What’s the most fun part about marketing? GIVING STUFF AWAY!!! Creating a solid giveaway marketing campaign can be tough sometimes. There are plenty of elements and variants from situation to situation. Well, I have good news. There are a few elements that exist at the core of every good giveaway campaign — and they’re not tough to implement. Read on:
Measurability
(Lame joke alert) What is a giveaway campaign without measurability? A raffle. You must be able to track what your audience is saying to you through your campaign in order for it to be a successful marketing campaign. There are many ways to do this depending on how and what you are giving away. I’d say the easiest way is to use a unique URL shortener like Bit.ly or Ow.ly that links to a splash page or home page. You might say in the contest rules “your blog post and/or tweet must contain this link ____”. These links are trackable, so you can run a contest based on a random drawing, or on the most RTs, or whatever you want — get creative.
Creativity
I’m not going to tell you how to be creative — that’s up to you. But here is a question/hint: What is your competitive edge? How and where do you connect with your fans/consumers better than your competitors? Take that place or method and exploit it through a giveaway. You will be in front of the largest portion of your fans in this place, and you will get the most responses. In the end, you want to build a campaign that rewards the biggest fan for their efforts.
The Prize
This might be obvious, but the giveaway must be relevant to your business in some form or fashion. I can’t tell you how many giveaway marketing campaigns I’ve seen where the giveaway item is some random thingamajig that only confused fans, and brought in participants who didn’t care about the brand at all. Moreover, this is an opportunity to bring your core fans in closer, and move fringe fans to core fan status. Get something that they all want more than anything, and be the only place they can get it. You have something like that — what is it? If you are a pop-art poster company, do a giveaway that is not only exactly what your audience wants, make it an exclusive item that you can only get through the gatekeeper … you.
Tracking
Tracking is different from Measurability; you must be the measurer and analyze what you set in place to be measurable. Use tools like Hootsuite or Google Analytics to track where your hits are coming from, and when they are coming. Analyzing when they are coming will give you insight into when your fans are watching. You can even track geographically to see where the majority of the giveaway participants are in the world. All of this information is infinitely important to your current campaign, and even more so all future campaigns.
A Call To Action
Your bread and butter, the call to action is what will put new eyes and ears on your brand. Leveraging social and viral tools here will help you spread the word through your fans, which brings in new fans. Shoot for RTs or blog posts that cover your stuff if you can. Call on your fans to do the legwork in promoting you and give incentives of something they all want — then over-deliver.
The Icing
You are almost finished. You’ve run an efficient and effective marketing campaign that has pleased your fans and given you immeasurably important data (see what I did there?). What will set you apart from the others is the icing, the bow, the special sauce. David Bazan did a giveaway that a friend of mine won last year. She recieved a signed copy of his record on vinyl and a hand-written letter thanking her for being a faithful listener and participating. They won a life-time fan in that giveaway, not to mention all of the important data about what his fans want – if they did it right – in the process. Be sure you have some icing.
Do Giveaways
Giveaway marketing campaigns are important because they please your fans, they are fun, and the incentive value delivers information that is extremely valuable to your efforts from then on on out.
My Call To Action
Create a giveaway campaign. Go create an interesting giveaway campaign and email, comment, or tweet me the results! Tell me what went on and how it worked. Send me feedback on how these points helped (or hurt) if you want.
Thanks for reading, it’s always a pleasure to have you. Friend me on Twitter and Facebook; lets talk for fun, too. Don’t let me do all the talking. Have a wonderful day!
I love the idea of giveaways. But sometimes when you are at a small level as a band it is tough to really bring out incentives for powerful campaigns. For instance, our band will have merch(1-2 shirts), our album, and maybe some stickers. And it seems like giving our album away is kind of out of the question because that is like giving our most valuable/meaningful item and if you give that away why would they pay money for the damn sticker? Ya know? So we are left with giving away stickers or shirts. Which is still tough because we are so small we need the shirt money and do stickers do anything? really? I wonder if using our core fans for this type of purpose would be more beneficial. By exclusively offering our shirts AT COST to our core members we can get them to do the “leg work” for us in marketing while being “band fashionable”. But that is kind of in a another direction. One thing that we have tried in the previous months is giving away one free track about 2 months before our cd release show. And although it didn’t give us more email addresses or other useful tools for future use it did create more hype for our album release which ended up selling out. Now the problem with that tactic is that there is no trackability (excuse my make-up words). This Christmas we decided to give away three live tracks. Who knows what that will do for us but it will at least keep us moving and our fans believing that there isn’t a lull.
Thanks for the comment, great question. That is a very common question and it’s a tough one to crack. Giving away and/or selling things at cost to your core fans is a good idea, it might work it’s way into a street team that will help bring in new fans. All of these are good options if you can afford it.
But I’d challenge you to think of this in a new way that’s not commodity or merch focused. You have other resources you are not considering:
Time, talent, and relationships. From what I’ve seen it seems you have a pretty solid core of fans who’d love to be a part of something interesting. How about a house show giveaway where the winner gets a house show, recorded by a laptop and burned for them at the end of the night – one of a kind. It could be measurable in that you enable your new street team to gather email addresses for you, most adresses wins. This would require some more thought and hammering out but it gets to the point I’m making.
Maybe you could make a one of a kind piece of merch for the hardest working street team member.
I’d say you set up a large show, print a TON of posters, have your ‘street team’ hang them around town taking pics of the ones they hung and sending them to you (as well as tweets and fb messages). That winner get’s a house show, and your large event gets some great marketing.
Shoot me an email and we can dig into this together! Thanks again for your comment. Have a great day!
also wondering what bit.ly and ow.ly are…
Oh, sorry I should’ve clarified that. if you just punch those into your browser they will take you to a site that is a “link shortener”. So if you ever see a link like this: http://ow.ly/3AurF, you know it’s been shortened. (click that shortened link to go to ow.ly). The cool thing about shortened links, is when you are tracking hits to your site or whatever you linked to, you can track how many people clicked through this specific link. As opposed to your sites URL which could’ve been placed anywhere. This link is unique and fully trackable because of it. Make sense?