Prize Draws and Competitions are what we do.
The Competition Agency is a highly specialised marketing agency delivering local, national and international prize promotional marketing campaigns. We help brands, agencies, non-profit and governmental institutions significantly increase their sales, engagement and awareness through a prize incentive, and ensure they are compliant with UK and international laws and regulations.
Promotional Campaign Strategy
Whether an instant win, a purchase necessary prize draw, or a creative competition, we can help properly identify the business objectives of any campaign and devise the most effective promotional mechanic and incentive, based on geography, demographics, industry and consumer behaviour. We pride ourselves on being at the forefront of prize promotional innovation in the campaigns we deliver and the industry tools we provide.
Legal and Compliance
We can ensure that whatever mechanic your prize promotion uses is legal and compliant with rules and regulations around the world. Whether local, national, or international, we can draft terms and conditions, register in territories, offer independent winner selection, and advise on risk and liability. Our cutting edge bespoke instant win and draw technologies are built with compliance, anti-fraud and audit trail in mind, and our free compliance tools such as PolicyTrail and Tweetdraw count millions of users. For creative competitions, we regularly advise promoters on judging panels, and our own in-house moderation team is used to shortlist thousands of entries per campaign.
Design and Development
We specialise in the development of interactive promotional mechanics such as apps, instant win games, free to play games, ARG and GPS treasure hunts, raffle and lottery systems, as well as more common campaign microsites and landing pages for entry. We can also easily provide infrastructure for code redemption, mobile apps, and SMS activations. We relish the opportunity to push prize promotional marketing far beyond the limited appeal of a prize and a slogan. Our emphasis wherever possible is to build reusable infrastructure instead of a transient campaign, allowing clients to self administer regular promotions without outside help.
Marketing and PR
Dedicated marketing for prize draw and competition campaigns can often be an afterthought. We can supercharge your prize promotion with both performance marketing and digital and traditional PR coverage creation. Digital PR via a competition or prize draw is an increasingly popular strategy. Celebrity judging panels, prizes and mechanics that appeal to viral coverage, and reactive campaigns to trending news items can all help you secure large quantities of coverage and inbound links. We can also drive entrants via influencer outreach, Google PPC, paid social and traditional ad buys.
Prize Fulfilment and Winner Experiences
We source, acquire and and fulfil large quantities of prizes for clients around the globe. A positive winner and runner up experience is a crucial part of any prize promotion, and whether it's one winner or ten thousand winners: we go the extra mile to make sure the process of prize fulfilment and winner experience is as smooth as possible, even when logistics and individuals are challenging. From totally bespoke experiences and holidays, to art commissions, to life changing cash, there isn't a prize we haven't made possible.
Hosting, Data Management and Analytics
We host and administer complex infrastructure around the world, allowing campaigns, sites, and businesses at large to operate at their best, in a compliant way, in the jurisdiction required. For data collection, we work with the client's existing engineering and marketing stack to determine the best platforms for routing and storage of data, and can advise on and assess existing or new technology they wish to use. Data analysis and BI for larger campaigns is undertaken using a variety of 3rd party and proprietary platforms. We are passionate about accessibility to our resources for individuals, SMEs and non profits, which is why our terms and policy hosting platform Policytrail allows any terms or policy to be publicly hosted, for free.
Instant win prize promotions
Instant win prize promotions are as adaptable and powerful as they are enduringly popular. From full interactive free-to-play minigames to classic "Spin to win" mechanics, consumers love the thrill of the instant win, and the opportunity to enter daily or multiple times a day. These mechanics work as stand alone campaigns, or in conjunction with a purchase for retail, and can run long term with new themes and promotional objectives.
For over a decade we have pushed the technical and conceptual boundaries of instant win mechanics for our clients. Learn more about instant win prize promotions here.
Prize and sales promotions for retail and ecommerce
Prize promotions for retail and ecommerce are a well tried and commonly used marketing and merchandising tactic, but are rarely silver bullets without proper strategy and expertise. We help brands and agencies to extract the maximum value for both free to enter and purchase necessary promotions. Learn more about prize draws and purchase necessary promotions for retail here.
Creative competitions for schools and universities
Creative Competitions for schools, universities and other institutions has become something of a specialism. We run many of the UK's most well known and prestigious university competitions - for future university applicants, undergraduate and postgraduate applicants.
We assist in all aspects, from design and development, marketing and PR, judging panel consultation and recruitment, entry moderation, the brokerage of prizes via sponsors or academic and industry bodies, and certificate and prize presentation.
We also run competitions in other academic institutions and societies, primarily for brands and charities. Learn more about creative competitions here.
Reward and loyalty schemes
Incentivising external customers or internal employees long term can be crucial to any business. Reward and loyalty mechanics allow for cumulative incentive over time without the need for short term allocation of prizes.
In a retail and ecommerce setting, we have designed and run a wide variety of loyalty programmes to incentivise higher average order value, longer customer lifetime value, sharing and friend referral (member get member). In an employee incentive setting, we have designed and run reward and competitive ladder schemes for sales departments, incentivised internal campaigns for large headcount organisations, and launched employee benefits schemes featuring incentives. Learn more about external and internal reward and loyalty schemes here.
Prize draws for data collection and market research
Prize draws are an extremely effective mechanism of incentivising the collection of data, both internally, within a business or organisation, and externally with customers, leads, suppliers and other stakeholders.
We help global businesses with their data acquisition using incentives, from the technical execution of the landing pages, surveys, apps, or other surfaces (including offline data), hosting, data processing, analytics and BI, winner selection, prize consultation and prize fulfilment at scale. Learn more about prize draws for data collection and market research here.
Raffles and pay to enter competitions
Raffles, often referred to as "paid competitions", or pay to enter competitions, have skyrocketed in popularity in the last five years with both consumers and promoters. From trends like "win a house" property raffles, to cars, cash and luxury watches, the market seems to show no signs of slowing down. However, the feeling among many raffle site customers and responsible promoters alike is that things are not run as well as they should be. Raffle site owners are often of the opinion that a pay to enter competition is "easy money", is easy to market (due to the allure of a prize), is easy to make compliant with laws and regulations, and underestimates the level of competition from other operators.
We help raffle operators who are serious about running a compliant and sustainable business with their technical implementation, medium and long term customer acquisition and conversion rate optimisation. We also offer proprietary raffle plugins and systems that are compatible with WordPress, Woocommerce and other common platforms. Learn more about raffles and paid competitions here.
The Competition Agency has been a leader in prize promotions, incentives and awards at the national and international level for the last 14 years. Here are a few vital statistics:
- Over 25000 delighted winners
- Over 75% of our clients return for at least one additional campaign
- Over two million users of our free promotional compliance tools
The Competition Agency is ISO 27001:2013 certified for information security management, certificate number: 392862022
The Competition Agency is ISO 9001:2015 certified for quality management, certificate number: 392862022
The Competition Agency is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office with a named Data Protection Officer contact.