Giveaway Marketing:
10 Tips for Successful Sweepstakes Marketing
- All contests provide incentives for engagement that can increase traffic to your website, generate new email leads, and, if you have a complete campaign strategy, drive sales. They are an innovative marketing strategy that can deliver surprisingly good results. Get creative and try to find a prize that excites your target audience.
- Awarding a prize relevant to your industry that generates genuine excitement has been proven to increase targeted contest entries. A well-defined giveaway
- marketing strategy can help guarantee the success of your contest, so take the time to document your intended outcome.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 1 Giveaway Marketing:
10 Tips for Successful Sweepstakes Marketing
- 1.1 The Most Important Points at a Glance
- 1.2 Step 1: Before the Contest
- 1.2.1 When Should You Run a Giveaway?
- 1.2.2 What Type of Campaign Should You Run?
- 1.2.3 Define a Goal for Your Giveaway Marketing
- 1.2.4 What Is the Prize?
- 1.2.5 What About the Incentive?
- 1.2.6 Set a Budget for Your Giveaway Marketing
- 1.2.7 Establish a Baseline
- 1.2.8 Duration of the Sweepstakes
- 1.2.9 Protect Your Business
- 1.3 Step 2: Executing Your Giveaway Marketing Strategy
- 1.4 Step 3: Promoting the Contest
- 1.4.1 Send an Email Newsletter to Your Existing List
- 1.4.2 Spread the Word on Social Media
- 1.4.3 Write a Blog Post
- 1.4.4 Promote Your Contest in Forums and Communities
- 1.4.5 Reach Out to Influential Bloggers in Your Niche
- 1.4.6 Use PPC to Drive More Entries via Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads & Google AdWords
- 1.4.7 Submit Your Giveaway to Promotional Websites
- 1.5 Step 4: During the Contest
- 1.6 Step 5: After the Contest
- 1.7 Conclusion
- 1.8 More Articles
| Erfolgreiches Gewinnspiel Marketing – Übersicht | |
| ⭐ Vorgabe: | Erfolgreiches Gewinnspiel Marketing |
| 🏆 Dauer: | Ca. 3 Monate |
| 💰 Kosten: | Projektspezifisch |
| 📺 Zielsetzung: | Interaktionen von Menschen für die Generierung von Traffic, Leads und Verkäufen |
| ⚡ Technologien und Kenntnisse: | Social Media, Webseite, Video, E-Mail-Newsletter |
The Most Important Points at a Glance
test
Schritt |
Kanäle |
Kosten |
|---|---|---|
| Vor dem Wettbewerb | Keine Kanäle, aber eine Menge Planung war nötig. | Niedrig - nur Forschung |
| Einrichten des Wettbewerbs | |
Mittel bis hoch |
| Promotion | |
Hoch, am höchsten unter allen; Kosten als die Promotion selbst |
| Während des Wettbewerbs | |
Mittel bis hoch |
| Nach dem Wettbewerb | |
Niedrig bis mittel,- es geht darum, die Bindung aufrechtzuerhalten, die Sie mit Ihrer Community aufgebaut haben |
Do you know how to run a contest? Thinking about launching a giveaway but not quite sure how to execute it? Whether you’re a small business or a large company, you should have a Giveaway Marketing strategy in place to conduct these innovative promotions on your website. Giveaways provide incentives for interaction that increase traffic to your website. This can generate new email leads and, if you also have a complete campaign strategy, drive sales.
Today, the purpose of running a sweepstakes is threefold: raising brand awareness through comprehensive giveaway marketing, generating engagement with your audience, and acquiring leads with a high potential for conversion. The prize is the catalyst. Offering a prize as a giveaways, contest, or sweepstakes motivates people to participate. This drives many social media marketing activities within sweepstakes marketing, including crowdfunding, where contributors receive something in return along with the product they helped fund.
Step 1: Before the Contest
First things first. As with any other campaign, planning your giveaway marketing is essential if you don’t want your contest to fail and end up costing more than you make in new leads. A well-defined giveaway marketing strategy can help guarantee the contest’s success and save you time by documenting your intended outcome.
When Should You Run a Giveaway?
Contests are a proven way to grow your business. But when is the best time to run a high-profile giveaway?
a) When you’re just starting out or simply unhappy with your current customer count and want to generate a buzz to expand your audience.
b) When you already have a large audience and plenty of website visitors but want more traffic and instant sales.
c) For any business looking to generate more leads by growing its audience, now is a great time to run a contest.
What Type of Campaign Should You Run?
- Do you want to host a contest where people compete for a prize?
- A giveaway where people enter their details for a chance to win?
