So you’ve read our Guide to the Different Types of Influencers, and found yourself the perfect influencer to promote your product/service and help you achieve your desired goals – great! Now you need to consider what type of post you want them to share. Giveaways with influencers are a fantastic way to drive engagement, but they can be daunting if you’re new to the game. We’ve made it simple for you! Just follow these tips and you’ll be on your way to a great giveaway in no time.
Why should your brand do giveaways with influencers?
We all love a good freebie now and then (go on, admit it! You’ve entered a giveaway or two on Social Media). Be it ‘tag your friend to enter’, ‘comment your best caption for this photo for a chance to win’, or anything in-between, giveaways are all over Social Media, and people love them.
The benefits of giveaways aren’t just for the winner, though. Giveaways can help rapidly grow your brand awareness, engagement, and even sales.
Of course, the nature of an ‘influencer’ means that they already have a large and/or dedicated following. By collaborating with an influencer, your competition will attract more attention than if only posted on your brand’s platforms. Put those two things together, giveaways + influencers, and you’re likely to see a big result.
The result you get depends hugely on what the giveaway entails, i.e. if you’re asking users to follow your page to enter, share your page, like the post, subscribe to your newsletter, etc.
Choosing the Nature of the Giveaway
When considering what it is you want your giveaway-entrants to do for a chance of winning, your overall goal is going to be the deciding factor. If you want to generate brand awareness or reach, asking users to repost the picture on their story or tag friends is a great way to do this. Are you after growth? Then it’s a good idea to ask entrants to follow your page for an entry. If you want to generate actual sales, then depending on the nature of your product or service, subscribing to your newsletter could be the way to go. It’s important to note, however, that boosting brand awareness/reach/growth also has the potential to result in more sales in the long-run.
Which Platform Should I Run The Giveaway On?
It may be easier to run giveaways with influencers on a single social media platform, but many brands now use multi-network giveaways. Statistics show that 41.6% of giveaway organizers run the giveaways across multiple social networks as a way of satisfying all of their online communities; You don’t want anyone to miss out on a chance at your freebie just because they don’t have Instagram. However, this will largely depend on the influencer you’re working with. If the influencer is hugely popular on Instagram, but not on Facebook, then it may make sense to run the competition on Instagram alone. If conducting a multi-network giveaway, Facebook and Instagram are the most common platforms to do so.
Pre-Giveaway Set Up Tasks
Before you go ahead and launch your giveaways with influencers, you’ll need to establish how long they will last, and what exactly it is you’ll be giving away. This will depend on the product/service that you offer. If your product/service is particularly obscure, too expensive to give away, or impossible to giveaway for another reason, consider giving away a voucher or something general that everyone will want.
You will also need to consider how long you want the giveaway to last – too long and people will forget all about it, but too short and you may not get many entries. A month is a great starting point. Once you have more experience running giveaways, you can decipher what length of the is optimal for your brand specifically.
It is also worth establishing some benchmarks before the launch. Create a document with your benchmarks to track, such as the current number of likes you have on your social media platforms, the current amount of traffic you having coming to your website, etc.
Another crucial pre-giveaway task is to ensure any landing pages involved in the giveaway, as well as your social platforms themselves, are in perfect order. Executing the perfect giveaway with an influencer is redundant if the entrants can’t actually access the relevant areas of your website, or if your social feeds are unappealing. A giveaway is a great supplement to your brand, but it shouldn’t be the one-and-only factor for kicking your brand off in the social sphere.
After the giveaway is successfully done and dusted, you’ll want to do something with what you received throughout the giveaway; This is something you must consider before going ahead with the giveaway. If you want to receive lots of follows on Instagram, how will you make use of this? Will this be by posting engaging and eye-catching content? Then you will need to plan this in advance. If you want to receive lots of email sign-ups, make sure your email marketing strategy is in tip-top condition.
Whilst Running the Giveaway…
Once your giveaway has launched, we suggest posting about it on your own platforms, rather than solely on the influencers socials. You can direct your followers to enter by heading to the influencers page by posting about it either organically or via a promoted post.
If your giveaway involves the possibility of multiple entries per user, it’s a great idea to send out reminders throughout the giveaway to entrants to come back and enter again. You can do this by either posting about it on your brand’s socials or agreeing with the influencer beforehand that they will promote the giveaway again on a certain date. For example, through the means of an Instagram story, you can remind users to come back for another entry.
After the Giveaway
Depending on your brand, you might want to shout out about the winner online. If the winner is okay with it, you could post a picture of them looking ecstatic with their prize. This would likely be done on your brand’s platform, though, not the influencers. This is a good way of developing a sense of community with your brand and its followers.
So there you have it! Running giveaways with influencers is a lot easier than it may seem. If this is still an area you want assistance on, why not reach out to us at Giraffe Social Media? We have lots of packages so we can create a service most in-line with your needs, check them out here.
