Managing the stress and expectations of giveaway marketing

The value of giveaway campaigns for early stage entrepreneurs

Giveaways are a dynamic marketing tool for startups, offering a cost-effective method to increase visibility, boost brand recognition and grow a customer base quickly.

This is why so many giveaways are executed on social media–it makes it easy for your followers to share the giveaway with friends, leading to more entries and engagement for your efforts. Giveaways can also be used to gather user data and feedback. If you’ve ever been entered into a raffle for completing a survey, you’ve experienced this method of giveaway marketing first hand.

The costs versus benefit of giveaway marketing

Yes, giveaways have significant benefits for early stage entrepreneurs, but it’s important to understand and manage the associated costs. This can include the cost of prizes, shipping fees, subscription fees for giveaway marketing tools or the time, effort and money to run ad campaigns to promote your giveaway.

There’s also the potential cost to your brand’s reputation and the perceived value of your product or service. Discounting can be bad for your brand, teaching customers to wait for coupons before buying from your business. Giveaways can have a similar effect if you regularly include your product or service as part of your prizes.

When you think about the cost versus the benefit of giveaway marketing, consider both the tangible and intangible impact it could have on your business. In the end, all the pros of running a giveaway campaign shouldn’t come at the expense of devaluing your business.

Managing expectations while maximizing impact

Set realistic goals for giveaway campaigns

Set measurable outcomes for your giveaway, so you have a better sense of where to focus your attention, outside of driving contest entries. Do you ultimately want your giveaway campaign to bring in new email subscribers? Boost your social media engagement? Drive traffic to your website?

Consider these goals before you kick off your giveaway, so you can gauge whether or not a giveaway is actually the right marketing tactic to further your business goals.

Select prizes and incentives that don’t conflict with your product or service

We mentioned how discounts and giveaways can have a negative impact on the perceived value of your product or service. One way around this challenge is to select prizes that complement, rather than conflict with what you sell.

You might even consider prizes that have nothing to do with your brand, like themed gift baskets, gift cards for coffee and shopping or year long subscriptions to tools and services your ideal customer likes to use. The more desirable the prize, the more potential for higher engagement.

Make entering your giveaway as easy as possible

There’s nothing more frustrating than fielding questions about how to enter your giveaway, on top of keeping track of all the people with valid entries. Making it easy to enter your giveaway can increase your participation rate, without causing unnecessary work for yourself.

Giveaway campaigns can be a valuable marketing tactic for early stage entrepreneurs, but it takes more work than you might expect to plan, organize and manage a giveaway. These giveaway landing page examples from Leadpages show us the success that’s possible with a well planned giveaway campaign.