Giveaways: How to Ignite Your Consumer Base

Also known as “limited time offers”, “fire drills”, and “while supplies last” promotions, giveaways aim to spark immediate action across consumers and drive brand awareness. Awarded on a first-come first-serve basis, they serve as a means to drive engagement, create awareness and keep your brand top of mind.

Before running any digital promotion, it is important to understand what digital promotion type is right for your goals. Consider the basic pillars of digital promotions as:

• Sweepstakes - A classic promotion type – by entering a sweepstakes users earn the chance to be selected as a prize winner at random.
• Instant Win Games - Instantly award consumers with smaller prizes. Instant Win games are great for driving repeat engagement. Users are randomly selected as winners as they play.
• Contests - Drive interaction with consumers by calling on user generated content submissions. Winners are selected by your brand via judging or voting criteria.
• Consumer Rewards - Directly reward consumer purchase behavior. Leverage receipt validation technology to verify purchase behavior and award prizes to eligible consumers.
• Giveaways - Spark immediate action with while supplies last promotions. Prizes are awarded on a first come, first serve basis to consumers.

When putting together a giveaway it is important to keep in mind three key areas of excellence:

• User Experience
• Prizing & Incentives
• Targeting & Methods of Entry

At Realtime Media we specialize in full-service support for digital promotions. Our in-house teams provide comprehensive and flexible support across development, project management, legal administration, player support, and fulfillment administration.

WHILE SUPPLIES LAST

By positioning limited quantities of prizes behind consumer-action you are creating a sense of urgency to participate. Unlike sweepstakes, that allows all entries an equal chance to win the prize, giveaway prizes are awarded on a first-come-first-serve basis. Immediate action is the name of the game

As previously mentioned, giveaways allow brands to spark high levels of engagement at a single point in time. With this short form engagement it is important to take two things into consideration:

• Do you already have an engaged user-base? Because of their short-form nature (only running as long as there are prizes remaining in inventory), giveaways work best when there is a pre-existing audience in place to broadcast the promotion to.
• Do you have a plan to continue engaging users after the giveaway? Since giveaways are typically short, it is important to think about how you’re going to engage your audience after the prizes are awarded.

Oftentimes, as a means to create repeat engagement with a giveaway, brands will run multiple giveaways as a part of a series. Using a single microsite to run consecutive giveaways, it allows users who may have missed a rewards period to have another shot at earning a prize and in turn re-engage with your brand.

Realtime Media’s PromoPick™ platform makes building and executing giveaway series easier than ever. Our quick-to-launch templates make it easy to get up and running and our flexible development options make it even easier to run a series of back-to-back promotions.

PRIZING FOR GIVEAWAYS

When looking to build the prize pool for your giveaway it is important to remember that it is the chance to win that is driving engagement. While sweepstakes and contests can leverage a single, grand prize to excite and activate users, with giveaways you're going to want to think small.

By using your budget to deploy a prize pool of lower-value prizes you can greatly increase the total number of users who can become prize winners. From the consumer perspective the chance to win is often a higher factor in participation than how high the prize value is.

Targeting & Broadcasting Your Giveaway

Some of the most successful examples of consumer engagement happen when a brand understands not only how to engage, but also where to engage consumers. As the attention of shoppers becomes harder to capture, going to the shopper, rather than expect shoppers to come to you, is key.

Leveraging social media with giveaways is a great way to bring your promotion right to the consumer. As seen through most of 2020, one of the most popular social media sites to target consumers through digital promotions is Instagram giveaways. According to Sprout Social, the average shopper spends 53-minutes per day on Instagram - creating plenty of touch points for brands to engage with consumers.

CONCLUSION

At Realtime Media, our ultimate goal is to help brands power engaging giveaways – with in-house teams supporting development, project management, winner administration, and fulfillment. We can guide your team through all phases, from navigating federal, state and local laws, to collecting email addresses, to prize notification.