Recipe Contests
Cook offs and recipe competitions are not only fun, but they’re also an excellent way to market your food brand online. In fact, more and more brands are seeing the appeal in recipe contests and the engagement they generate and are now using these competitions to make their products more appealing to a wider market. Plus, food lovers of all levels, from home cooks to professional chefs, tend to be drawn to this type of advertising. Recipe contests can introduce your target market to your brand and are a fun way to engage potential customers.
Luckily, running a recipe contest is actually not that difficult. We’ll take a look at the top 10 food blogs that run recipe contests and investigate what makes these contests successful. Let’s break down how recipe contests work and some tips for launching your own contest.
How Do Recipe Contests Work?
Recipe contests work wonderfully as marketing or promotional campaigns. This is because they get consumers involved and appeal to food lovers around the globe.
Essentially, a recipe contest is an online or face to face contest in which individuals can enter their own unique recipes for free. These campaigns can be completely remote, or they can be actual events in which individuals prepare their recipes in a cook-off style competition.
The main goal of recipe contests is to promote your brand, improve brand awareness, and lend an element of trust to your brand. Recipe contests are great for building up a community of avid brand ambassadors. Typically, recipe contests will be focused on one product. For example: A barbeque sauce brand may launch a recipe contest challenging consumers to create their own barbeque pork recipe with a newly-launched sauce product from the brand. However, some brands may choose to run recipe contests without any specific product placement, opting to make their brand name the focus of the competition. This all depends on the specific food or wine brand involved.
Tips for Running Recipe Contests That Convert
At Gourmet Ads, our network of websites are great spots for reaching foodies and home cooks who can be targeted for these contests. Through our platform, you can easily promote your recipe competition and reach food lovers in locations where they are already reading up on cooking.
When launching a recipe competition, it’s important to take an approach to the campaign that is consumer-focused. You’re offering them an opportunity to do something important for the brand and to be part of something bigger. Your customers and contestants can create a recipe that can be enjoyed by people around the world.
With that in mind, your product or brand name is very important when it comes to recipe contests. Think of the products you want to advertise and how they can be leveraged in a recipe competition. It’s important to take an approach that is unique. A simple pasta competition with a plain pasta sauce isn’t likely to catch the attention of consumers. Think of unique and fun rules you can set for the competition that can really challenge consumers to make something unique, all while engaging with your brand and purchasing your products.
It’s also important to consider the prizes and ultimate benefit that consumers can get if they win the contest. There are a lot of options here, from gift cards to coupons to cash to free merchandise to kitchen equipment. Brands could also entice consumers by offering a year’s worth of their specific products, which tend to be popular prizes for recipe competitions. Take the time to think of the timescale for your competition and what types of prizes would be best to offer. It’s very important that the prizes you choose are appealing enough for consumers to put the work into their recipes and enter the contest. Even if you are a small business, you can offer sensible prizes that are still appealing.
When it comes down to it, recipe competitions and cook-offs are a great opportunity to celebrate how creative and unique your customer base is. It’s also a great opportunity to support and celebrate your local business’s community, all while engaging in an excellent marketing campaign.
