The winter sports industry accounts for a big part of the leisure economy, because the sports are recreational activities aimed at and carried out by an audience with high purchasing power. In the U.S., the skiing & snowboarding market size was estimated at USD 5.53 billion in 2023, with expectations to grow 5% annually, according to the ‘U.S. Skiing And Snowboarding Market (2024-2030)’ report from Grand View Research.
Skiing and winter sports marketing cover many sectors and themes. The mountain and winter sports resorts tourism sector is a mature market whose marketing strategies mainly focus on maintaining its market share and generating recurring visits. On the other hand, snow trips and apparel are both growing markets, and their marketing strategies might focus more on brand visibility and growth, attracting new customers who might not have enjoyed skiing before.
Interactive promotions can help reach all these different marketing KPIs in ski sports marketing. With Easypromos, you can easily create and manage everything from simple social media giveaways to more elaborate customer loyalty promotions. In this article, we will go through ideas and see examples to help get you inspired for your snow sports marketing.
Ski resort marketing based on social media giveaways
Instagram, and to a lesser degree Facebook and other social networks, are perfect for promoting your ski trips or resorts. Snowy mountains and skiing make for beautiful pictures, which you can show off on your feed and in your stories. Combine this with a giveaway, asking for comments or replies to enter the prize draw. And on Instagram, ask participants to tag their friends to enter the draw. With these interaction-based social media giveaways, you can generate brand visibility and recognition as part of a branding campaign.
That’s what Coast Range Heliskiing adventure organizer did in this first example of an Instagram giveaway that they launched on their profile to celebrate the beginning of the season. Users had to comment on the post, tagging their friends that they wanted to join them on the adventure if they won. With an amazing prize that included a heliskiing adventure for four people, with hotel stay included, a GoPro camera, and a winter jacket, the brand reached more than 11,000 comments. What a way to reach new potential customers.
Outdoor adventure sports organizer Rafting Llavorsí raffled a free skiing or snowboarding lesson to one lucky winner in this second Instagram comment giveaway. Users had to tag a friend in their comments, follow the brand, and like the post. They added all the right hashtags to the post to reach more users. Giving away a free lesson is a great way to get people who haven’t tried skiing before to give it a go and become new customers.
Sun & Snow Weekend is an electronic music festival in the Sierra Nevada that mixes snow with party. For their 2025 edition, they ran an Instagram contest, where users had to tag a friend in the comments, like the post, and follow the organizers’ account. All this for the chance to win 2 tickets to the festival. 400 people commented on the post, so for sure they reached new users.
Tip: In Instagram giveaways, you can ask participants to mention friends in their comments to enter the prize draw, which increases the reach of your post.
A shout-out to the Instagram Story Giveaways, where you ask customers to mention you in the Instagram story. Instagram users are usually careful with what they post to their feed, but not so much on their Stories. Make the most of this, and ask them to publish stories mentioning you to enter a prize draw. Participating is very easy, and this kind of giveaway gives a lot of visibility.
Social media giveaways are a good tool to attract attention at the first encounter between your brand and potential followers and customers. With paid ads, you further increase the reach of your giveaway posts. As the next step, we recommend combining them with other promotional actions, aimed at achieving more than new followers: turning users into leads to have a more direct communication channel with the brand. In the next sections of this article, we will see how.
Generate leads for your winter sports marketing campaigns
Entry Form Giveaways are a simple but effective way to generate leads from your audience. They don’t require much from the organizer or from the participants. This type of promotion is a simple microsite with a URL that you can post on your social media and drive zero-party data for your marketing campaigns. You can also share the link in your newsletters and other channels as SMS marketing or offline through a QR code printed on posters. The microsite is multi-channel, and all participants are collected in a single database, which you can export or integrate with your CRM.
Let’s see some examples.
Winter sports marketing is big on collaborative promotions. FGC Turisme, a division of the Catalan Railway company, ran an Entry Form Giveaway with automotive supplier and tire manufacturer Continental. The giveaway was open to users who had received the link in an email from FGC Turisme, and it was mandatory to accept that the data would be sent to Continental. But the prize was worth it, if you’re a skiing enthusiast: A full seasonal pass for the following season to the Ski station La Molina. This is a great way to create excitement about the next season.
Mountain and ski gear brand Barrabes joined forces with Camp y Rab, an initiative to generate community, creating a space for connection between climbers of all levels, in this co-branded entry form giveaway used as a survey. Through the registration form fields, the two organizers gathered information about the participants’ skiing and mountain hiking experience, habits, condition, and whether they already have their own gear. All of which is valuable information for both brands in their further marketing efforts. The brand posted about the giveaway on their social media profiles where they explained about the prize and the requirements, and linked to their blog where interested participants could find further information. Five lucky winners received a VIP pass to Camp y Rab’s weekend ice climbing event with accommodation, free dinner, and VIP entry to the event.
Barrabes likes co-branded actions. Here’s another one, this time a collaboration with Atomic She Ski, just for the ladies, to promote the ski brand’s line for women. Together, they ran an Entry Form Giveaway in which five lucky winners would win a guided mountain skiing experience for two. Again, they used the registration form to ask the participants to enter information that’s necessary for the experience.
Tip: The prize you offer in your giveaway is very important. As you may have noticed in these examples, the prizes are high-value ski products and experiences that attract and convince ski sports fans to participate. Offering this type of prize will help reach the target audience we want to convert into leads.
Upgrade your winter sport marketing with games
Offering your audience entertainment through gamification is a great way to increase brand recall. Through branded mini-games, the users interact with your brand for a longer period of time, and as being entertained is a positive experience, they will remember it. Add the possibility to receive a reward, and you have a winning combination.