- Or a promotion where everyone who signs up receives a prize?
When considering different campaign types, you need to think about your customers: how much effort should they invest to enter the giveaway? We’ve found these to be the best variants for a contest, and they generally require less work and effort. The lower the entry barrier in your giveaway marketing strategy, the more likely people are to sign up. So weigh the pros and cons of each before proceeding.For clarity, we’ll use the terms giveaways, promotions, and sweepstakes interchangeably. Please note they refer to the same type of giveaway marketing!
Define a Goal for Your Giveaway Marketing
What are your immediate and post-contest business objectives? Starting with a clear goal helps shape your entire giveaway marketing strategy.
Ask yourself if you specifically want to:
- Grow your subscriber list?
- Increase social engagement on Facebook & Twitter?
- Drive instant sales through coupons and incentives?
- All of the above?
You’ll also want to keep your audience in mind by answering:
- Who is your ideal contest participant?
- What will interest them?
As you outline your goals, also identify your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). You’ll use these later to measure contest success. Examples might include an increase in social followers, more website visitors, or higher sales. If you don’t write anything down, you lose the advantage of analyzing results against your original goal.
What Is the Prize?
This is the first major tip on our checklist. . . . . .
. . . . How will you reward your winner?
a) Be creative and try to find a prize that truly excites your audience. Whatever prize your business chooses, make it memorable and desirable for many potential leads. It doesn’t need to be a million-dollar prize. Just ensure it’s worth far more than the effort to sign up and share with friends.
Our advice for your giveaway marketing strategy is to avoid prizes irrelevant to your business—think free iPads and generic gift cards! Sure, you’ll likely get tons of entries, but will they be the best leads for your business? Probably not. Awarding a prize relevant to your industry that generates genuine excitement has been shown to increase targeted contest entries.
b) Make your sweepstakes more attractive by offering multiple, tiered prizes—1st, 2nd, 3rd place, or runner-ups. Try giving one prize at random and another to the person with the most referrals. People will see higher odds of winning and potentially increase your contest engagement.
Student loan servicer Great Lakes gave away a $6,000 cash prize to use for a student loan. While this seems like a hefty sum, Great Lakes is in the business of money, so the prize gave them authority in the loan space and made the company appear highly philanthropic. Their giveaway marketing campaign consisted of a quiz testing participants’ knowledge of student loans. The Great Lakes announcements also included clearly stated rules about the prize, how participants could enter, and what to expect when receiving the grand prize. This giveaway marketing campaign generated over 206,000 entries.
What About the Incentive?
The second most important tip. . . . .
There has been a major cultural shift and people have become increasingly impatient. If you want people to participate in your contest, offering an incentive for instant gratification is a must. People want to know NOW what’s in it for them. And not just any incentive—it must be one that encourages sharing and holds value for them.
Be the first to give something of value. Offer a digital download like an eBook or a discount code for the next purchase. All your contest entrants should get the incentive. Make sure the incentive is relevant to your industry or niche.
Set a Budget for Your Giveaway Marketing
- How much money do you want to spend on your giveaway marketing campaign?
- How much will the contest prizes cost your business?
- What is the cost per lead acquisition via PPC ads?
You should calculate all of this in advance so you know the total cost of your giveaway marketing and avoid exceeding your budget. Use this information later to determine your cost per lead.
We know most businesses don’t have to spend large sums on giveaway marketing. Read on for practical, effective, and mostly free strategies you can easily implement in your giveaway marketing.
Establish a Baseline
To accurately measure the impact on your business, establish benchmarks for your email lists, social media accounts, and other key metrics like conversion rate or weekly/monthly visitors. Write these down or, better yet, create a table. Depending on your business type, there are several other metrics you might use to measure success before running a contest.
Duration of the Sweepstakes
Before you launch your contest, decide how long your giveaway marketing campaign will run. Setting the right timeframe helps achieve the best results. However, ending too soon may lose potential entries, and running too long can cause audience interest to wane. As a general practice, we’ve found that contests lasting between a minimum of 2 weeks and a maximum of 6 weeks tend to yield the best results.
The highest-performing sweepstakes strike a perfect balance between contest duration and urgency. Urgency drives action in a world full of distractions. Experiment with different contest lengths to find what works best for your business.
Cadence Watch has been producing high-quality, stylish watches at unbeatable prices since its launch in 1985. The way Cadence continuously runs contests can be seen as a form of “evergreen content,” or perpetual marketing. This is a perfect example of using a regular giveaway marketing strategy to maintain interest in your brand.
