What is a giveaway? How to make one in 7 steps

What is a giveaway? How to make one in 7 steps. Surely you have already participated in a giveaway on Instagram or another platform. The truth is that many brands resort to this option. After all, a giveaway can be offered free of charge to customers, bringing many benefits to companies. So, if you want to create a giveaway, you’re in the right place. Today, we will tell you what a giveaway is and give you the best recommendations.

 

Maybe you didn’t know it until now, but online giveaways are the perfect ways to get more interactions. Besides, it allows you to grow your followers on your social media. Therefore, before explaining everything you need for a quality giveaway, you must know its meaning.

 

What is a Giveaway, and how does it work?

 

You may be wondering what a giveaway is. This is nothing more than a contest carried out by a business or a brand. Its goal is to get participants to act in exchange for winning a prize. This can be a product or service.

 

When you have a brand, there are many reasons for wanting to do a giveaway:

 

• They provide greater visibility to your brand.
• Increase your community on social media.
• They help build customer loyalty.

How to plan a giveaway?

 

Now that you know what a giveaway is, the next step is to understand that there are times that will be the most appropriate to make a contest through social media:

 

• Hot comes out.
• Day of saint
• Friends day.
• Mother’s Day.
• Father’s day.
• Christmas
• Anniversary of your brand.

How to make a giveaway in 7 steps?

 

Here are the seven steps that will help you create a giveaway without fail:

 

• Define the goal you want to achieve with the giveaway

 

To reach the goal, you must first have your goals outlined, even if we are talking about a dynamic through social media. Also, these can be some of your goals to start a giveaway on Instagram or another social media platform:

 

• Grow in your community on social media.
• Drive more traffic to your store.
• Increase your sale considerably.
• Generate engagement and awareness of your brand.
• Loyalty to your audience.
• Get a higher number of leads.

 

Commonly, you want to get a lot out of your Instagram giveaway. However, as marketing experts, we recommend not setting more than three objectives. Otherwise, it will only increase the steps to the participation dynamic, which only makes users demotivated.

 

Therefore, choose your goals and set quantitative goals: the number of visits to the site or the number of followers you want to increase. Thus, when evaluating, you will know if you have been successful or not.

 

If you didn’t know, an average brand could gain up to 34% followers by trusting a giveaway. Taking this number into account, you can set a consistent goal so that your account can also have this same percentage of growth or more.

 

• Select the gift

 

Once your objectives have been well defined, the next step is to choose the ideal prize. What do you want to give to the winners? It must be an attractive gift for your audience, including users who do not know it yet.

 

So, how should a prize be a giveaway in Spanish?

 

First, it needs to be relevant, so pick a giveaway that you know your audience will be happy to win. Second, it must be something valuable or unique, so it must be charming and offer value to the user. When we talk about values, we don’t mean something expensive, but rather a useful gift.

 

As you can see, to give away in a giveaway, you must detail:

 

• Its values
• The usability.
• The purpose of dynamics.

 

If your goal is to get more people to know about it, the ideal gift is probably one of the products that generate the most attention or the best seller. However, suppose the objective is to increase your sales. In that case, a good option may be an initial kit of a product, which, once obtained, leads to the consumption of more products of your brand.

 

Therefore, if your store sells vapers and essences, you can give away both products. In this way, the winner’s next purchase will be more essences to continue using the vaper.

 

• Most popular gifts for giveaways

 

Among the most popular products for a giveaway on Facebook or Instagram, we can mention brand products, promotional material with the brand’s colors or logo, or free or low-cost services.

 

Similarly, the demographics of your account are also a very important factor.

 

With them, you can determine which audience to target, whether they are female or male, or their age range so you can pick the perfect prize.

 

A survey carried out by kontest indicated that 53% of the participants in a giveaway are men, with an average age of 30 years. Similarly, you must analyze if this data agrees with your community’s.

 

• Plan the logistics of participation

 

Participation logic is another very important point to creating a really successful giveaway. Likewise, your plan should be subject to the objectives that you have already established previously. However, it can also vary depending on the decision you make.

 

To have good participation logistics, we must take into account:

 

• Make it easy to create

 

This will be of great help to encourage many users to participate in its dynamics. After all, the simpler the requirements, the more people will join.

 

• Create a good structure

 

Having well-planned logistics in depth allows us to have greater certainty of the contest. This will avoid confusion or misunderstandings when selecting the winners.

 

For users to complete the dynamics of a giveaway post, it can take an average of 2:30 minutes, so you should choose an activity that does not take more than that time.

 

And if you can’t think of any dynamic, here we provide you with valuable ideas:

 

• Of alike

 

You can ask users to follow your Instagram, Facebook, tiktok, or other social media account. This step will contribute directly to the growth of your community on the platform.

 

• Like + comment

 

This is a combination that can help more than you imagine in the algorithm of social media. The reason is that your post will be considered more relevant, so it will be shown in the feed more often and in the users’ timeline.

 

• Leave a comment on the post.

 

If you intend to generate more engagement, you can invite your users to comment or share the image of your giveaway on Instagram for free. This way, you can ensure that other people find out about this dynamic and are encouraged to participate.

 

• Take a photo with…

 

When you ask the user to take a photo with something of your brand or with some logo element and label it, you are generating conversation around your business.

