With St. Patrick’s Day coming up this week, I know that I have been feeling EXTRA lucky. Makes me want to enter some giveaways!
When consumers see a giveaway pop up on their feed, their EXCITEMENT to participate is the perfect opportunity for your brand to grow its reach, brand awareness, or even sales! The opportunities for rapid growth that come with giveaways must be implemented correctly to ensure you are getting to your end-goal. March is the month of luck, and your audience knows that, making NOW the ideal time to host a social media giveaway. Here are three key elements to successfully running a giveaway and how to get your audience feeling lucky enough to enter!
1. The Prize and Promotion
You want your giveaway prize to attract your audience to enter, so the prize must be desirable enough for them to take the time and follow the entry rules. An unattractive prize will result in low entry levels meaning, low engagement. Pick prizes that are relevant, attractive and represent your business!
When creating the posts for your giveaway during the month of March, you want a clever hook for your audience to get excited and feel lucky enough to win! The colors green and gold can be put to work for promoting giveaways and enticing consumers to put their luck to the test. Once you have figured out the perfect prize for your lucky winner and how you are going to promote it, it’s time to decide HOW you want them to enter and where you are driving your traffic with the entry-criteria.
2. Entry-Criteria
Strategically selecting the entry-criteria for your giveaway is KEY for your end-goal. The entry-criteria can drive engagement to wherever you want! Stating the rules in short yet clear instructions is also very important for your audience to understand how to enter correctly. Let me breakdown three potential rules and how they require your audience to engage.
Tag three friends in the comments – This strategy will bring additional viewers to your platform, increasing brand awareness and maximizing reach. If those tagged fall into your target market, they will now be familiarized on your brand and can result in a potential new follow!
Click the link –This strategy can be used to drive your audience to multiple different destinations and boost engagement outside of the social platform. Looking for a way to gain subscribers to your monthly newsletter? Include the sign-up link in the rules for your giveaway. Want to boost your latest YouTube video views? Include the link in the comments or your bio.
Follow another account – Creating criteria to follow another account is ideal when doing a partnership giveaway or increasing awareness to another one of your own brands! This strategy is guaranteed to increase followers and brand awareness.
Since it is March and we want our audience to feel as lucky as possible, promote ways to gain multiple entries to the giveaway! Allowing your audience to submit multiple entries to the giveaway will allow them to take the wheel and try to boost their luck. This can result in an increase of overall engagement, maximum potential reach, and brand loyalty.
If you choose to follow the “Extra Entries” approach, here is a highly used addition for your entry-criteria!
Share this post to your story/republish – Similar to tagging friends in the comments section, having your participants re-publish your giveaway post spreads brand awareness to their followers. Resulting in a larger opportunity for brand awareness and some free advertising! When your followers choose to republish your content, they are telling their followers they are loyal to you in some way. Repaying your followers with bonus entries using this entry-criteria is an extremely effective way to maximize brand awareness.
3. Time-Limit
Because your audience is feeling extra lucky this month, you should create a giveaway that has a time-limit set to end before the month is over. In theory, giveaways can last months if you want, but the longer you expand the entry period, your giveaway loses urgency.
People will think “Oh! The deadline isn’t for another month. I’ll enter later,” and then forget all about you and your giveaway, resulting in a major loss of potential brand awareness! I know we have all done it before, and we don’t want it to happen to our brands! Create a time-limit that makes sense with the amount of entry steps that are required.
For example, let’s say the criteria to enter is “like this post and tag three friends in the comments!” A month-long timeframe is not needed here. Maybe only a few days to a week at maximum.
You also do not want to overwhelm your potential entries with a time crunch and an unreasonable time-limit. Find a steady balance to keep audience engaged, excited and feeling like a potential lucky winner! The time-limit must be stated somewhere in your social post, either in the caption or in the giveaway image. Clearly stating the time-limit is crucial to letting the giveaway run smoothly and fair for everyone! Once the time-limit hits, its best to get the winning results out as soon as possible. Listing all the entries and then using a random number generator to pick the lucky winner is the most fair way to find the winner quickly.
It can be difficult to grow brand awareness on social media due to all the competition. Giveaways are fun and engaging for your audience and are a great way to keep customers loyal. Start hosting your own giveaways and see how many of your followers choose to test their luck!
