Giveaway Ideas to Help You Win Customers and Promote Your Business

Have you ever come across a competition or a giveaway post on your favorite social media platform that lots of people shared, liked and commented on? We see this all the time which is why we thought we should share some insights and ideas of how to run great giveaways and competitions to promote your business. 

🎁 Giveaways are a great tool to gain new leads and promote your business organically. As a business owner or marketing manager, you are probably always looking for new ways to engage your existing customers and gain new ones. What you need to aim for is to get your potential customers, users or clients excited about your brand, product or service.

👉🏻 Did you know that over 34% of new customers are acquired through competitions and giveaways? Yes, that’s right! 34% is a lot, so utilising those in your social strategy is truly a great way to generate new traffic and gain potential customers. 👈🏻

Even though running competitions and giveaways create a lot of brand awareness, you should be mindful when you organise them. In order to have successful giveaway campaigns, you need to ensure your content will keep the attention of all the new potential customers coming your way. 

❗ You should also aim to keep your new customers loyal. ❗

In order to increase the loyalty of your customers, you can offer reward programs, coupons and special promotions. This is one of the easiest and most popular ways businesses tend to use when working on their customer retention and loyalty rates. 

Interested already? Keep on reading – we have outlined the two simple steps you need to follow in order to run successful giveaways and competitions. We have also included two useful and well-working ideas you could test for your business. Last, but in no way least, there is a little prize for those of you who reach the end of the article.

Step 1:

Our main advice when it comes to creating a successful giveaway campaign is to plan ahead.

👉🏻  How do you do this?
The best way for you to plan all your social activities is to create a content calendar. This will help you stay in line with all the activities you would like to do throughout the week, month or even the whole year. We highly recommend planning your giveaways and all your competitions in advance. You could also schedule your competition so you can ensure it will be posted on time. Planning and scheduling posts will help you avoid forgetting and it will also allow you to have an overview of all your social content.

👉🏻  How to plan effectively?
In order for you to be able to plan your content, competitions and giveaways ahead, we developed 24SevenSocial Publisher. In there you can use the Calendar option to schedule your giveaway posts ahead of time, so you can concentrate on the other important parts of running your business. 

Step 2:
After you have set up and posted your giveaway post, you will start receiving a lot of comments, messages, reactions and shares. You need to manage them the right way. Worry not – we also have a tool to help you stay on top of all the incoming client communication.

It is called 24SevenSocial Inbox. The best part about our Inbox tool is that not only do you know exactly what is happening with your giveaway, but it helps you monitor all existing conversations. To top it all up you can easily choose a winner with the “Pick a winner” functionality.

👉🏻  Why is this functionality so useful?
Usually, when you get to the part of the competition where you need to pick the winner, you have to look for a “winner picking generator”. Most of the free tools are very limited and you may need to either pay or use a few different ones. It is also advisable to post the winner picking process. This way people see your business is transparent and you have picked the person in a random draw.
With 24SevenSocial Inbox’ pick a winner functionality you get everything you need to draw a giveaway winner. It gives you the option to pick how many people can win, depending on the prizes and conditions of your giveaway. It is also really easy to make the draw and announce your winner/s.

👇🏻 We have prepared two giveaway ideas to help you promote your business better: 👇🏻

✔️ Giveaway Idea 1:

Sweepstakes

This is the most popular and quite simple contest to execute.
Each customer has a single chance to enter. They only need to take any action with your post. You could ask them to follow your social media accounts, share, comment, react or even create a lead magnet where people need to leave their email addresses.
You need to announce an end date of the giveaway – we see that it’s best practice to run competitions for no more than 3 days. At the end of the competition, you should announce the winner.

✔️ Giveaway Idea 2:

Quiz

Do you need some customer insight and a real overview of your business, or maybe an idea of what product or service people need from you? We all like to get some fresh ideas and who better to ask than your actual clients. What you can do to ensure you will grab their attention is to run a quiz competition. This will help you gather as much information as needed. You will then reward your customers’ participation with a discount on their next purchase. You could also offer a free service, or another incentive you find suitable. This is a win-win situation as you get the needed information as well as building a loyalty base of customers. Last but not least, they get something from your business as well.

😀 Great! You have created your content calendar plan, scheduled all the posts you definitely know should be there – well, your giveaway. You are also ready to pick the big winner.

So what’s in there for you, apart from getting a lot of engagement, traffic and new customers?

As promised, your prize is a free 14-day trial of 24SevenSocial’s Publisher tool. This will give you more than enough time to test the tool. You will also see how it can help your business grow and get your content ready for your audience.