Let’s resolve this mystery right away: the answer is – yes!
It might be true that there is no such thing as bad publicity and that all publicity is good, but raising awareness about your brand in a positive way is what most small business owners aim for. Also, every wise entrepreneur would place their customers’ satisfaction to the top of their business priorities, which also includes gifts from time to time.
However, to make it enticing, you need to make them work for it, and perhaps the best channel to achieve this is through social media. Based on today’s standards of communication, they have the widest reach, so don’t disregard your brand’s social media profiles but instead, get more active. To encourage you, here are a few suggestions about how to organize a giveaway which will boost the interest for your brand and reward your customers at the same time.
Motivate customers’ creativity
To draw your present and prospective customers to participate in your online competition, you need to make them feel involved and valued. So, here’s a suggestion:
- Challenge them to post any content related to your brand – a photo or a video, and tag your social media profile.
- Create a gallery out of that content and allow other users to vote on the most beautiful, the funniest or the most original content.
- Award the winners with one or a few of your products, and make sure you make this move noticed.
This kind of user-generated content can have quite a positive influence in raising awareness about your brand – people creating the content will share it with their friends and followers on social media, which will result in an increase in the extent of your reach.
Collaborate with other brands
A prudent entrepreneur knows that partnering up can bring benefitsto both parties involved. One manner to go about these joint ventures is a loop giveaway:
- Post an engaging photo on your social media profile, and in the description instruct your audience to follow your profile, if they haven’t already, and like that particular post.
- Ask them to follow your partner’s profile and like a particular post and repeat the process on whichever profile that post directs them to
- And continue the loop until they return to the initial profile and post.
Regarding the gift, the best option is to go with something from each brand. To make it look more like a joint gift, you could use the services of professional promotional printing and send a special ‘thank you’ card. Besides cards, these experts can print brands’ logos on virtually anything, so you can also consider giving away an item containing all partners’ logos.
Organize a scavenger hunt
Scavenger hunts are contests which are a real treat for those who enjoy games. Make sure that the content is interesting enough for them to want to enter in the first place. This is how it goes:
- In order to enter the competition, the customers need to find a password which should then be entered on a particular link.
- The password can simply be a word, something related to your brand, but nothing too obvious.
- Avoid making it too complicated – consider placing the password on another one of your social media profiles.
Again, the key is for the scavenger huntsearch to be fun, so it is important to find the balance between interesting and difficult. You can then choose the winner randomly with the help of a software or give the reward to the first person who completes the search.
Spice it up with brand trivia
A competition such as brand trivia reveals the true fans of your brand and eliminates those with no interest. By starting a competition like this, you will make sure that only people interested in your products or the industry you are related to will participate, and not opportunists. You can do it like this:
- Make a quiz form and ask a question related to your brand’s history, logo or products. Alternatively, you can ask a mix of questions which are heavilyoriented towards your industry (e.g. fashion) and your brand at the same time.
- Depending on your questions, you can make it a ‘yes or no’ quiz, a multiple answer quiz or a ‘fill in your answer’ one.
For the loyal fans of your brand, the gift needs to be something which will reflect your gratitude and make such a strong statement that all customers know how much you appreciate them. This kind of attitude towards your customers can only result in more customers, once the good word about you spreads among their friends and social media followers.