 

• Answer a question

 

Answering a question is a dynamic that increases the engagement you are looking for, allows you to ask something you would like to know. For example, you can ask the user what their favorite product is or what they like most about the brand to get to know their audience and future consumers more closely.

 

• Use a hashtag

 

Suppose you already have a hashtag associated with your brand. In that case, you can enhance it and make it a trending topic or make it memorable for your followers.

 

• Visit the website and leave your email.

 

Suppose the goal is to drive traffic from your social media to your online store and a subscription system where they can leave their email. In that case, this dynamic can be very useful.

 

Don’t forget the terms and conditions!

 

The terms and conditions can never go unnoticed when making a giveaway draw. Therefore, you must tell your followers the steps to follow, the time of participation, the number of winners, and how they will be selected. Likewise, we must clarify if the contest will be exclusive to a city, country, or for the world and if it is necessary to cover the shipping costs.

 

• Establish the legal bases of the giveaway

 

The legal bases for a giveaway or the terms and conditions are also known. These are very important factors when running a contest on social media. Therefore, you should learn how to write this document to make everything clear and avoid inconvenience or losing face.

 

But do not worry because in this step we will help you. Once you begin to elaborate on the legal bases for the draw, these are some general elements that cannot be missing:

 

• A summary of the draw will launch on social media.
• Start date and end date of the giveaway.
• Who can participate?
• Participation mechanics.
• Prize
• Personal Information and Confidentiality.
• Election of the winners.
• Awards
• Additional details of the dynamics.

 

Each of these elements is necessary so that all the people who wish to participate are aware of the contest’s rules.

 

• Promote your giveaway

 

You probably think that an additional promotion for a dynamic like this is unnecessary. However, based on the best practices for making a giveaway, you should know how to promote it somehow.

 

The fact is, several methods can help you promote a giveaway on a platform like Instagram, Facebook, or whatever you want, and these are some of the most common:

 

• Collaborate with other brands and influencers

 

Third-party support is also helpful in amplifying your giveaway message. You can give them an incentive or some of the giveaways you’ve already considered for your online giveaway. Of course, the gift must be in addition to those already designated for the contest winners.

 

• Invest in ads and promote your publication

 

In all social media, you can add a budget amount so that the publications have a greater reach. Therefore, you can do it if you have already considered this additional budget.

 

• Share it on social media.

 

To take advantage of social media’s reach, you can perform cross-traffic dynamics by sending users from one platform to another. You likely have an audience that only follows you on one channel. When they find out about your giveaway, they will also know that you have another community on another platform.

 

• Share it in your newsletter or your online store.

 

At no time should you forget about users or buyers who are already part of your community? Consequently, I sent an email with an invitation for them to participate. You will notice how this helps in their loyalty and that they fall more in love with your brand.

 

• Select the winner

 

Once the participation time has passed, you must follow the terms and conditions established to select the winner or winners. Likewise, you must ensure that the process is 100% transparent and framed within the established conditions.

 

To select a winner in a giveaway:

 

• Take a test before the final choice.

 

Most of the tools used to select the winner allow you to do a post-draw test. This way, you can avoid mistakes and a bad experience with the contestant.

 

• Live stream

 

In this way, you will be able to increase your engagement on social media, thanks to the fact that you will have more connected users to see in real-time who the winners of the draw have been.

 

This moment will also be perfect for you to explain the characteristics of the gift if you wish. You can also explain where you can find the gift products if they are for sale in your online store. Also, besides explaining their functionality, explain what they are for, payment methods, etc.

 

• Post on social media

 

Regardless of whether you’ve decided to do the giveaway online or via live stream, we recommend that you post a post outlining the contest winners. In this way, everyone will be able to know who the winners have been, and the contest will have ended correctly.

 

As an additional tip, you can ask the giveaway winner to share on social media or tag you once they get their gift.

 

• Evaluate the performance of your giveaway

 

If there is something that we must not forget, it is that the way prizes are given away doesn’t end in the delivery of the final prize. On the contrary, we have a stage where we can measure the results.

 

As in any marketing strategy, this time, you will have metrics. This way, you’ll be able to measure the success of your giveaway marketing. Besides, they are related to your objectives.

 

So if one of your goals was to increase your social media following by 55%, that’s a variable you can add to your final report. If you don’t know how to start a social media report, an Excel template will be a good resource.

 

What application to use to make a giveaway?

 

As good news, we must say that there are many free applications you can to make a giveaway. They are very easy to use and will make this job easier for you to pick the winners without any hassle. Therefore, these are one of the most used and best-performing applications to make your giveaway quality:

 

• Random name picker.
• Google random number generator.
• Appsweepstakes
• Comment Picker.
• Draw2
• Simpliers

Blucactus, your ally in Digital marketing

 

Blucactus international marketing agency serves clients all over the world. Our specialty? The creation of web designs and SEO positioning in online searches. Our group of experts focuses on helping businesses and brands succeed in one of the most competitive sectors in the market, the digital world.

 

Blucactus will accompany you in every step that your brand takes. This goes from creating your business’s branding to the creation of content. Our focus is on supporting you with creating your website or the administration of your social media accounts.

 

Based in Toronto, CA, this online marketing agency seeks to strengthen your image as a brand and take it to the next level. Don’t wait any longer to get the help of the best specialists in digital marketing. Contact us now through our social media or website!

 

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