their mobile apps. We think it’s a great tool, but we always struggle when it comes to marketing, despite knowing exactly who our audience are.

So to help encourage new users, we’re planning a giveaway, and I’m here today to ask for your help, advice or tips and tricks on how to promote it.

The competition will be for a new iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. Without going into the technical details of using Bugfender, the rules for the competition are pretty simple:

1. You must be a new user and sign up
2. You must start using the product (sending logs from your application to our servers)

Naturally, we want to spread the word and get as many people using our service as possible. So we’ve come up with a few ideas to help promote it:

• Created a dedicated landing page for the competition
• Written a blog post announcing the competition
• Written other blog posts where we are able to mention the competition in good context
• Create images and banners to promote the competition on social networks

But we know there must be more ways we can promote it - so I’m here to ask for help and ideas.

1. Has anyone else here ran a successful competition? What did you do that went well?
2. Has anyone here ran an unsuccessful competition? Want went wrong?
3. Do you have any tips or ideas on how to promote a giveaway?
4. How can we encourage sharing? People won’t likely want to share this, as the more entries, the less their chance.
5. What duration should we run the competition for? We need to find a good balance between creating a sense of urgency and also enough time for us to get sufficient sign ups.
6. Giveaway directories - do developer focused ones exist? Would it be beneficial publishing them there? Do you have any recommendations?
7. Aside from Twitter and Facebook, are there any other social networks worth posting this on? Does anyone use Google +?

Any help or ideas you can share would be greatly appreciated. Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll be happy to answer them.

Many thanks

1. Mobile Jazz https://mobilejazz.com/
2. Bugfender https://bugfender.com/