Leveraging Competitions for PR

Competitions can work as an amazing tool for boosting brand awareness, engaging audiences, and earning valuable media coverage. When done right, they’re not just the chance to give something away —they’re compelling PR campaigns that showcase your brand in the spotlight.

At Peppermint Soda, we know how to craft competitions that deliver maximum impact and consistently run competitions with big brands to help our clients get to the forefront of their target audiences.

So, with our competition hat on, here’s our guide to leveraging competitions to supercharge your PR efforts.

Why competitions work as part of PR

Competitions offer multiple PR advantages:

Instant brand awareness: Hosting a competition via respected media outlets exposes your brand to a broader, more engaged audience. The credibility they lend translates directly to your visibility and authority.

Targeted reach: You can tailor where and how your competition runs—whether in niche publications or highly relevant social communities—to reach the consumers most likely to engage with your brand.

Elevated credibility: Collaborative competitions with established publications (e.g., Ideal Home, Delicious, House Beautiful and Good Housekeeping) can enhance your brand’s perceived trustworthiness and legitimacy.

Product buzz and feedback: Gifting a new product through a competition creates excitement and allows people to try and talk about your offerings first-hand.

Data & insights: With participant consent, competitions are a source of rich customer data—helpful for segmentation, audience understanding, and converting entrants into customers. Data capture can come at an additional cost, but tapping into this data is great for adding to your own database.

SEO and link benefits: Hosting or partnering through high-domain websites can drive valuable backlinks that boost your own search engine ranking. It can also drive your social following if doing a social media competition, as many social media competitions are run on a ‘like & follow’ mechanic.

Crafting a competition that generates PR

1. Define clear PR objectives

Start by clarifying your goals: boosting social engagement? Gaining media traction? Building your email list? A firm objective guides every aspect of your competition—from outreach to measurement.

2. Choose the right platform

Media partners: Leverage established publications with loyal readerships for instant trust and visibility.

Social platforms: Run campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok with share-to-enter mechanisms—effective for organic amplification.

On-site placements: Add prominent banners or pages on your own site to capture entries while driving traffic.

3. Keep duration optimal

Too short, and you miss reach; too long, and interest fizzles. Aim for 2–6 weeks, keeping entries fresh and engagement high. Offer prompts—like bonus entries for sharing content—to sustain momentum. When doing a competition with a media house or publication, many stick with the 4 to 6 week time frame to optimise entries.

4. Collaborate smartly

Micro-influencers: Partner with influencers offering high engagement for minimal cost—often in exchange for products or shout-outs.

Related brands: Co-host competitions with complementary businesses to share effort and broaden the audience. We recently ran a competition for our client Bar-Be-Quick with the household cleaning brand Oven Pride. This resulted in a great follower gain on Bar-Be-Quick on Instagram due to the ‘like and follow’ mechanic.

5. Use eye-catching visuals

If you haven’t got brilliant high-res imagery which really showcases your product or business, create striking visuals using free tools like Canva and Unsplash, to help make your competition look professional without breaking the budget. When collaborating on competitions, many media houses and publications have image guidelines to follow so that your image fits within its publication and maximises competition impact.

6. Leverage media relationships

Offering competitions to trusted publications not only drives entries but also builds ongoing relationships—promising future PR opportunities if your campaign performs well.

7. Monitor and follow up

Collect entrant data responsibly with consent and always keep in line with GDPR. If running your own competition, follow up via email with offers or announcements—transforming one-off entrants into returning customers.

Our examples of brilliantly run competitions

Our client Bar-Be-Quick is no stranger to brilliant competitions. During the summer of 2025, we worked with them on a variety of competitions across some BIG publications, including Good Housekeeping and Delicious.

The Good Housekeeping competition ran online and gained over 43,000 entries, and by providing a prize, Bar-Be-Quick was put in front of the Good Housekeeping audience for a few weeks across summer 2025.

Showcasing the brand to Delicious’ engaged audience also brought a great entry figure for Bar-Be-Quick, with over 33,000 people entering this competition to win a Steel Kamado Barbecue.

Bar-Be-Quick also ran a social media competition partnered with the cleaning brand Oven Pride. Providing a barbecue competition prize and a barbecue for the Oven Pride photo shoot, the exposure here meant Bar-Be-Quick’s Instagram following increased rapidly over a few days – all due to the like and follow mechanic used in the competition. A great way of gaining new followers who are interested in the product and brand.

All of these competitions gave Bar-Be-Quick the opportunity to gain a new audience and tap into the audience of three big names, making traction for Bar-Be-Quick and bringing the brand to the forefront of people’s minds over barbecue season, reminding people of the brand or introducing them to it.

Measuring the impact

For a competition to double as a PR win, track the following:

• Reach metrics: Media impressions, site traffic boosts, social mentions.
• Engagement: Shares, comments, tags, entries.
• Media pickups: External coverage, features, or roundup mentions.
• Data acquisition: Subscription rate, opt-ins, and qualified leads.
• SEO signals: Inbound links and domain authority growth.

Why competitions work at Peppermint Soda

As a brand that blends freshness, fun, and creativity, Peppermint Soda is perfectly positioned to host competitions that reflect your spirit and engage consumers. Whether unveiling a new flavour, rewarding fans with branded merch or creating content-driven contests, competitions can:

• Spark chatter on social media
• Earn mentions in brand-required publications
• Grow your brand’s mailing list with a real client base

Need help designing a competition offset to your brand values? We can co-create everything from entry mechanics to visuals and media outreach strategies.

Our final thoughts

Competitions are an underused but potent tool in the PR toolkit—when executed with strategy and flair, they drive brand awareness, build media exposure, create engagement, and deliver valuable customer insights.

At Peppermint Soda, we specialise in creating competition campaigns that aren’t just fun—they’re strategic PR assets.

Ready to make some brilliant competitions?
Contact us today – [email protected]