Social Media Marketing for Business

Are you a Business-to-Business company looking to grow an email list on Facebook? Running a Sweepstakes on a page with a large, engaged fan base is often the way to go – but what does that mean for your business? In this case study, I will go over ECR4Kids, a classroom furniture distributer, their recent Shopping Spree Giveaway, and the strategies they used to convert at 55 percent!

ECR4Kids is headquartered in California, and is committed to delievering high quality children’s furniture to preschools.  ECR4Kids offers a wide range of products and all of them have gone through rigorous testing for safety, functionality, and GREENGUARD certification.

Meet Ashley, Sales and Marketing team member at ECR4Kids.She and the team at ECR decided to dedicate more of their marketing time to social media marketing efforts, especially through Facebook. According to Ashley, “One of the ways we planned to drive engagement with our following was to run sweepstakes and giveaways with our fans. However running a sweepstakes without understanding the…Facebook rules and regulations seemed daunting.”

“We searched for a third party that understood the rules and regulations and offered an easy to use platform and that’s how we landed with HEYO. HEYO was simple to use and walked us through the steps to create a sweepstakes. I liked the backgrounds that were offered and found it very easy to use. We are satisfied and intend to use HEYO in the future.”

ECR4Kid’s High-Converting Giveaway

Ashely and her social media marketer, Brittany, set out to create a Sweepstakes that would appeal to their fans on Facebook. The first thing they did was align their giveaway with a milestone for their Facebook page – in October, 2014, the ECR4Kids page reached 5,000 fans. Using Heyo’s Sweepstakes Template, the team at ECR4Kid’s had everything they needed to capture email addresses and reward their fans – old and new.

Aligning their contest with this milestone does wonders because it encourages engagement out of fans and keeps them coming back to the page. Another strategy for maintaining customer interest in on-going contests is to post Link Share’s on your fan page’s timeline. This can mean posting about the sweepstakes every once in a while throughout the contest, or posting about the giveaway launch and the winners when the giveaway ends.

Ashely and Brittany created a few posts linking fans to their contest, including a Link Share post, a photo, and a winner announcement, which you can see below.

The winner announcement is particularly unique, and ties in with ECR4Kid’s choice of prize. ECR4Kids is a Business-to-Business distributer, so their fans are more likely to be teachers or principals who purchase their furniture through a separate store. In order to appeal to these fans, they offered a shopping spree on their site – appealing to teachers, rather than their distributors.

Normally, we don’t recommend offering prizes like shopping sprees because they may attract attention from people who do not fit your fan base. However, ECR4Kid’s has specially tailored their page to teachers and schools that shop for their furniture, and they designed and promoted the contest specifically to those people. Because the cash prize is specifically for their furniture, any new fans they attracted because of this giveaway are likely to be engaged fans.

When they announced the winner, too, they focused on the winner’s school, giving a description of GiGi’s Playhouse. Not only does this give social proof, but it lets fans know that the furniture shopping spree was given to a school that needs it.

Your Turn

Ready to run a contest on your own fan page? Click here to start your free trial with Heyo! No credit card required, just enter your name, email, and password to get started creating awesome contests.

Meet Emily Goodrich

Emily Goodrich is a Technical Writer at Heyo. She is a Senior studying Creative and Professional Writing at Virginia Tech.