Running a giveaway is no easy feat. They are constantly promoted as a way to achieve viral growth, 10x your email list, social followers and revenue.
What a lot of people don’t know is how to actually run a successful giveaway.
This guide is going to give you a few tips on how to set up and run the best possible giveaway or contest for your brand.
1.The prize
Bottom line, without a great and compelling prize, people will not want to enter your giveaway or contest. Think before you launch your next giveaway or contests. Is this prize worth the time and effort for people entering and doing bonus actions? Will they share it with their friends? Will they bring up your brand up in daily conversations because the prize is that good?
Compelling prizes don’t push people to enter the giveaway. The good news is, the prize does not have to be expensive! It just has to be good enough people would want to share. Think gift cards, experiences, unique and highly requested items (like an e-book, or access to a course or class).
It’s important to ensure the offer a prize is good enough to attract the right crowd and make them want to share to their audience.
2. Use a giveaway tool
To make the most of your campaign, you need a tool to facilitate your giveaway or contest. It streamlines the process to capture leads, incentivize, encourage referrals and set multiple prizes and rewards.
Not to mention, this makes the management of cheaters and choosing a winner much, much easier!
3. Use a landing page
So many brands make the mistake of not capturing and leveraging all the possible data from a giveaway or contest campaign. Get people to opt into a landing page to enter your giveaway so you can capture their email addresses.
Once you have their email, you can use giveaway tools to get people to engage with social content, follow your profiles, tag friends and more.
Simply posting an image to Instagram or Facebook will get you a lot of likes, but likes do not lead to revenue. Emails and messenger subscribers do!
4. Use bonus actions
The best thing about a giveaway is the ability to use “bonus actions.” These are perfect for incentivizing actions like tagging friends, referring others, following your social profiles and engaging with content.
Giveaways on tools like VYPER allows you to create a points system where the more points you get, the higher your chance of winning. To get points, contestants must refer others and complete bonus actions.
This is a recipe for growth!
5. Contact your current community
Too many brands miss a huge opportunity when it comes to marketing their giveaway or contest. They do not notify their most passionate fan base, their engaging fans, their current audience.
Brands will make the mistake of thinking “we already have their email” or “they already follow us on social”. They miss out on tapping into their networks audience like their friends, family, and co-workers.
Sending your content out to your email list, posting on social and notifying any past influencers or brands you have worked with are all great starting points.
6. Leverage social media
It’s a good idea to post about your contest or giveaway every 3-4 days. Post to socials, stories, and email lists. Keep people interested and engaged. If you use a tool like VYPER, users will have their own logins so they will continue to complete bonus actions and get more points.
One bonus trick is to set the bonus actions of:
100 points to share this Facebook post about the giveaway
100 points to tag 3 friends on this Instagram post
100 points to share your referral link on Facebook
100 points to retweet this
You can see how the combination of bonus actions and social media can be a deadly combination!
Check out this brand (Coconut Bowls) that generated 37k new followers, 41k emails & 15k social engagements using an Instagram giveaway.
The growth all comes from good promoting, user shares and referrals!
7. Submit your giveaway to directories
A great way to generate a huge amount of traffic and exposure is using giveaway directories. Websites like I Like Promo’s can get your brand and giveaway in front of a lot of people.
Remember that you get what you put in, so a good prize will get a lot of people interested. A low-quality prize will not get the results you’re looking for no matter how many giveaway directory sites you submit to.
If you’re looking for a full list of giveaway directories check this out.
8. Influencers
It’s hard to do it all on your own. So a fantastic way to get help is to connect and leverage influencers or industry leaders.
Reach out to them and see if they would be willing to share your giveaway campaign. A lot of the time you will need to build a relationship first before they are willing to do you a favor.
If they say no, you can always fall back on the offer of paying them or offering a promotion exchange. So if they promote your giveaway, you will promote an offer or campaign they are running.
TIP – if you do a leader board contest, you can get a few influencers competing against each other for the top spot. It’s a waterfall of traffic, leads, followers and engagement.
This only works if you are choosing the option for a placement winner. For example
1st place wins XXXX
2nd place wins XXXX
It also helps to add a leaderboard to your giveaway, see the example below.
9. Leverage paid ads
If you’re struggling to get traffic to your giveaway or contest, one option is to run paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google or Reddit. We have seen that these are the top platforms but make sure to choose a platform that your brand has a strong presence on.
Paid ads are a great way to send targeted traffic to your giveaway campaign. You can choose who sees your ads down to the demo and geographic.
E.g. If you’re a brand that sells cat products, you can target people interested in cats. The quality of this traffic is extremely high but make sure that your prize is worth the entry. Otherwise, you will end up spending a bunch of money sending traffic to a giveaway that no one wants to enter or doesn’t match their interests.
If you are able to apply just half of these tactics to your next giveaway campaign, you can easily 2x your results!
Let us know if you have any questions at all about running a giveaway and what you’re favorite tactic is in the comments.
Jack Paxton
Co-Founder VYPER
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