Giveaway: Common Mistakes to Avoid

Ensure the success of your campaign by avoiding the costly mistakes that most businesses make

Hosting a giveaway gives you a great chance to increase brand awareness, generate authentic content, and boost your sales. However, it can accomplish the opposite when it’s not well planned and executed. If you fail to deliver on the promises, your brand will get dragged online. And if you don’t comply with the legal compliance requirements of each country you operate in, you may end up facing huge fines, legal issues, and bad publicity.

The key to running successful prize promotions is having the right foundation, and avoiding various common giveaway mistakes will push you in that direction.

🎯Failing to set clear goals and strategies

If you don’t plan your giveaway well, you can easily end up with wasted resources and disappointing results. The first thing you need to do is define what you want to achieve with the campaign.

Is it increasing brand awareness, promoting a new product, or growing an email list? Are you looking for potential long-term customers or first-time entrants, and how will you measure the success?

Having this information is crucial as it helps shape the campaign. For example, if you need to create an email list, you should make signing up for a newsletter a key requirement. If you want to boost engagement, then you need to focus more on user-generated content.

🧩Having complicated entry requirements

If participants have to jump too many hoops to be eligible for the draw, they may lose interest before completing the process. While you may want to increase the value you get from basic participation, you need to balance this with simplicity. Don’t frustrate potential customers or make them worried about the amount of data you are collecting.

To avoid complicated requirements, focus on the goal of the campaign. If you are looking to boost sales, encourage participants to visit your website and create an account. They don’t need to follow several accounts, tag multiple friends, or watch a video. Also, ensure that everything participants need to do is mobile-friendly.

🎁Offering irrelevant prizes

The prize on offer is one of the most crucial aspects of the campaign. If it’s not attractive, desirable, or relevant to your target audience, the campaign will fail.

For example, offering the latest iPad can get everyone excited and encourage them to join your giveaway. However, if you are a skincare brand, this will attract the wrong audience, so your campaign won’t have a meaningful long-term impact.

Instead, you should offer an assortment of your products. However, you should also ensure that the prize is exciting, so offer your best products. This way, you’ll attract customers who have the potential to buy even when they don’t win.

📣Failing to sufficiently promote the contest

Even the best-planned prize promotions can fail if people don’t know about them. While it may seem obvious to promote any campaign, most businesses assume that by simply posting about free prizes, the campaign will immediately generate the desired engagement.

This still works, but it may restrict you to a smaller circle. One of the key targets of giveaways is to reach new audiences, and promotions are the way to do that.

Start by using multiple social media platforms instead of focusing on one. You can then incorporate paid ads and email marketing. As one of the requirements, have participants share your post with their audience, which will help reach a new audience as the chain continues.

Apart from that, partner with influencers and micro-influencers. These people have a religious following, and using them is one of the most effective social media marketing strategies. They’ve built trust and an audience over time, so they’ll give you credibility and help reach a wider audience.

🌍Ignoring legal compliance requirements in different countries

One of the common and costly giveaway mistakes is failing to comply to legal requirements. To be fair, it’s a bit tricky as the laws change from one country to another, and in some cases – such as the US and Australia – one state to another. It’s important to remember that each region you want to operate in has its rules around entry, prizes, and taxes. If you don’t comply with all these, you may end up being shut down or facing legal issues.

If you are running international prize promotions, ensuring legal compliance can be a bit hard to do, but you can partner with legal experts or an international promotion agency to ensure your campaign is fully legal.

Ready to take your giveaway to the next level? At Promosfera, we can help you navigate the complexities of local and international giveaways, ensuring maximum engagement and legal compliance. Our expertise will set you up for success from the get-go!