Last Updated on September 13, 2024
Giving away free gifts to prospective customers is often more effective in establishing your brand than spending money on huge advertising campaigns. If done right, organizing contests for giveaways can bring you a quick and high return on investment. Here are a few ways to promote your brand through contests.
1. Hold Simple, Cool and Engaging Competitions
Instead of splashing free gifts at everyone or hosting random lucky draws to determine winners, it will serve your marketing needs better to engage with your community by coming up with interesting activities that they can compete on. These may include:
- A quiz testing the participant’s knowledge about your brand and relevant products.
- Posting creative media – you can link these to some social cause for enhancing your reach to a wider audience. If your brand sells women’s clothing, hosting a contest somewhere around International Women’s Day and asking partners to submit media that demonstrates women’s empowerment is a great idea.
- Rewarding the best one-liners about your brand or a signature product. You can start chains on social media sites or ask for independent entries by email.
2. Encourage People to Buy Your Product
One popular strategy to build your brand and simultaneously boost sales is by encouraging people to buy one of your products in order to participate in the contest. Putting in different sets of puzzles in breakfast cereal cartons and making a contest out of the same puzzles is one classic example. Alternatively, if you are selling a food product, asking for recipes that use your product as one of the ingredients is a fantastic idea. This tactic works best if your product has been around for some time. Recent product launches may not respond quite as well.
3. Try Gift Cards Instead of a Fixed Giveaway Item
A gift card with a specific value on it that the contestant can use for buying products of his or her own choice is a well known tactic. The choices people make, will let you analyze the popularity levels of the different products your brand sells.
4. Infuse a Sense of Urgency
Phrases like “first come, first serve”, “limited gifts only”, “grab your goodies before giveaway ends” trigger a psychological response to enroll faster. A giveaway that lasts for too long may make you appear desperate. Remember to keep the duration long enough to allow for sufficient promotion and letting people be at ease, but don’t let them take your contest for granted!
5. Break Your Budget into Lots of Small Gifts Instead of One Huge Gift
Dividing a budget for giveaways and contests into many small prizes is way better than keeping a single jackpot win. Numbers matter and your aim should be to win over as many people as possible. An assurance that the time and money people invest in your contest is highly likely to win them a gift encourages higher participation rates than a situation where the prize is huge but the probability of winning it is next to zero.
This holds particularly true when you are distributing your own brand’s products, as you get to give more people a chance to see how good your brand is. So, for maximum participation and increased brand awareness, go higher in quantity.
# Now Promote the Promotional Contest!
When you are ready with an amazing contest, use all your powers into making it go viral on social media and other websites. Send out crisp emails announcing the giveaway, post on your social media pages, tweet frequently, and put banners of it on your website. The wider spread the participation, the better it will be for publicizing your brand. Therefore, proactively promote the contest on all marketing channels you are using.
Whatever style of a giveaway suits you, remember to keep it fun and transparent to win the trust of existing and potential customers. Hope you have a series of some mind-blowing contests ahead!