Protect Your Business
Most prizes are relatively low-value, like a free eBook or similar. But if your prize is high-value and depending on where the contest is held, it may be subject to restrictions or taxes under certain circumstances. Therefore, you should research the applicable legal regulations. This helps you avoid legal issues and understand what you can and cannot do. Also note that, aside from monetary and location-based restrictions, each social network has its own rules for running giveaway marketing campaigns.
We’ve seen countless contests run smoothly. But if you plan to give away an expensive prize package or are unsure about cross-border or state restrictions, it’s best to obtain proper legal advice from a qualified attorney.
Step 2: Executing Your Giveaway Marketing Strategy
So you’ve crafted your initial giveaway marketing strategy. Now it’s time to align your contest and prepare for launch. While you could manage your giveaway marketing campaign “by hand,” using the right marketing tools for building, monitoring, and tracking the contest makes it easier. Contest marketing platforms help you drive conversions, manage leads, and measure success accurately.
Crafting Effective Copy
Before creating any assets, first write a rough draft—the actual words you’ll use to entice and convince people to enter your contest. This rough draft should be concise and conversational, and it’s key to driving engagement.
Write a short, clear description of the prize and the steps to enter. Don’t make people guess what your contest is about!
- Use bullet points and bold text to highlight the benefits of entering.
- Pay special attention to your headlines and calls to action.
- Once your draft is written, read it aloud to see if your words flow naturally. Check grammar and run a spell check.
Create a Dedicated Landing Page for Lead Capture
Once the draft is finalized, it’s time to design and set up a simple yet compelling landing page. Many of your potential contest entries may come from outside social networks, so ideally this is where you’ll send people. Directing traffic to a dedicated landing page gives you the opportunity to maximize the effectiveness of your giveaway marketing strategy.
For the landing page, make sure to include these 6 essential elements:
- Attention-grabbing headline – The headline should immediately capture your visitors’ interest and briefly describe the contest’s unique value proposition.
- Prize image – Show people a high-quality, attractive image of the prize to further motivate entry.
- Entry & prize details – Provide quick details about the prizes and contest mechanics. The main purpose is to excite people!
- Contest entry form – It goes without saying that participants need a place to enter. Keep form fields to a minimum, asking only for essentials.
- Clear call-to-action – Make it extremely obvious where people should click by using a high-contrast color to highlight your button.
- Social media – Increase the chances of your contest going viral by embedding Facebook Like, Twitter Follow, and Google +1 buttons and asking people to share immediately after entering.
Keep in mind there are many variations on this design that can also work well, so your contest landing page doesn’t have to look exactly like this. These are simply best practices for the 6 elements your contest landing pages should include, not the only way to create a high-converting page!
StartupPirates is a week-long program that enables aspiring entrepreneurs to dive into the startup world and learn how to develop a business idea. They designed highly converting landing pages based on extensive testing and analysis of what performs best.
Step 3: Promoting the Contest
This is undeniably a critical part of ensuring your giveaway performs well. The success of the contest largely depends on your giveaway marketing activities. Don’t assume you’ll get traffic just because the prize is desirable or the page looks great. You must be proactive in building excitement before and during the contest. Promote your giveaway via email, blogs, social media, forums, internal links, and ads. Start announcing your upcoming contest a few weeks in advance to build anticipation. Inform your current audience and begin generating buzz.
On the day your contest launches, send out a reminder with the links to participate. During the contest, post frequent updates—use this as an opportunity to build relationships and foster engagement. For all your contest promotional messages, ensure they include:
- Contest start and end dates
- Details on how to enter
- An image of the prize
- Incentive details
- A strong call-to-action
- A link from your homepage
Make sure everyone visiting your website has the opportunity to enter by adding links or widgets to your homepage.
Send an Email Newsletter to Your Existing List
Email is still one of the most effective ways to reach your audience. Create an email newsletter and notify your current subscribers. This gives you the chance to promote your giveaway marketing strategy to your existing fans and engage your customers with your brand.
Spread the Word on Social Media
It goes without saying that you should promote your giveaway on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc.
Post, tweet, and share these details across as many social networks as possible. Create share links tailored to each platform. Good descriptions and images on Facebook, hashtags on Twitter, visuals on Pinterest, and similar actions help amplify your message. It’s an excellent way to turn fans and followers into real leads.
MakoHaus is an online furniture and home goods retailer offering innovative collections from young and established brands for style-conscious consumers. This example shows you don’t need big-ticket prizes to succeed—a simple sign-up and Facebook entry sufficed.
Write a Blog Post
Write a well-detailed blog post about your giveaway and share it with your online community. Include relevant links to drive traffic from your blog post to your contest page.
