Social media marketing campaigns happen all year round, but they really ramp up in the summer. You know the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and people are in the mood to win free items – at least, that’s what business owners seem to think. People are pretty much always in the mood to win things, but that doesn’t mean that they are going to jump on your social media giveaway campaign.
Like everything else in the marketing world, there is an art to getting people super pumped about your giveaway. Luckily for you, our social media management team has a lot of experience with running these campaigns and have compiled a few helpful hints to help your giveaway be the talk of the town and blast off!
Know Your Goal
You have probably heard the saying that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” It is the law that marketers have to live by. Our every action is calculated to try to have a specific reaction. Knowing the end goal allows you to reverse engineer the campaign strategy and tailor every picture, caption, and hashtag to meet that target. That goal tends to be rather simple, ie. increase social media engagement, conversions, gather emails, or brand recognition.
Know Your Audience
Yes yes yes, we are a broken record on this blog. We preach knowing your audience because if you don’t your social media campaign or your marketing efforts and going to fall flat. Who is your businesses audience and what do they want to win? What do we want to get out of this campaign and what does our audience want to see from us are the two biggest questions you should be asking yourself.
Pro tip: make your giveaway match your brand. If you are a hip-hop magazine, giving away tickets to a country music festival is an odd choice. Knowing your end goal and knowing your audience will help make sure your giveaway is on point.
Less is More
Pick a social media platform (or two) and stick with it. You may have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and Pinterest but for the love of god, don’t try to promote your giveaway across all of them. That will cause you way more of a headache than it’s worth, become a strategizing nightmare, and could make your audience tune out rather than tune in. Pick one or two of your most active platforms and stick with it. On the less is more note, pick an action (or two) that you want your audience to take to win, that’s it. Gone are the days where we ask our audience to like the page, like the post, share the post, tag 5 friends and give us their kidney to win the contest. More than one or two actions and you are likely to lose people completely.
Tracking
Before you run your contest, you are going to have to decide on how you are going to track who is entering. There are apps that you can use to help you run your campaign and track entries, but they are a pay to play product, if you don’t have the money to put out for a subscription you are going to have to put in the time and effort to track your campaign. A simple way is to just take entrants and put their names into an excel spreadsheet and then when the time comes you can just pick a number to determine a winner.
There is so much more that goes into running a social giveaway campaign that we just didn’t have space to get into here. If you are thinking of running a contest give us a call and our social media marketing team will chat with you about how we can help your campaign takeoff!