You can have the prettiest site and the best prizes in the world - if nobody sees them, you might as well be raffling off your nan's biscuit tin in the cupboard. Marketing is what turns a competition business from a hobby into an actual operation.
Meta ads: your main workhorse
For most competition operators, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is the number one source of traffic and sales. Why?
- Your ideal customers already spend half their lives doom-scrolling there.
- Meta's pixel and conversions API let you optimise for real buyers, not just random clicks.
- The targeting options - interest-based, lookalike audiences, remarketing - are genuinely powerful when you have clean data behind them.
The basics:
- Install the pixel properly and track events such as View Content, Add to Cart, and Purchase. Don't bodge this step - bad tracking data produces bad optimisation.
- In the early days (roughly the first few weeks), spend around £50–£100 per day purely to feed Meta data on who actually buys from you. Think of it as training the algorithm, not generating profit. This is an investment phase.
- Start with one campaign optimised for purchases, with one broad ad set (your geo and age range only) and one interest-based ad set targeted at your niche.
- Test two or three creatives per ad set: a clear prize image, a strong headline, and a landing page that exactly matches the promise in the ad. Don't advertise a Rolex and land people on your homepage.
The early goal is not to "hack the algorithm" - it's to feed Meta decent data on who actually buys, so it can find more of them. Once you have purchase signals, things get more efficient. Before that, patience is your biggest asset.
When campaigns are working, specialist agencies in this space - such as Mamba Marketing, who focus specifically on UK competition sites - report results like 15x ROAS (return on ad spend) for clients with good pixel data and solid creative. That's not guaranteed, but it illustrates what's possible when the data is clean and the targeting is dialled in.
Avoid polluting your pixel and chasing vanity metrics
A painful lesson that comes up repeatedly: running a free giveaway to "warm up" the pixel or grow your page tends to backfire badly. Here's a real example of how it plays out.
You run a free £50 Just Eat voucher giveaway. Thousands of people enter because, well, it's free and who doesn't want a takeaway. Your page followers jump. Your pixel fires a thousand times. Looks great on paper. Then you switch to paid competitions and discover that Meta has learned your audience is "people who will never pay for anything as long as there's a chance of getting it for nothing." Your paid campaigns now cost more and perform worse because the algorithm is optimising towards freebie hunters rather than buyers.
It can take weeks of clean paid data to undo this damage. Avoid the shortcut entirely.
Other common traps:
- Buying cheap followers or likes - they look nice on the page but confuse your targeting data and drag down the quality of any lookalike audiences you build later.
- Running "like and share to enter" promotions at scale - these attract broad, low-intent audiences that inflate vanity metrics and muddy your pixel.
You want every signal (follower, engager, website visitor) to look like your real buyers - not random people from across the globe who clicked something for the chance at a free tenner.
DIY vs specialist agency
You have two broad approaches:
- DIY. Learn Ads Manager, start small (£30–£50/day), test creatives and audiences, and slowly scale what works. You keep full control and pay in time and inevitable early mistakes. For creatives, Fiverr has video editors experienced in competition ads who can produce scroll-stopping content for reasonable fees.
- Agency. Work with a specialist competition-focused agency that understands compliance, creative angles, and Meta's quirks for this niche. If you go this route, look for agencies with demonstrable competition site experience rather than a general digital marketing firm who'll be learning on your budget.
Typically, under around £2,000 a month in ad spend it often makes sense to stay DIY, learn, and put budget into testing rather than retainers. Once you're spending more and feel stuck, an agency or media buyer can be worth the fee if they genuinely lift performance. Either way, treat ads as an investment that must be tracked - not a mysterious expense you "hope" will work out.
Timing and scheduling your campaigns
When you run your ads matters almost as much as what's in them. A few timing principles that apply to UK competition audiences:
- Payday periods (last few days of the month and first few days of the new month) typically see higher conversion rates - people have money and are more willing to spend it.
- Bank holidays can work well for leisure niches - people are bored, scrolling, and relaxed.
- Major events in your niche create natural moments to push relevant prizes - a darts world championship final is the perfect time to run darts gear competitions.
- Avoid sending marketing emails at random times. Ten Fosters deep in a beer garden on a Friday afternoon is probably not when your customers want a competition newsletter landing in their inbox. Tuesday and Wednesday mornings tend to perform better for B2C email.
Email and SMS: turning one-off punters into regulars
Meta is great for discovering you; email and SMS are great for remembering you. Every customer who buys is an asset - they've already shown they'll part with money. Keeping them engaged costs a fraction of re-acquiring them via paid ads.
- Use tools like Mailchimp or Klaviyo for newsletters and automations. Klaviyo has tighter e-commerce integrations if you want to send trigger-based emails (e.g. "this competition ends in 24 hours").
- Send 1–2 emails per week for new sites, plus simple automations: a welcome email when someone registers, a "new competition live" notification, and a "last 24 hours" urgency reminder.
- Keep your list clean - remove people who haven't opened or clicked in 90–180 days after a re-engagement email, and honour unsubscribes immediately. A smaller, engaged list outperforms a large, stale one every time.
- Treat SMS as a special-occasion channel since messages are charged per send. Save it for big launches, final hours, or major prize announcements where the urgency justifies the cost.
Organic content and community building
Long term, your safest traffic source is a community that actually likes you. Paid ads can disappear overnight - a Meta account ban, a policy change, or a budget cut can stop that traffic dead. A community is harder to build and slower to grow, but it compounds over time.
- Run a Facebook group or Discord server as a "members club" for regulars - somewhere people can chat, see behind-the-scenes content, and feel like insiders rather than just customers.
- Be genuinely present there: answer questions, tease upcoming prizes, share draw footage, and ask for feedback. The operators who do this well are the ones who survive when ad costs spike.
- Celebrate winners properly - photos, unboxing videos, shout-outs (with permission). User-generated content from real winners is more persuasive than any ad you could create.
- Consider occasional members-only discounts or exclusive early-access competitions to reward regulars and give people a reason to stay in the group.
Combine consistent community presence with regular organic posting and you end up less dependent on paid ads alone - and far more resilient when Meta inevitably has one of its moods. And it will have moods.