Growing a business is hard work – and it can take months, even years to get it to the point you want to get it. And it’s particularly difficult to promote your business effectively, to the right audience, when you don’t have a generous marketing budget.

That said, there are some tactics that you can try that can get you amazing results for your business, faster than you thought possible.

And one of those ways is through creating engaging contests that get people excited and, of course, engaged. Giveaways and contests can be very powerful tools – and they won’t break the bank either.

In this blog post, discover how to leverage giveaways and contests to grow your business.

We’ll be talking about:

• Why giveaway and contests are such powerful marketing tools and how exactly they can help your business grow
• Useful tips for creating awesome giveaways and contests for all kinds of platforms
• How to create awesome giveaways and contests for all popular platforms

Why you should incorporate giveaways and contests in your marketing strategy

When talking about giveaways and contests, I’ve used the terms “powerful tools” quite a bit; and there’s a reason for that: giveaways and contests when done right, can have a huge impact on your results.

And what’s even better is that you can achieve different goals with giveaways and contests;

• Grow your social media followers very quickly: a giveaway or contest will attract people who want to participate (or should I say, win) and will follow you as a results
• Boost your engagement: the possibility of getting a cool prize gets people to engage. Plus, if your goal is to boost engagement on social media, you can pick a winner from your post comments. That’s great for encouraging people to engage with you
• Grow your email list: giveaways and contests are amazing at boosting emails lists as you can use entry forms to get people to participate (and therefore provide incentivize them to subscribe to your list as well)
• Re-engage your leads: you could also create giveaways and contests exclusively for your email list. This is a great way to re-engage all of those leads and further nurture them into becoming paying customers

As you can see from the above, there are numerous marketing goals that you can achieve faster and more effectively, just by using giveaways or contests.

Here’s how to create awesome, high-performing giveaways and contests for your business:

What are your marketing goals?

Before you pick a prize and start putting together your contest, you first need to answer one all-important questions:

What exactly do you want to achieve with this giveaway/contest?

Having a specific marketing goal – and KPI (key performance indicator) – will allow you to craft a giveaway or contest designed specifically to help you achieve that goal.

To help you set a goal and KPI, consider your current business and marketing goals; for example, if you have a large list of subscribers but low open and clickthrough rates, then a giveaway or contest via email might be the perfect solution to re-engage all of these leads; or, if you want to boost awareness of your small business, then you can set up a giveaway or contest on Instagram (or any other social media platform you’re using) to help you reach more people and generate more followers.

Once you know what you want to achieve, the next step is to:

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to leverage #giveaways and #contests to grow your business with @easypromosapp #marketingtips” quote=”How to leverage #giveaways and #contests to grow your business with @easypromosapp #marketingtips”]

Pick an awesome prize!

Not just any prize will work – you need to think carefully about what you’re going to be giving away in this contest in order to maximize your results.

For example, choosing a generic that isn’t industry-specific (for example, something like an iPad or a Kindle) will likely attract a large audience, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right audience – i.e. your target audience.

It’s best to have fewer participants, but participants who are likely to want to buy from you.

In order to get more targeted participants, use something that is either something you sell (a product or service) or something that is highly relevant to your target audience and to your niche/industry. It can be a gift card, a product, a limited edition product or even an experience.

And now that you know both what you want to achieve and what you’re going to give away, you can start putting together your giveaway or contest:

How to create awesome giveaways and contests

Time for my favourite part: tools-talk!

Because you’re definitely going to need a tool in order to create awesome giveaways and contests as easily and as quickly as possible.

And one of my favourite tools for this is easypromos  – a content tool that lets you create giveaways and contests for numerous platforms (social media – Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube -, your blog, newsletter subscribers, etc.), as well as entry forms and coupons, promotional codes and discounts and even fun interactive games like quizzes, polls, photobooths and multiple-choice tests.

But it’s probably easier to just show you a screenshot of all the different apps you can set up with easypromos:

The tool offers pretty much any type of giveaway, contest and other related interactive content under the sun, so it’s perfect for showing you how you can create awesome giveaways/contests.