An example of winter sports gamification is this Minesweeper game from the ski station Vallter, where participants had to solve the game without bothering the Yetis. The game was customized so the “mines” were Yetis, along with brand colors and Minesweeper-related design. Users could play first and register after if they wanted to enter the prize draw for three 1-day forfaits for two. More than 400 participants signed up for the chance to win the attractive prize.
Another example is this Fall-Winter collection Memory game, which could easily be used for ski clothing and equipment. All you have to do is upload the images of the clothes and products you want to include, and the system will duplicate them for the game. The Memory game is a perfect way to invite your audience to engage with your brand and products.
Enrich your snow marketing with quizzes and surveys
A good way to engage your audience and learn more about them is with quizzes and surveys. You will collect leads, as in the Entry Form giveaways, but you will also get additional information from participants in a more engaging way.
Create a challenging quiz and let users show off, with the incentive to win a prize. This can show you the level of engagement your followers have with your brand, the area your resort is in, or winter sports in general. You can use this information to focus future marketing campaigns. There are different options: linear knowledge quizzes, quizzes with timer, or multipath quizzes.
Surveys are a great way to learn where you can improve your business or what users are looking for. You can use them as a customer satisfaction survey or to detect tendencies and interests. This way, surveys can help you to enrich your customer profiles.
Apart from the typical linear survey, you can also try new formats such as a Pick your Favorite, a Like or Not, or a Face Off dynamic survey.
In the Face Off survey, users are presented with two options and they have to pick one. The one they pick, stays, and a new option appears. Users keep picking their favorite out of the two, and end up with one – their favorite. This is a very visual way of presenting a survey to your audience and obtain valuable information about their preferences. You can tie prizes to users’ choice, and, for example, give a discount on the selected option.
In this example, a ski sport station is asking users to pick their favorite after-ski activity. This information can give the ski station an idea of what to focus on. At the end, every user receives a discount or a free experience, depending on their choice, that they can redeem upon booking or ordering, directly from their phone. The employees at the ski resort don’t have to log in to the promotion, the redemption takes place entirely on the user’s mobile screen.
Winter sports competitions to show off your resort or equipment
What is more beautiful than a snow-covered mountain with a dash of sunshine and happy faces? Ask your customers to share snaps of their ski sports experiences in exchange for a chance to win a prize in a Photo Contest, and activate voting to increase the competition’s reach. Choose how you select the winner: by voting, jury, random draw, or a combination of two of these options (recommended).
This kind of contest is best for audiences with a high level of engagement, because you’re asking users to do much more than just leave a comment on a post. It’s also important to offer attractive prizes and rewards to incentivize participation. Luckily, the Photo/Video contest includes several ways to reward engagement. You can give everybody who uploads an image a discount, and run a random draw among all voting users. In exchange, your customers will convert into ambassadors and talk about your brand with enthusiasm.
In this Photo Contest example, users are asked to share pictures from their experience at the ski resort. Users can participate with up to three images, and they can share their entry to ask their friends and family for votes.
Discover winter contest ideas to engage your audience throughout the cold season.
Apart from sharing their photos, you can also ask participants to add a frame and stickers to their photos to show your logo/brand. This is done with the PhotoFun app, which is like an online Photo Booth where participants pick the accessories they want to appear on their pictures. This option is great for events where you can hang posters about the competition with a QR code for guests to scan to enter and upload their photos.
Boost the reach of your snow sports marketing promotion with referrals
One of the goals for promotion organizers is to reach many users and get a high participation rate. But, how to do that? How do you incentivize participants to share your promotion so that their friends and family members also sign up? A foolproof way to achieve this is a ‘Refer a friend’ contest, where participants are encouraged to invite their friends. If those friends also register for the contest, the participant earns referrals. Every registered user enters the prize draw, but those who bring in referrals earn additional entries in the prize draw. You choose how many entries to give for each referral.
This contest is an example of just that. Users are invited to sign up for a chance to win, and after registration, they see the invitation link and sharing options, so that they can easily share their unique link with their friends and family. When someone signs up through their link, a referral is registered to them, and they get an additional entry in the final sweepstakes. Users can also see how many referrals they have on a special page in the promotion.
Increase repeat customers with a ski sports loyalty club
With a loyalty club or loyalty program, you can cultivate a dedicated customer base and drive repeat business throughout the winter sports season and beyond. You can reward customers for their continued interest, also off-season, by offering incentives that encourage them to choose your brand over competitors. By understanding your members’ preferences and purchasing habits, you can tailor exclusive offers, discounts, and early access to new products or experiences, making them feel valued and special. This not only boosts sales but also fosters a sense of community around your brand, transforming casual buyers or visitors into enthusiastic advocates.
Offering deals, promotions, and giveaways exclusive to your loyalty club members is a big incentive for your customers to join.
This is what Club Pirineu365, FCG Turisme’s loyalty program, is all about: special invite-only days, offers, discounts, raffles, and promotions. One of these is this example in which the loyalty club raffled a full weekend for two at the Port Ainé, complete with forfaits for both days, a full pension hotel stay, and drinks at the peak with DJ music included.
Registration was limited to club members only, and they had to enter their telephone number to enter the raffle. This is a way to use promotions for data enrichment. The giveaway was only open for participation for a couple of days, and the prize had to be consumed the next weekend, yet more than 2000 loyalty members registered for the raffle. Not bad engagement at all.
The winter sports season is a prime opportunity to connect with an engaged and passionate audience. By leveraging interactive promotions, your ski resort, apparel brand, or winter event can successfully achieve key marketing goals: boosting visibility, generating qualified leads, driving direct bookings, and ensuring repeat business. Ready to see how Easypromos can transform your snow sports marketing strategy and build unforgettable experiences for your customers? Book a personalized demo with our experts today and discover the perfect interactive campaign to make this your most successful season yet!
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