Are you a new business owner who is looking to improve your sales, traffic, and user engagement? If so, you’re not alone. There are plenty of options to choose from when reaching out to your target audience, but giveaways are becoming increasingly popular.

Online giveaways encourage consumers who may have never heard of your brand to enter your event for a chance to win a prize. This marketing tactic is used to re-engage current subscribers as well as spreading brand awareness.

Let’s look at four tips to keep in mind before you create an online contest. These tactics are designed to help you reach your target audience and boost engagement on your website.

Encourage Sharing for Increased Engagement

Have you noticed a significant spike in your social media engagement and website traffic? If so, a well-planned contest can help you improve your numbers. You should establish a timeline for your contest as well as rules.

For instance, how will consumers enter the event? If you want to see more engagement on your social media channel, you should encourage users to share your post and tag three of their friends. Odds are, these people will tag individuals who may have shown interest in your brand.

When you encourage social sharing, your event has a snowball effect. As more people share your contest, more consumers are exposed to your brand and browse your website’s blog and storefront. You’ll slowly begin to build organic traffic centered around an audience who cares about your industry.

Pick a Relevant Prize

Your prize has a significant impact on the type of people who enter your contest, as well as overall engagement. Let’s say you run an eCommerce store that sells computer parts. If you hit social media with an online contest where you’re giving away a 50 dollar Amazon gift card, plenty of people would enter even if they have no interest in your brand.

The result is you may get way more eyes on your business, but the lead quality will suffer. You can encourage your target audience to enter your event by offering a prize that’s relevant to your brand and industry. In our previous example, a new PC graphic card as a prize would get far fewer participants, but these people are more likely to fit your customer personas.

You can take this information and retarget the consumers that entered but didn’t win with a special discount for participating in the event. Because the consumers are in line with your target audience, there’s a good chance they will take you up on your offer and buy something from your business.

Work with Influencers

Influencer marketing plays a significant role in promoting and your contest and spreading brand awareness. Essentially, influencer marketing is when you work with a content creator on platforms like YouTube or Instagram to expose your content to the audience of the internet personality.

The critical decision you’ll have to make before working with an influencer is deciding whether their target audience and values align with your own. Let’s revisit the eCommerce computer parts store for an example. If you wanted to show everyone that you have an event where you’re giving away a custom gaming PC, you would want to work with influencers in that niche.

Odds are, people watching health and fitness personalities won’t care about your custom PC. If you promote your contest with a YouTube personality that reviews tech, their target audience is much more likely to care about your promotion.

Analyze Results for Future Giveaways

Finally, don’t forget to use the data from previous giveaways to strategize for future events. Your Google Analytics data and social media reports can give you some insight as to what consumers like about your contest, how often they entered, and what you can do to get more relevant participants next time you host a giveaway.

A successful business owner is always willing to learn from past ventures. When you have all of the data at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions about contest times, rules, and announcing winners. As you host more events throughout the year, you’ll start to learn what consumers expect from your events, which can further improve the success of your contests.

Conclusion

Online contests are one of the best ways to grow your social media following, engage subscribers, and boost your sales. You’ll want to split test different contests and analyze the results for more interactive and engaging contests.

Factors like time, prizes, entry method play a significant role in how your contest will perform with your audience. Make sure you’re keeping all of your records and send out a thank you on social media to everyone that entered. The most important thing to remember is you should always make the event fun. Entertaining events will keep consumers coming back for more, which helps you grow your brand over time.