Remember those goals and KPIs we talked about earlier? Here’s where they come in handy: first, you need to choose which route you want to take:

• A giveaway on your social media: for example, on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube you can select random winners from a comment on one of your posts (therefore encouraging them to comment!) while on Twitter you can give your prize away to someone that’s following you or a user who retweets one of your tweets; or, you could even hold a multi-network giveaway
• Leverage entry forms to get contact information and generate leads: for example, create a sweepstakes contest using a registration form, create surveys and coupon codes and create contests where participants have to recruit their friends in order to increase their chances of winning
• Create a contest on your favourites channels: from photo, video and essay contests to “pick your favourite” contests, contests can help you boost awareness of your brand along with boosting your engagement
• And last but not least, games: interactive content like multiple-choice tests, quizzes and predictions (for example, “Who do you think is going to sit on the Iron Throne?” – although you might already know the answer by the time this is published!) are particularly great at engaging (and re-engaging) your audience, whether it’s on social media, on your website/blog or via email

Once you’ve created your easypromos account – which, by the way, has a free plan as well – select “create my first promotion” to get started:

I’ll create an Instagram Giveaway, in this case; once you’ve connected your Facebook account and selected the Instagram Business Profile you want to run the contest on, all you have to do is either select one of one of your existing Instagram posts for the contest or create a new one using a template.

Easypromos features numerous ready-made templates for each type of contest, as well as for all kinds of occasions (like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Valentine’s Day and so on):

And what’s really great is that they add new templates pretty much every week; for example, since this spring was undoubtedly Game Of Thrones season, there are several Game of Thrones-themed giveaways and quizzes to choose from:

If you choose one of the templates, you’ll also get both blurb and imagery included; all that’s left to do is customize it with dates, prizes and other relevant information that you can know:

And, as you can see in the above screenshot, you can easily preview exactly what your contest/game will look like once live.

If you don’t want to use a template but rather use one of your existing posts (as I mentioned earlier), it’s also worth pointing out that you can select up to 10 past posts if you want to include the comments in the giveaway and consider them all potential finalists; then, just click on “continue” to get to the next step:

If you’re going to use your own past updates (or a collection of several updates) make sure to hit the refresh button in order to import all the latest comments.

Next up, you can control who gets to be considered in your giveaway; you have several filtering options to exclude users:

For example, if anyone involved with your business has left a comment, you can easily make sure they’re excluded from the draw. Plus, you can exclude previous winners and blacklisted users, as well as require a minimum number of commented posts, a minimum number of characters in comments and even a minimum number of mentions in the comments, among other options.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to leverage #giveaways and #contests to grow your business with @easypromosapp #marketingtips” quote=”How to leverage #giveaways and #contests to grow your business with @easypromosapp #marketingtips”]

These options, of course, will vary depending on the type of contest you choose, as well as the social network you’re running the contest on (or networks, as you can set up multi-network contests).

Next up, you can decide how many winners you want your contest to have, as well as customize prizes for each one (if you so choose, naturally) and even select a number of alternate winners.

And that’s pretty much the whole process – your contest is good to go! But, if you want to make sure that things are definitely going to run smoothly, then you can easily set up a number of tests to check everything is running as it should.

Once you’ve tested your contest, you can easily pick the winners from within your easypromos dashboard; the system will automatically and randomly select the winners and alternate winners, as per your settings:

As for announcing the results of your contest, easypromos can help with that too:

In the above screenshot, you might’ve noticed that you also have the option to enable “claim your prize”; this then allows you to set up a page where the winners can claim their prizes and where they have to authenticate with their social media account, and an entry form where you can ask for the data you want in order to send them their prizes.

Plus, this will allow you to fully manage all the winners and check their status easily and quickly.

Oh, and another thing I really wanted to mention about easypromos is that they have a help live chat option that’s always up – so if you have any technical questions about the tool or any other question, you can easily ask the easypromos team and get a reply as quickly as possible.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”How to leverage #giveaways and #contests to grow your business with @easypromosapp #marketingtips” quote=”How to leverage #giveaways and #contests to grow your business with @easypromosapp #marketingtips”]

Conclusion

Contests are amazing tools for getting results quickly and effectively: whether you want more traffic to your website, more followers on social media, more conversions and sales or simply more brand awareness, contests can help you get those results much faster than you ever could organically. And when it comes to creating great contests and giveaways, easypromos is a great choice – an easy to use tool that allows you to create and manage giveaways, contests and games for pretty much any platform you want.

Do you use contests and giveaways to promote your business? Let me know in the comments section below and please share it you liked the post 🙂