Lead Generation Secrets: Using Giveaways to Build Your Brand and Expand Your Audience

Welcome back to our third edition of the "Automate Your Hustle" Newsletter!

This week, we're exploring an exciting strategy that can significantly boost your brand's visibility and lead generation: giveaways. While giveaways are a fantastic tool for engaging audiences, managing them manually can be fraught with challenges, such as difficulty in tracking leads, potential for fraud, and missed opportunities for building a valuable email list.

By integrating automation tools into your giveaway campaigns such as UpViral, you can streamline the entire process, ensuring that every participant is properly accounted for, reducing the risk of fraud, and efficiently capturing essential data that turns entrants into lasting connections.

Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or new to the business world, understanding how to smartly execute a giveaway with the help of automation will amplify your marketing efforts and drive real results.

Every business needs sales to survive, but unfortunately it is getting harder and harder to convince people to buy a product the first time they see it or visit your website. True brand exposure is getting harder, especially for smaller companies who are competing against others with bigger marketing budgets. To go from the first exposure to the sale usually requires 4-7 touch points.

One solution to this is using viral giveaways, which are used to incentive the behavior of sharing and increasing the exposure of your brand to get that introductory touch point with little effort and keep them looped into your product or services by adding them to your email list for future marketing campaigns.

What Are Viral Giveaways All About?

"Giveaway marketing" is a process whereby a particular company runs contests in which something valuable is given to a selected winner as an award. In this situation, customers can enter your contest without paying anything in exchange for providing their data, which is usually their email address.

A viral giveaway works like this:

1. John has a phone store and decides to giveaway a phone in order to incentivize people in signing up to his email list so they could get his weekly deals.
2. Then Kelvin signs up and provides his email and this qualifies him to win a phone.
3. On the confirmation page, Kelvin gets a unique link to share to his family and friends through his email or social media.
4. As his friends and family sign up to win their own phone using his (Kelvin) own unique link, he gets additional entries.

As you can see, using this method allow for 1 entrant to refer a whole lot more people!

Why You MUST Run a Viral Giveaway

There are many benefits attached to running a giveaway especially when carried out effectively. The return on your investment is beyond what you can achieve for years without running one. Below are some of the reasons you must consider running a giveaway:

• Grow your Network: ?As a small or thriving business owner, you want to build your network because the more your network, the more sales you can make. There is no better way of growing your network than by running a giveaway. Build your email list today by investing in giveaways.
• Generate leads: Giveaways allows you to grow leads in your business. Furthermore, it also brings about more email list subscribers. If you are looking for the best lead generation secret weapon, you have one in giveaways.
• Save money: No business owner wants to spend money without seeing a profit. While other marketing strategies may be expensive, running a giveaway is cost-effective and an inexpensive marketing strategy to employ for your business. All you require is a budget for the giveaway prize, your marketing process, and the time to spend in managing the entire process.
• Social exposure: Custom entries can make your contests extremely powerful in building more than just emails. (Ask questions, get social likes on posts, drive traffic to blog posts & much more!)

What is Required to Run a Viral Giveaway?

Before deciding on using giveaways to explode your growth, you must have the right tools. Without the right tools, you are merely investing your resources in an open pulse that has leakage. There are two important tools that will help you in your quest to gain more lead in giveaways.

• Landing Page: The importance of a landing page cannot be overemphasized. You may already have a landing page on your website. However, you need a dedicated page where the deadline and prize of the contest are clearly stated. You will need basic information about your company and what you deal in to be stated boldly. Additionally, the page must have a place where contestants will input their email
• Contest Software: In order to facilitate the sharing, you will need contest automation software such as UpViral that is designed to track sharing and points accumulation.
• Email Service Provider: You need an email service provider in order to collect, store and send emails to those who inputted their email during the contest. It is imperative to integrate your landing page with such email service provider, which gives an avenue for contestants who sign up for the giveaway to become subscribers.

How to Set Up a Viral Giveaway

• Select a prize relevant to your business: This is very important because some business owners select prizes that don’t make sense. For instance, imagine a shoe company giving toothpaste as a giveaway to buyers. Importantly, your prize must complement what you sell to enable your giveaway entries to align with your business. When selecting a price, it must meet the criteria of being relevant, tangible, and affordable for your contestants.
• Plan Your Outreach: As important as selecting a prize relevant to your business, planning your outreach is extremely important if you want to explode the growth of your social engagement. In this stage, you have to contact other influencers asking for help in promoting your giveaway. The best option is sending out emails to your friends in the same industry. Remember to reciprocal the favor when required.
• Take advantage of your present audience: It doesn’t mean that because you have someone’s email, you will not leverage that contact. The best place to start your giveaways is by leveraging your social media and email list. Peradventure you already have some passionate fans, email them using a personal message because they can either make or mar your giveaway. Interestingly, they may know others and may share your giveaway with their friends and family.
• Launch: We have come to the easiest step, which requires you to hit the launch button by sending out all your outreach emails, posting to all your social media, and blasting your email list with your giveaway. You don’t have to waste time during this step because it is all pre-planned before deciding on your giveaway.
• Manage your entries: Once your giveaway builds momentum, it’s time to separate the chaff from the wheat. Now look at the different emails, their source with most referring traffic, and find other influencers or sites to reach out.
• Continue promoting your giveaway: It is better to begin with a media spend when you want to use a giveaway. This allows you to get things rolling and bring your giveaway to the right audience. Additionally, you can use goals or pixels to keep track of signups when using a paid media channel. Normally, you can start by publishing ads on Facebook, Twitter or other social sites. Furthermore, there are other means of promoting your giveaways, which include banner, pop-ups, emails, and incentive sharing.

Traps to Avoid During Viral Giveaway

• Becoming too self-promotional when promoting your brand, product or services
• Not promoting the giveaway as you ought to. The first 1-2 weeks requires massive work
• Giving prizes not relevant to your industry

Case Study

Recently, I assisted a client in the education coaching space to execute a giveaway that remarkably garnered over 9,000 leads! Not only was the campaign profitable, but it also significantly boosted the client's brand visibility and engagement rates.

The key to success was offering a high-value prize that resonated with the target audience and executing a robust promotional strategy that maximized reach and participation.

In Closing

Using viral giveaways is not only a reliable way of growing your social engagement; it also minimizes the cost of building your email list. When it is properly done, it can help you gain many leads in a matter of few days. With your marketing and follow-up systems in place, you can now work towards converting those leads into regular customers.

Are you considering a giveaway for your business, or have you run one before? Share your experiences or questions in the comments below. Let’s discuss how giveaways can become a part of your winning marketing strategy!