A Guide To Instagram Giveaways

One of the best ways to grow your following, extend your reach, generate sales, and acquire customers is to run a giveaway on Instagram. Running Instagram giveaways can help your brand and business growth. However, it's vital that you know how to create a winning campaign. Without proper implementation, you'll be wasting your precious time and money with the giveaway. Here's our quick guide to creating a winning Instagram giveaway.

Step 1: Start with the Goal
Before you do anything else, you want first to define the goal of your giveaway campaign. Are you looking to grow your followers? Do you want to promote your products or services? Perhaps you're looking to generate brand awareness and extend your reach. Your goal will define how your campaign will be designed. For example, it makes sense to highlight the main feature of your product and offer a discount code if the goal of the campaign to generate sales.

Step 2: Choose the Audience and Appropriate Prize
The next step is to think about the target audience. You have to be clear on who you're trying to reach. For example, a beauty company may want to target women that are young adults. This audience should play a part in choosing the prizes. One of the reasons why some contests and giveaways fail is because the award isn't enticing enough to the audience. Make sure that the giveaway prize is something that people actually want to win.

Step 3: Decide the Entry Criteria
The entry criteria for your giveaway should be aligned with your goals. For example, if you're looking to grow your audience, you'll want to get people to repost your content and tag their friends. If you want to improve your brand, a good idea for entering the giveaway is to get people to submit their own content. Many brands have used this user-generated content approach with excellent results. Finally, decide on how long the giveaway will run for.

Note: Also make sure you follow Instagram's promotion guidelines.

Step 4: Create a Marketing Plan and Strategy
The most important part of your contest or giveaway will be the marketing. You can't expect your campaign to take off on its own. You have had a solid plan and strategy to promote the giveaway. The prominent place to start is to leverage your existing audience and traffic your website or blog receives. Here are some other ideas you can use:

• Create beautiful and visual posts that promote and explain your giveaway event.
• Buy ads on relevant sites. Banner ads tend to be very cheap and can be an affordable way to get things started.
• Find a non-competing partner to run the giveaway with. For example, if you're selling dog accessories, it might be smart to run the campaign with a company that sells dog supplements for extended reach.
• Reach out to influencers and try to work out fair compensation for helping you promote the giveaway.
• Use catchy hashtags for your contest. If you can get entrants to post the hashtag, it can result in buzz and catch on with other Instagram users.
• Craft follow up posts to remind users of the remaining days to take part in the giveaway.
• Step 5: Announce the Winner of Your Instagram Giveaway
• The final step is to announce the winner of your Instagram giveaway. This lets entrants know that your giveaway is real and is something to look forward to in the future. You'll also want to study the metrics of your campaign to optimize future giveaways. This is an excellent guide for tracking and analyzing the data.

This quick guide should help you create a solid Instagram giveaway campaign. Just make sure that you cover every step accurately so that you don't make mistakes when the actual campaign is launched. If you want to find out more ways to improve your social media marketing, check out our articles on social media marketing!