If someone offered you a free meal at your favorite restaurant, would you take it? Probably. Now, if someone offered
you a free meal at your favorite restaurant but required you to jump through a bunch of hoops, would you take it? Probably not.
One of the most popular and effective ways for brands to increase engagement with customers is through giveaways on their social channels. These giveaways continue to be hugely popular despite the changing online landscape in recent years. Everyone loves getting something for free and doing social media giveaways can lead to increased brand awareness. So, giving something away for free can result in free marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of tips to run a successful giveaway.
Determinations to make before launching your giveaway
Once you’ve determined what you’re going to give away, you have to consider the type of giveaway you’re going to use. A sweepstakes gives entrants an opportunity to win a prize based on chance; a contest requires effort and skill to win; a lottery requires purchase to win. Once you determine your type of giveaway, you’ll need to determine what channels you’re going to use for your giveaway along with their respective budgets. If you set up too many barriers to entry, you’re unlikely to receive a large number of entries. The entry method is critical to success; if it’s too difficult you are jeopardizing the number of potential entrants you can expect to receive.
What to do once your giveaway is up and running
Just like any other marketing campaign your business runs, tracking results is of the utmost importance. Using the analytics provided by social media channels and your website, you can analyze the reach, engagement, and interactions with followers. Make sure that you measure the contest’s impact on your brand engagement, click through rates, conversions, and sales. The least productive thing you can do is rely on your followers to spread the word about your giveaway, so if you’re serious about having a successful campaign, you have to be serious about promoting it through your various social channels. Taking a hyper-aggressive promotional approach is good, because the more exposure your can create for your contest, the likelihood of better results improves.
What to do when your contest is over
The reality with giveaways is that the real work begins when the campaign is over. If you ran a successful giveaway – you increased engagement, raised brand awareness, and collected a boatload of data – now it’s time to really get to work. Using the collected data to cultivate relationships through email marketing and social media campaigns will become easier because of the feedback provided through the data. Capitalizing on user generated content is critical, too. If your followers are sharing your content or leaving comments it’s important to recognize that and respond in a timely manner. The bottom line is: your giveaway is the end; it is a means to getting exposure to and feedback from your customer base.
There are many misperceptions about giveaways, but by following the above steps you can push those aside. Besides, chances are you’re going to frequent your favorite restaurant whether it’s free or not.
For more social media tips, be sure to like us on Facebook.
