How to Promote your Giveaway or Contest

Promote your Giveaway or Contest

Are you looking for a way to generate more interest in your giveaway or contest? Do you want to make it go viral and gain the attention of many people? If so, then this article is for you.

In this blog post, we will talk about how to promote giveaways and contests effectively.

We’ll also discuss what steps need to be taken and where these promotions should be advertised.

Here are 7 easy steps to promote your giveaway or contest:

  1. Use the Right Giveaway Platform
  2. Promote It on Social Media
  3. Send Emails to Your List
  4. Blog About It!
  5. Reach Out to Bloggers and Influencers
  6. Run Paid Ads
  7. Promote Offline

Let’s jump right in!

1. Use the Right Giveaway Platform

The success of your giveaway or contest hinges on the platform you’re using.

You can’t just set up your giveaway on any app and expect it to go viral. Instead, you need to use one that provides you with all the tools and features to generate more participants and create a louder buzz about your business.

And what better platform out there for you to use than Woorise?

You can run various contests on the platform, from essential giveaways to social media-specific competitions, more evident for starters.

woorise giveaway and contest templates

If you’re a WordPress user, you’d feel right at home with Woorise because it lets you create your page from scratch using content blocks.

woorise dashboard landing page builder

You can also edit the form to add more options for users to join your contests and gain more points for better chances of winning.

Using its editor as the foundation for your giveaway or contest campaign, you should be able to create the best-looking contest you can muster.

As we progress in this post, it’ll become much clearer that Woorise is a superior solution for your giveaway needs.

2. Promote It on Social Media

Once your giveaway campaign is up and running, so should your efforts in promoting it, starting with social media.

Ideally, you want to publish numerous posts promoting it on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever your audience may be.

However, you must avoid posting the same message multiple times, as they will eventually fall on deaf ears. Instead, mix up your messages by posting about the days left before they can join your giveaway or talk about your prizes and how they can help make the lives of your followers much more accessible. By doing so, you provide them the necessary information about your giveaway enough to compel them to join.

Also, automatically sharing on these platforms lets you plot out your social media calendar for this campaign in one fell swoop. By scheduling the posts in advance, you no longer have to log in every time you need to share something about your giveaway on social media. At the same time, the time you saved in scheduling your posts in advance lets you focus on more pressing matters regarding your campaign.

When writing your posts, you must also include hashtags in each—mentioning relevant hashtags that people keep track of increases the visibility of your posts, thus allowing you to attract more participants to your contests.

While the steps above make promoting your giveaway on social media much more convenient, you must still put in the work to get the ball rolling. 

So, wouldn’t it be nice if your giveaway or contest promotes itself?

Using Woorise, you can do this by using its Viral share feature.

woorise viral share

Enter the bonus entries the participants will receive for each successful participant they refer to the contest using their unique link. You can also set a maximum amount of bonus entries to receive through referrals to prevent people from abusing the system.

This feature encourages participants to share your giveaway to increase their chances of winning. But, at the same time, they do your bidding because they promote the contest for your sake — it’s a win-win for both parties!

Woorise’s Share buttons also make it easier for people to share the giveaway on different social platforms. Just enter the message that will appear on the post every time they share it, so they don’t have to come up with words to enter.

3. Send Emails to Your List

Like social media, creating an email drip campaign for your subscribers before time runs out is another excellent way to promote your contest.

The fact that people signed up to your email list means that they’re at the very least interested in what you have to offer. And you can expect the majority of them to open your email and learn more about your contest or join it!

Unlike social media, however, you can’t send them daily emails about the contest as it will result in annoyed subscribers who will unsubscribe from your list instantly. Therefore, you need to space out your email and make every message count. Be as informative as you can about the giveaway, describe how the prizes can help them in their lives, and share what some of your audience think about the contest and the giveaways included.

If you don’t have a list of subscribers yet, you can start using Woorise’s built-in email features.

Whenever users join your contest, you can send out an automated email to their inbox regarding their entries. In addition, you can keep in touch with participants using Woorise via email until the contest has concluded.

By that time, it’s best to move the list of participants to your existing email list on a particular platform or tool. 

It’s better to start with that by integrating Woorise with other email marketing tools like Hubspot

Woorise integrations

You can create automated emails to participants straight from your email tool of choice. By doing so, you house all of your email campaigns in a single place for easy reference.

Also, whenever users fill out your giveaway form after connecting with your chosen platform, their details go straight to their email tool. As a result, you don’t have to enter their personal information manually, thus making managing your giveaway much easier.

4. Blog About It!

If you have a blog, you have perhaps the most effective platform for promoting your giveaway and generating the most participants when all’s said and done.

By leveraging on the many benefits of blogging, you can rank on top of Google search, get shared on social media, and garner more referral traffic from different sources for maximum exposure.

At the same time, there are many ways you can feature your giveaway in your blog.

