How to turn a competition into coverage

This article is an excerpt from week 18 of The Digital PR Newsletter, each week I share a tip that either makes your job easier, or increases your chances of landing coverage.

You can sign up at DigitalPRNewsletter.com

Inspired by a consultancy call I had recently which went a little something like this

Them: Our client is running this competition [explains competition], do you think it’s something we could get coverage for?

Me: Potentially, but if you want it to work, you shouldn’t refer to it as a competition.

Them: Huh ?????

That’s right, if you have a client that is running a competition and they suddenly decide ‘PRing it’ might be a good idea, or perhaps you’re running a competition for the purposes of achieving coverage, the first rule is don’t talk about it being a competition.

Competitions are too commercial, they are overdone, and more often than not, they just aren’t particularly interesting. All that spells bad news for your chances of landing coverage.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t work, in fact some can work really well, it’s just a case of reframing it, and turning it into a story.

Reframing Option 1

One of the most common ways this is done is by reframing the competition as a job.

I remember when my girlfriend turned to me excitedly after she saw an article where a bed company was looking to hire and pay people to sleep

In the articl it says that the company is looking for a “Chief Sleep Officer”, which makes it sound like a job, but then later on there is wording that talks about a ‘winner’.

If this was simply presented as a competition by a bed company to win ￡10k, it wouldn’t work so well, it wouldn’t get the clicks for the publisher (which is what they care about) and it’s not sharable.

One quick search on Google News, and you’ll see these types of stories are EVERYWHERE, and for just about anything. From being paid to test baths, walk 10,000 steps a day, or even drink espresso martinis.

Sometimes there are genuine jobs, like when The Victoria and Albert Museum were looking to hire a Taylor Swift superfan.

But 9 times out of 10, these ‘jobs’ are actually competitions in disguise.

Reframing Option 2

Sometimes a competition doesn’t involve giving away money, so you may find that difficult to turn into a job.

Here’s what you can do instead.

1. Call out your intended audience. For example, if you have a competition giving away pizza, that could be something like “Pizza Lovers Wanted”.

2. Try to make it about testing a product or experience. Sticking with the pizza example, that could be “to test pizzas”.

3. State the value of the prize. If you were giving away a ￡20 pizza each week, that would be ￡20 x 52 weeks = ￡1,040. So you could say “worth over ￡1,000”.

Putting that all together, that would create a headline along the lines of “Pizza Lovers Wanted: test pizzas each week for a year, get over ￡1,000 worth of pizza free”.

Maybe not the best headline in the world, but I’m sure you get my point.

Here’s an example of a headline from The Mirror that encompasses all these points quite well.

I must admit, this is probably one of my least favourite ways of landing coverage. I’m not exactly sure why, perhaps because it feels a bit lazy?

However that doesn’t mean I haven’t suggested it to clients in the past, particularly ones that seem to want EVERYTHING from a campaign.

You know the ones that they say they want coverage, links, collect customer data, social shares, and just about everything under the sun?

Competitions can often tick a few of those boxes, journalists are far more likely to link with these stories, because as soon as you say the magic words “full terms and conditions can be found on this page” they are going to link to the page.

To enter the competition people are going to have to take some form of action, which either means giving up their contact details (which your client could remarket to later), or liking/ sharing some post on social media. That often translates well into traffic.

So yeah, not my favourite type of campaign, but there’s no denying that they can work.

That's all for this week, thanks for reading!

This article is an excerpt from week 18 of The Digital PR Newsletter, each week I share a tip that either makes your job easier, or increases your chances of landing coverage.

You can sign up at DigitalPRNewsletter.com