The holiday season is at its peak and taking advantage of Christmas sales is not creepy at all. You just need to adapt some savvy marketing tactics like giveaways and viral contests to grow your business this Christmas.
Witty start-ups are taking advantage of the boom of mobile technology and social media to reinvent tired business models while existing brands such as Amazon and ETSY are aiming to target the millennials with wearable technology.
Think again if you think that such creativity is just the realm of nimble start-ups or major brands. It is equally a case of innovation for small businesses and newly launched e-stores, with mobile disruption spreading into the business industry.
This Christmas you can uplift your sales using social media pages by running viral contests and giveaways.
The trend towards Christmas or occasional giveaways and viral contests represent a huge opportunity for small online businesses to grow their very audience right up to the last minute and this will eventually increase your sales.
But only businesses with the right technology in place will be able to take advantage of this.
What is a Giveaway?
A giveaway is an act or an example of giving away something. The giveaway, especially a gift or premium is given with every new subscription to a magazine or a page. People often run them to increase their followers and to increase brand awareness.
You run a contest or give a gift to the person who completes the task. Running a giveaway is always an excellent strategy for someone trying to reach a new audience, engage their followers, generate leads, and drive an effectively infinite array of powerful acts that will help you achieve success and achieve your business goals, no matter what industry you work in.
How do Giveaways and viral contests work?
This Christmas, you can run a giveaway on your social media page like on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. This is how people run giveaways on Instagram. They will ask you to follow some steps like reposting their post in your story, tag a few of your friends and like your posts, etc.
How are you nurturing your viewership?
People do not like to buy from new brands; they prefer buying from personal recommendations.
And how do you get your brand referred to and recommended by people?
This method of discovering and cultivating the traffic into raving fans usually includes:
- Creating advertisement traffic, content blogging, organic social posting, etc.
- Capturing the email address for that traffic and retargeting them
- Bringing up the leads.
- Eventually, after weeks, converting the person with email or followup
The ‘Prize’ should be worth the efforts
A list of things you need to remember when choosing your contest or giveaway award for Christmas sales is below.
- Is it attractive and unique? If they miss out on this once in a lifetime chance, would people be upset?
- Are they shareable? A clothing store, for instance, could give away $1,000 store credit or they might do a personal shopping spree. The winner will be fitted, sized and styled and it would be very special. What one do you think is easier to share?
- How precious is the prize? If the grand prize was a $5 phone case, you wouldn’t share a contest with your buddies, but you would put in the effort to make the prize a personalized phone case and headsets. It doesn’t have to be a value either you want a high perceived value to be targeted at.
This Christmas, run viral contests with giveaways
Instagram competitions in a short period of time and with little effort will help you maximize your follower count.
Of course, there are other ways to gather more followers, but to raise brand awareness; you want to use every instrument in your arsenal.
Contests on Instagram will also help you gain more engagement.
Compared to standard’ content, posts related to Instagram contests appear to receive around 64x more comments and 3.5x more likes.
Best practices for running Instagram contests and giveaways
You need to be aware of some major best practices before you run your first contest.
Failure to understand these best practices may mean you’re going against Instagram’s guidelines.
It could also lead to lackluster results being generated by your contest, which can equate to a lot of wasted effort.
But what are the best practices like these?
The first is to ensure that a consistent and thorough outline is written for your contest.
When writing your content outline, make sure to cover:
- Set the RULES
- The ELIGIBILITY criteria
- Any LIMITS on who is eligible to join
- The PRIZE
- DEADLINE for the contest
- When the winner is revealed
Doing it this way makes it easier for you to remain on the right side of Instagram’s promotion guidelines. Some of the pretty Giveaway ideas are discussed below:
List of some contest and giveaway ideas to cater more
1. Invite by a tag
Ask your existing followers to tag a friend in the comment section or you can ask them to follow your page.
They can enter the competition and become eligible to win the prize.
This contest format does a fantastic job of expanding the organic scope of your profile.
That’s because they’ll actually get a notification until people are tagged by others.
These individuals will then search your profile and probably become a follower.
Instead of asking people to tag someone randomly, you might recommend that they tag someone they think deserves to win instead.
The winner of the contest for this type of format would be the person who has been tagged, and not the person who left the original comment. Follow us on social media. View our last video and follow the steps.
2. Repost and win
On Instagram, you can run giveaways that enable users to repost the giveaway announcement on their own feed.
Just make sure you have them add a defined hashtag and tag you in the post so that you can track entries.
For Christmas holiday sales, this is a perfect way to attract a wider audience to your brand and competition, build visibility, and kickstart customer relationships.
The downside of this form of the giveaway is that constant reposts can seem spammy, and Instagram does not actually have a native way of reposting images.
3. Like and comment to win
The simplest form of giveaway that you can run on Instagram is one that users can join by liking your message, following you on Instagram, and tagging a comment with their friends.
These are all fantastic ways to increase interaction, grow your followers, and introduce your brand to a wider audience, of course.
4. Selfie contest
You ask people to post a picture of themselves with a selfie contest while they use your product, or with the product in the background somewhere.
This contest format is particularly useful for a company because it helps to teach potential customers how to use a product. It’s a great type of content created by users.
Create a distinctive hashtag while writing the description for a selfie contest and then ask people to use this hashtag if they share their images.
By looking for the hashtag on Instagram, you will find the photos people have submitted for this contest.
Select the photo that you feel is best at the end of the contest.
5. Run Challenge Contest
A challenging contest will work wonders if you are in a place where you need to put together a contest in a short period of time.
In this competition format, you only need to come up with a simple challenge for individuals to face, and the individual who solves the challenge wins.
There’s no need for the challenge to be complex. In reality, simpler competitions usually attract more social interaction and involvement.
6. Voting contests
You can try posting a series of photos to Instagram and have users vote on their favorite in the comments for a chance to win a small reward if you want to get some quick reviews or just improve interaction. You can get your audience to vote on something specifically relevant to your brands, such as their favorite product or variant, or something more abstract like a desired holiday destination.
Some more Giveaway contest ideas for Christmas Sales:
There are many more contests that can be run over the Instagram platform or any other social media platform to boost sales before Christmas.
You can run a hashtag contest, comment and win a contest, follow and win a contest, post a photo contest by asking them to share a picture on Instagram or Facebook with your product and Instagram holiday hashtag related to your page.
You can even run contests in collaboration.
Collaboration contest increases your customer base because more the organizers more will the participants.
Giveaways can be used to push many useful acts, but there might be none that is quite as powerful as a fan-made content generation. There are many kinds of content that can improve your promotional efforts.
What results you should expect from Giveaways and contests:
Contests are viral and have the potential to generate traffic, leads, and social media followers, as described above. You will have to plan your contests accordingly if you want to accomplish one or more of these goals.
Some examples of contest goals are here:
- Boost social media followers
- Increase your website traffic
- Generate potential leads
- Grow your email subscribers
- More clients, more sales
Wrapping up:
Each industry has a peak season of its own. For many e-commerce vendors, Christmas is the busiest time of year, Easter sees a massive increase in chocolate sales, and Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day are popular for florists.
If there is a holiday that suits your product’s increased interest, then running a giveaway is a perfect way to capitalize on the increased interest to attract attention to your product and push action.
You can drop a comment if you have any crazy giveaway ideas or if you have already run a contest on your social media then do let us know how it went.
So, Happy Holidays!
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