Hosting Contests and company giveaways are a great way to announce a new product, creat excitement around your brand, give back to your clients and increase your following.
But even with the very best incentives, a cmpany contest or giveaway can totally flop if some key ingredients aren’t included in the campaign.
Here are the four key ingredients that you must have in any contest or giveaway campaign that you run.
1. Determind the Purpose
Before doing any work on your contest or giveaways, the very first step is to determine the purpose.
Are you hosting the contest to grow your mailing lish, reach new customer, grow your following on social media, promote a new product, give back to your customers or maybe get feedback from them?
The purpose is going to determine every other aspect of your campaign so it’s really important to figure that out first. If you can select just one primary purpose, your campaign will be more successful. So one you decided the purpose, you can move on next step.
2. Select the Entry Method
It may seem really obvious to you, but it’s often where business owner get tripped up and what causes their campaign to not yield the results that they hoped for. The key to this is selecting the method of entry based on the purpose of the campaign.
So let’s go through at a couple of examples.
Let’s say the purpose of your campaign is to grow your isntagram following.
You could do this simply by promoting the campaign to your mailing list and your followers on other social media networks.
The method of entry would be to follow your instagram account.
Simple enough. But maybe now you’re realling increasing your instagram following isn’t the primary purpose of your campaign. You really want to reach new customers. This changes everything.
Instagram can still be the vehicle for the campaign, but the method of the entry is going to be completely different, The method of entry would now be following your instagram account and tagging a friend in the comments. Now you have your existing followers referring your business to their friends and you’re reaching new potential customers.
Lastly, keep your method of entry as simple and straight-forward as possible. Have multiple or complex steps will confuse people and you will have fewer entries. Also the level of effort required to enter is directly related to how many people will enter the contest.
Hitting a following button is going to gain you a lot more entries than if the method of entry is subscribing to a mailing list. Or if you’re requiring customers to send in photos of themselves using your products that takes a lot of effort and you’re going to have fewer entries by comparison.
Now it might be worth the trade-off if your goal for the campaign is to gain photos of your customer using your products
3. Set the rules
Every soical media network, contry and state has their own laws for contests and giveaways so make sure you do your research so that you can include those laws in the fine print of your campaign.
Specify things like requirements of:
- Age of Entrants
- Location
- Length of Contest
- When and how a winner will be selected and notified
- how the winner is to redeem the prize
With your purpose selected, your method determined and your rules set, you’re now ready to create the image and copy to promote your campaign.
Yes, just like launching a new product, promotion is key for a successful campaign.
4. Promote the Campaign
The obvious places to share your campaign are to post it on all of social media accounts, email your mailing list and post it on your website. But if you have small following you mey not get the results that you are hoping for by those thres steps alone.
Contests and giveways are a great opportunity to team up with outher business. You will essentially be swapping followers so it’s imperative that the business you team up with has a similar target customer as you.
You can often get free advertising by contacting website, blogs and influencers and asking them to share the giveaways or contest with their followers. They will be more likely to share this type of campaign rather than advertising a product for your for free.
Once again make sure the influencer’s followers are the same as your target customer. And third and very smart option is to invest some of your advertising budget to promote the campaign on social media.
Four steps to hosting a hugely successful contest or company giveaways. Share with us in the comments when you have hosted a campaign that was successfully or maybe one that completely flopped.