To begin, you can publish a post advertising your giveaway. Write everything that people need to know about it, plus a link to your Woorise contest page. Then promote the post on the channels above like social media and email newsletters.

Besides linking to your contest page, you can embed the contest form on the post or any part of your blog. For example, you can paste the code in line with the content and make it appear on all pages of your blog. There’s also the option of embedding the form on your blog’s sidebar and make the form sticky so more desktop visitors can see it.

You can also show the form as pop-up boxes on your blog. You can set when the box will pop up on the screen — whether immediately after the page loads or before visitors leave the site.

Play around with the different ways you can feature your contest on your blog for maximum effect. You can even perform all of the suggestions above if you’re feeling lucky!

5. Reach Out to Bloggers and Influencers

The tactic above should help get the word out on the street about your contest and generate an ample amount of participants.

However, to make your contests go viral, you need help from bloggers and influencers who will broadcast your giveaway to their audience.

With thousands of daily visitors on their blogs and thousands of likes, shares, and comments on their posts, influencers are crucial to getting your contest kick into high gear and get all the press it deserves.

There are different ways you can reach out to influencers who will be more than happy to help promote your contest.

Influencer marketing platforms

You can join sites like Upfluence, TapInfluence, and other influencer marketing platforms find influencers who can help advertise your contest.

upfluence

These sites allow you to choose from a list of influencers to promote your giveaway to their audience. To decide which influencers to choose, you can look at the data you need to know about each influencer, from the number of followers across different social platforms to their engagement metrics.

Another intangible you must consider when choosing influencers is their tone and voice. Since each influencer has a specific way of engaging with their followers, you need their voice to match your brand. In addition, having the same brand identity and goals allow you to collaborate much more accessible and achieve higher conversion rates for your campaign.

The only downside of these platforms is the cost. Access to millions of influencers and metrics about each cost money. So if you’re serious about making a splash with your giveaway and contest, it’s hard not to go the platform route, especially if you have a budget set aside for this campaign.

Manual outreach

Reaching out to influencers outside of the platforms mentioned above is possible, but it’ll take a lot of your time and effort to get this done.

First, you must manually find whom you should target—research for their followers, website traffic, and other metrics. An easy way to do this is by using LinkedIn automation tools 2021 to put prospecting for influencers on autopilot.

Once you’ve identified the influencers, you need to build relationships with each one. However, you don’t lead off by asking them to promote your contest from the get-go — you must stroke their ego first by complementing their posts and talk to each one like you would with a real person.

The goal is to befriend them and get into their good graces before you can ask for their help in promoting your contest. Therefore, building connections with influencers before you launch your contest is much better.

This process will take much longer to complete because it depends on how responsive the influencers are and how long it’ll take before they get on board with promoting your contest.

However, this approach wouldn’t cost you anything as opposed to joining an influencer marketing platform. So, if you have the luxury of time, you can take this route instead. 

6. Run Paid Ads

If you’re serious about promoting your giveaways, you need to pull out the big guns by launching ad campaigns across different platforms.

You can bid for keywords on Google to show your campaign on top of SERPs or appear on social media in front of users that meet your target demographic.

Paid ads are perfect for running time-sensitive campaigns like giveaways because you can allot a certain amount for your campaign and analyze as you progress. You can make tweaks to it while the campaign runs to correct its course if you’re not getting the results you want.

Like joining influencer marketing platforms, launching an ad campaign is costly, especially if you’re bidding for expensive keywords. Suppose you don’t know how to throw a campaign properly, better to ask for an expert to help you out with this.

7. Promote Offline

Finally, you need to advertise your contest by resorting to offline channels.

This may seem counterintuitive since your giveaway can only be accessed online. However, promoting it offline allows you to extend your reach to people not connected to the internet at the moment. Examples of such situations are when your audience is in your local store or passing by the street near your store, during a conference or exhibit, network opportunities, and others.

If you find yourself in these situations soon, arguably the best way to market your contests is to print out QR codes or an easy-to-remember shortened URL that points to your contest page on print materials like business cards, flyers, posters, and others.

You can then display posters and flyers in your stores, hand out business cards during networking events, hand out brochures to people to step into your booth during an exhibit — the possibilities are endless!

You simply can’t write off offline strategies just because they’re not online. They open up more opportunities to make an impression on your audience if you implement them correctly.

Conclusion

There’s a lot that goes into a well-promoted giveaway or contest based on the step-by-step process above. However, if you want to separate your brand from the pack, following the tips above is worth more than the price you’re giving away to lucky winners.

Keep in mind that contests aren’t simply about the prize you’ll give away or the money you’ll invest in promoting them. It’s more about how many people become aware of your brand once all is said and done.

Some brands just can’t translate the magic of their contest to their business after it concludes. And the reason is that they weren’t able to build an audience from advertising their contest like the ways detailed above.

So if you have generated a few thousands of subscribers from the contest, then you’re off towards building a sustainable and successful business. Good luck!

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