Promote Your Contest in Forums and Communities
If you belong to an online community and it’s appropriate, share your giveaway there—avoid spamming! It looks unappealing to only promote your business. If you just post your giveaway without engaging with the community, don’t expect much support later. Like everything in giveaway marketing, you need to earn trust by providing value first.
Reach Out to Influential Bloggers in Your Niche
Do your homework and reach out only to blogs relevant to your niche. Don’t push your offer; point out the benefits to their readers. A positive response often comes if you’ve engaged with the blogger beforehand, through comments or social interactions. Again, if you only reach out to promote yourself, you can’t expect measurable results.
Use PPC to Drive More Entries via Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads & Google AdWords
You don’t need a huge ad budget to run a successful sweepstakes. But if you have the budget to buy ads, creating targeted campaigns specifically for your audience can give your giveaway an immediate boost.
Paid advertising within your giveaway marketing campaign can be approached in two ways:
a) If you have NO audience and are starting a sweepstakes to build one.b) To test the effectiveness of giveaway ideas before rolling out to your mass audience.
When creating your ads, make sure they include:
- A strong headline
- Contest details like type (giveaway, promotion, sweepstakes)
- Image of your prize or contest
- Clear CTAs such as how to enter NOW
- A link back to your contest page
With Facebook ads, Twitter ads, or Google AdWords, you can also set a budget so you acquire contest entries without overspending.
Submit Your Giveaway to Promotional Websites
You can try submitting your giveaway to various aggregated directories. The downside is most people on those sites are only interested in freebies. The chances of finding high-quality leads there are slim. But if you insist, here’s a short list of sweepstakes directories. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
- Contest Hound
- Contest Girl
- Online Sweepstakes
- Contest Heat
- Contest Listing
- Sweeties Sweeps
- Contest For Moms
- Mom Giveaways
- Big List of Giveaways
Step 4: During the Contest
Keep Promoting Your Contest
On average, only 16% of posted content reaches fans and followers. To ensure your giveaway marketing campaign reaches as many people as possible, continue sharing your contest across your internal and social channels.
Track Resulting Conversions and Sales
Monitoring your giveaway is crucial for accurate results. You can measure whether you’ve met your initial giveaway marketing campaign goals. KickoffLabs provides access to key metrics for analyzing campaign performance. They track leads in real time and even notify you immediately upon each contest entry.
For deeper analysis, you can also connect your Google Analytics account to your KickoffLabs pages to gain more data and insights about your new customers. Learn how to connect Google Analytics with your KickoffLabs pages here.
DiamondCandles manufactures soy candles with a surprise ring inside. Their candles cost $24.95, but the hidden ring can be worth between $10 and $5,000. They offered a chance to win a ring worth $1,000 and an exclusive discount to those who signed up. By using an eye-catching and aesthetically pleasing image, they maximized customer attention. They determined this through an extensive A/B testing process, showing how data analysis can be a powerful tool.
Thank Influencers for Sharing
If someone helps promote your contest as part of your giveaway marketing strategy by sharing referrals, you’ll surely want to know who they are. Of course you will! They are the best kind of customers—the people spreading word-of-mouth marketing on your behalf.
Step 5: After the Contest
Once the contest has ended, it’s time to inform your audience about the winners. Along with your announcement, aim to keep your audience engaged with ongoing promotions relevant to your business as part of your giveaway marketing strategy.
Select the Winner(s)
Notify the winners immediately and ask for permission to use their image in the announcement and for possible future promotional materials.
Announce the Winners
Update your current contest page or create a new landing page to showcase the winners. Make announcing the winners an event as part of your giveaway marketing.
Ship the Prize
If the prize is digital, email the download link with a personal thank-you. If it’s a physical item, send it packaged nicely. Include a handwritten note or something to make the winner feel special. Encourage the winner to share their experience online by leaving a review of your product.
Add Emails to Your Subscriber List
Export the emails of your newly acquired audience to third-party marketing services. Continue the sales process by adding entrants to your Mailchimp, Aweber, or other email marketing platform and guiding them through additional autoresponder funnels. KickoffLabs can automate segmenting different customer types on autopilot.
Keep or Redirect Your Landing Page
Leave your contest landing page live indefinitely and generate post-contest leads by including calls-to-action relevant to your business. We still receive traffic on our past contest pages. Use all the traffic your site gets to continuously capture registrations via landing pages.
Announce Your Next Contest
Encourage your newly acquired audience to stay tuned by sharing plans for your next giveaway. Will you host one every month now? Every two months? Let your audience know and keep them engaged!
Conclusion
