4 Tips on How to Nail Your Contest/Giveaway Swimmingly

4 Tips on How to Nail Your Contest/Giveaway Swimmingly

Contests, giveaways or other types of interactive campaigns can be a powerful way to boost your brand or business’ reach or visibility and attracting a new batch of customers as long as they’re executed with proper preparation and precision.

Contests and giveaways are essential for driving actions such as social media follows, newsletter subscriptions, social referrals, content creation, exposure of promotional material and more.

Fortunately, our marketing experts, have prepared just the winning formula to ensure your campaign goes off with a bang.

1.      Establish Your Goals

Every successful plan starts with a goal in mind. This is perhaps the most crucial, yet overlooked step in running a giveaway or a contest. Once you have your goal figured out, it will enable you to figure the other aspects of your giveaway out as well.

One perfect example of a goal is to increase brand awareness. Other goals may include:

• Building an email list
• Qualifying Leads
• Gathering and crowdsourcing a collective opinion from our audience
• Collecting data from your audience to segment your marketing
• Collecting user-generated content such as pictures, stories, videos, etc. to improve your marketing methods.

2.      Choose the Most Ideal Prize

Choosing what to give away must be perhaps the biggest step to undertake for your contest marketing campaign. After all, it is the prize that ultimately motivates users and customers to participate and complete your entry actions.

Without a cool prize attached to your contest, not only will you lose your opportunity to attract existing and new entrants, but you will also lose the chance to maximize the value of your campaign.

When choosing a prize, consider the following:

• Make sure the prize you choose is relevant to your target audience. This means selecting a prize that ideally appeals to your target audience.
• Ensure that your prize is appropriate valuable. The prize needs to be worth all of the effort that you want users to put in to win it.
• Pick a prize that boosts your promotional efforts. The giveaway you put out has to ultimately promote your brand.

3.      Create a Riveting User Experience

When users or participants interact with your contest, they need to be completely invested in it. This is what it means to create an enticing user experience.

The process in which the participants or customers arrive at your contest, or giveaway campaign, and receive the follow-up communication about your giveaway or contest will relate to your goal. As a matter of fact, determining a user-experience is what could lead you to your goal.

For instance, if you want to build your email list, part of the user experience will involve triggering an email autoresponder as soon as the participant has entered the entry form. You can include a double opt-in for this autoresponder, which can be incredibly helpful in building solid email lists.

4.      Types of Giveaways

There are various types of giveaways that you can run for your business. It all hinges on whom you’re attempting to reach out to, and the kind of entry actions that you’re trying to drive.

Some of the best and easiest giveaways that you can run are available on social media and provide entries for the simplest of actions.

Facebook Giveaways

Facebook is arguably one of the best platforms to reach new audiences, construct a community around your brand and promote your products. You can run a giveaway and also increase your presence by asking users to:

• Comment on your post
• Like your post
• Upload a photo or another post with a target hashtag.

Twitter Giveaways

Twitter is also another stupendous platform for getting the word out about your product fast and wide. You can run a campaign and ask entrants to:

• Retweet a post
• Follow you
• Send a tweet or even upload a photo with your target hashtag.

Instagram Giveaways

With Instagram, you can just post a photo that gives customers a chance to win prizes by:

• Liking your post
• Following your Instagram channel
• Posting a photo with your target hashtag
• Tagging friends in a post.

Guest Article.