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What is a giveaway?
A giveaway is a promotional offer provided by a company to increase its number of customers and leads. There are many types of giveaways based promotional means, the most common of which is to provide a prize to a randomly selected winner from a pool of entries. In such a case the pool of entries serves as potential leads. A giveaway promotion allows a company to interact with the audience and also promote its own products. It is primarily a marketing technique that is used by brands of all sizes to engage, grow, and market their customer base.
Difference Between Contest, Sweepstakes and Lottery
Following are the three types of giveaways.
Contest
When the giveaway process involves a small task or game that needs to be performed by the participants, then it is known as a contest. A number of winners are usually chosen from the participants who are given prizes. A giveaway contest can be hosted by any brand through a quiz, a drawing or photography competition, etc.
Sweepstakes
Sweepstakes consist of participants entering a draw-based competition where a winner will be chosen at random. The prizes are usually new products that a company wants to promote. For example, if a magazine comes out with a new issue, it can provide a giveaway of an annual subscription to winner from amongst the first few buyers.
Lottery
In the event of a lottery, tickets are sold to participants from whom a certain few will win prizes. While the process is much like that of a sweepstakes, in a lottery the participant has to pay to enter the pool and the money is usually donated to a charity. A lottery works great for any charity-based run by a corporation. It allows them to promote a product while also adding value to their brand.
Key Benefits of Giveaways
Grow Your Network
A giveaway contest is one of the best ways to increase the size of your community. If a product is worth value and is being given away for free, word on the internet travels really fast. And since giveaways help increase engagement you can be assured that the leads you generate will not be wasted.
Generate Leads
While a good number of people only enter contests because of the free prize, giveaways provide access a large number of leads for any company that can be followed up after the giveaway ends. All forms of giveaway-based marketing generate leads.
Save Time and Money
Marketing a new product can take months of planning and a solid budget. But a giveaway is a quick way to let the customer base know about any product that is being launched. It also provides a sense of exclusivity which adds to the potential marketability.
Product Exposure
A giveaway allows people to actually crave for a product instead of simply knowing about it. So, even if a participant does not get the prize, they might still want to buy the product because they were anticipating it.
Liven Up your Community
You may have a target market at hand but that does not devalue the power of engagement. Giveaways provide a direct line of communication between a brand and their customers and this helps strengthen the community feeling.
Have Fun
Lastly, giveaways are a fun event. They can be tagged along with any major corporate event and will provide the space for a fun recess for both employees and participants.
How to Run a Giveaway
What is the Goal
The type of giveaway one hosts will depend on their goal? Are they looking to create long term customers or generate a lot of leads? Or are they trying to capture market presence for a new product? Since each type of giveaway produces unique results one should first be clear of their goal.
Choose the Right Platform
When hosting a promotional giveaway, choosing the right platform is absolutely important since this will drive the participation levels. For example, a clothing brand should host their giveaway on Instagram whereas an IT brand should do it via Twitter or email. It’s important to remember that a giveaway is a marketing technique and thus it needs the right platform to operate.
Set a Deadline
Once the giveaway has been set up the deadline needs to be reminded to all the participants multiple times. Creating adverts that give occasional reminder regarding the deadline really help push the point into the applicants’ minds.
Make Sure the Rules are Clear
A giveaway needs to be well defined much like that of a sports event. No quarrels should occur between participants and the winner(s) should be chosen ethically.
The Prize Needs to be Relevant
It’s important to give the audience something worthwhile in order to increase leads. The prizes for contest and lottery-based giveaways are usually higher in value than those for sweepstakes. The prize for a giveaway event should be useful to the winner and should hold monetary value as well.
Key Giveaways Ideas for Businesses
Giveaways are always a good idea to increase your brand awareness, sales and to attract new customers. It is worth-mentioning that only in America businesses spend more than $20 billion on giveaways. The reason behind this spending is that it always works and will be a successful marketing strategy in the future.
One thing marketers should keep in mind is to use the techniques strategically. Here I will discuss different giveaways ideas to promote your business.
Coupons
In marketing, coupon is a redeemable ticket for discounts and rebates when customers purchase a product and service. It is hard for customers to resist a coupon especially for a product they really want. When creating a contest for your target market, use social media platform and it is up to you to offer 15% 20% or even more incentives.
Hashtag Contest
Using social media is an integral part of any marketing campaign especially when it comes to giveaways ideas. In this digital age, you should always rely on social media platforms, for example, hashtag contest.
Always choose a unique #hashtag contest, revolving around your campaign objective in mind, ask the participants and followers to share a pic or make a post using the hashtag. Believe me, this is a great giveaway idea because people love to share and participate.
Photo Contest
Hashtag contest is a good way to reach people but one should not ignore the photo contest. Creative photo contest ideas are the best strategies for those businesses who want to reaches the target markets.
Facebook and Instagram are considered to be the social media platforms to sponsor the photo contest. For example, post a photo on Instagram and ask your customer to like or comment and win. Tag a friend or photo caption contest is also a good idea for photo contest.
Gift Cards
When it comes to promotional giveaways, gift cards idea is an easy way to attain the promotional objectives. This strategy is simple and everyone likes to participate. Gift card campaign is a good strategy because those who participate are interested in your product and mostly likely be potential new or return customers.
Grand Prize
Grand prize giveaway always grabs the attention of customers. Make sure to excite the participants with small prizes which will lead to the grand prize. This strategy will grab the attention and more people will enter. Building suspense is another element of this giveaway strategy.
Limited Edition Products
Offering a limited edition product as a giveaway is always an enticing idea and customer feel excitement and the sense of exclusivity. Most of the time giveaways are valid for 24-48 hours and it is a perfect opportunity to promotion a limited edition product. For example, a special edition gaming console from Playstation is always a good opportunity for gamers and parents, I must say.
Giveaway Examples
Nike giveaway
A clothing store marketing by giving away free Nike sneakers, what could be more perfect? Lapstone and Hammer chose to giveaway 5 Nike sneakers from their Instagram page during a live session and this provided a humongous social media boost to their page. This is a perfect example of using valuable giveaways to successfully market a brand. Every kid, teenager, and adult want to own a good pair of Nikes and if a store if giving them out for free they are most likely to check back with the store for more discounts.
Amazon giveaway
Amazon opened up its Prime membership category quite a while back and one of the constant benefits that it has provided to its Prime customers are weekly giveaways. This singular opportunity has helped them retain a number of prime customers and build up a larger base. A free giveaway from Amazon can potentially mean anything and this is a perfect value-based proposition to have for the price of Prime membership.
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