There are lots of great reasons to run a giveaway for your business. Audience growth and engagement are two of the most common we hear from our customers. OnePlus grew their mailing list during their One Plus One product launch and the Colorado Tourism Office reached over 400,000 people during their promotion.
There’s another great reason to run giveaways that requires almost no extra work yet provides a ton of value. Your giveaway data.
Giveaways and promotions, as with most marketing efforts, work best with a well thought out and long term strategy versus an unplanned initiative with no preparation. A solid communication plan with several prospect and customer touchpoints helps to insure that your brand and products are top of mind when your prospects are ready to buy. The challenge we all face at times is a steady stream of fresh ideas to bring our strategy to life.
The number of ways businesses can communicate with customers and prospects has exploded over the past several years. In addition to phone, postal mail and in-person touch points, technology now allows marketers to reach people virtually anytime, anywhere. And as the saying goes: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Facebook rolled out new rules at the end of 2014 that discontinued the “fan gate”. Some saw this as a negative, but we felt the Facebook fan gate updates was an overall positive thing. We believe it will help marketers and businesses focus on using Facebook (and more broadly, all social networks) to drive things that help their business reach its overall business goals rather than focus on the raw number of likes and followers.
It’s not a secret we’re pretty active on social media (and if it is, follow us on Twitter or Facebook). We’ve learned a lot interacting with our customers, but we can also pick up a thing or two by interacting and listening to other competitors as well. Here’s a story of how that recently played out for us: