Who doesn’t like free stuff? I mean, people LOVE free, and if the swag is high quality, even better! I’m that kind of person that always participates in giveaways and I have to say that I have been luckier than the average participant overall.
From my marketing perspective, I have seen how utilizing free social media channels such as Instagram has given us marketers the opportunity to gain more multicultural influencers and followers for the pages that we manage. There are so many options to gain followers and influencers interested in your content and products, let’s start with a simple and common strategy of giveaways. We recommend Instagram as due to its immense consumer popularity it makes it easier for brands to reach their multicultural social media giveaways objectives. These objectives are typically gaining new followers and allowing multicultural consumer the opportunity to try our clients’ products. Awesome, isn’t it?
For several of our clients in the beauty industry, we provide the service of ‘Surprise and Delight’ in which we send boxes or swag of our client brands latest products to multicultural influencers that we identify using OYE! Intelligence software. But, to support our social media profile that we use to connect with influencers, we conduct giveaways from this Instagram page: Rockinpost. The main objective when we run these giveaways is to gain additional multicultural influencers to in order to grow awareness for our clients’ brands and to be able to engage with these influencers for future campaigns.
From our experience over the past few years, here are a few tips to help you plan a fantastic Instagram giveaway campaign to support your marketing plan:
Plan Ahead
Plan ahead and take advantage of holidays and special occasions. Look for the most popular holidays of the year including Mother’s Day, Christmas, Halloween, Easter, etc. You can also consider the back to school period, seasons of the year, a popular trend or even to do ‘just because’ giveaways.
Create an Eye-catching Image
Once you have selected dates of the year that you’re going to conduct giveaways, make a theme! Instagram is all about cool imagery so use fun colors but keep your branding specs and include ‘Giveaway’ word in your art design. For Instagram, you should use the 1080 x 1080 image dimensions and always include a caption. Here are a few examples to review:
Be Specific
In general, a giveaway is a great way to grow your audience and expand your reach on Instagram. You don’t want to create confusion to your social audience and you will benefit from having a reliable reputation when it comes to giving away your products. That’s why I recommend being as specific as possible, but don’t forget to use attractive ad copy that includes a fun tone! Include components of the giveaway and requirements such as the following:
- Follow your page account requirement
- Like the post requirement
- Use of a hashtag requirement
- Tag a friend in the comments requirement
- How many entries are allowed per person
- How long the giveaway will be open for entry
- How many winners, and when winner will be announced
- Official rules and or terms of eligibility
- Referral to link in bio for more details (if applicable)
- Country limitation
Use Hashtags
If your brand has its own hashtag, use it! You can also create a new hashtag specific for this giveaway campaign and ask users to include it in their messages/comments. Hashtags will allow your page and your post to become more discoverable among social users as well. You can also integrate other hashtags related to your theme and contests. Additionally, if you want to reach multicultural groups, be sure to research hashtags that resonate with their ethnicity and/or in their primary language.
Let’s say you’re running a giveaway during back to school, consider using these hashtags: #backtoschool #schoolgoals #giveaway #giveawaycontest #giveaways #schoolhair #hairproducts #potd #swag #swags #freebies
Monitor Daily
Tracking your results will give you the opportunity to learn and optimize your future giveaways. You can also allocate a small ad budget to sponsor your post, but you will see that most of your entries are going to be organic and that’s the real magic of giveaways! They are free so it doesn’t require as much effort to generate traffic to your social media profile.
Engage & Choose your Lucky Winners!
Don’t forget to create Instagram stories to promote your giveaway, it’s fun and easy to do. You can even ask social influencers and/or bloggers you are connected with to spread the word of your giveaway.
Make sure to Like comments from participants and to always answer their questions promptly. When the day that everyone is waiting for arrives, announce your lucky winner(s) using a random generator tool. Comment on the original post and write to the winners via Direct Message (DM). Be sure to get all their details necessary and get that prize in the mail ASAP! Ask winners to post about their experience unboxing the prize as this typically makes for great content.
Track Results & Look for Influencers
You can begin to compare the insights from each giveaway to determine which prizes, messages and holidays resonate most and gain the best results. Tracking your results will allow you to have a better understanding of what your followers appreciate and create future giveaways based on this knowledge.
We haven’t finished yet! Something that has helped us identify new influencers is reviewing the profiles of participants to see who may be a good fit for other client campaigns. Once identified, we engage them by asking if they would be interested in receiving a ‘consolation prize’. Generally, they will consent, giving you the opportunity to obtain a relationship with these social influencers.
And there you have it. Use these tips to help guide your strategy for your next multicultural social media giveaways!
Contact Us about Running Giveaways for Your Brand or Working with Multicultural Influencers:
