Who doesn’t love a good giveaway, especially as a tool for increasing profits? In this post, we’ll talk about interesting giveaway contest ideas and I will offer tips to make your next giveaway a success.
When I first started exploring giveaway contest ideas for my business, I was amazed at how a well-planned contest could engage customers and drive sales. My journey with giveaways began with a small social media contest, and the response was overwhelming. Now, I want to share some of the best giveaway contest ideas that can help you create the same excitement for your business. I will be sharing some of my favorite ideas that have proven enormously successful in attracting new customers, cultivating brand loyalty, and—you guessed it—boosting profits. So grab a pen and buckle up; these giveaway contest ideas just might change everything for your business.
Table of Contents
How Do You Make a Giveaway Interesting?
The key to running a wildly successful giveaway is nailing the perfect combo of an amazing prize and a fun, engaging experience for your audience. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Choose an awesome prize: The prize should be something your target customers genuinely want or need. It could be a product from your line, a gift card, or even an experience like a vacation.
- Make it visually appealing: Use high-quality visuals like photos or videos to showcase the prize and get people excited about your giveaway.
- Get users involved: Encourage participants to share their own photos, videos, or stories related to your giveaway theme. This boosts engagement and gives you awesome user-generated content to use.
- Promote on social: Share your giveaway across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – wherever your audience hangs out online. This will help it spread through shares and reach more potential contestants.
What Are the Best Giveaway Contest Ideas (11 Genius Picks)?
With creative and effective giveaway contest ideas, you’ve got tons of possibilities to explore. The best approach is to put a fresh spin on a classic concept or merge a few ideas together into something new and buzz-worthy. Here are 11 of my go-to giveaway contest ideas that have generated great results:
1. Photo Caption Contest
Visuals are hugely shareable on social media, so a caption contest checks all the boxes for an engaging giveaway. Source a fun, attention-grabbing photo related to your brand, product, or industry, and challenge participants to come up with the wittiest caption they can. You can award prizes for the funniest or most creative entries.
2. Selfie Challenge
Speaking of visuals, you can also run an awesome giveaway by inviting people to share selfies around a specific theme. Have them snap selfies while using your product, visiting your location, or striking a silly pose. It’s an easy way to both collect user-generated content and award prizes for the most delightful or distinctive selfie submissions.
3. Video Testimonial Contest
If you’re looking to stock up on persuasive social proof content, try running a video testimonial contest as your next giveaway. Invite existing customers to record and submit short video testimonials raving about their experience with your product or service. Give away cool prizes for the most entertaining, authentic, or touching video stories.
Related Post: Top 7 Creative Contest Ideas to Liven Up Any Event
4. Branded Hashtag Challenge
You’ve surely seen branded hashtags used by big companies for things like photo contests. Why not put your own spin on this giveaway idea? Create a unique, on-brand hashtag and encourage people to share their best photos or videos including that hashtag. It gets your brand circulating while also sourcing user-generated content.
5. Guess the Number
This classic contest idea is straightforward yet massively engaging. Fill up a large clear container with a bunch of small items like candies, beads, or branded swag. Then challenge entrants to guess how many items are in the jar, with the closest guess winning a prize. Simple yet irresistible!
6. Trivia or Quiz Contest
If your business has an element of education or expertise involved, a trivia or quiz giveaway contest is a smart way to put that knowledge on display. Come up with trivia questions related to your industry, products, or brand history and lore. Award prizes to the top scores to reveal your biggest fans!
7. Meme Caption Contest
For a giveaway idea that taps into internet culture, host a meme caption contest. Source a few blank meme templates and challenge participants to come up with the funniest or most relatable captions possible. Award your favorite entries with prizes, plus you can leverage the user-generated meme content for your own marketing.
8. Holiday or Seasonal Giveaways
Time your giveaways strategically to coincide with holidays, annual events, or seasonal trends. Not only is this great for giving your contest a relevant, timely hook, but you can get creative with themed prize packages too. For example, a summer giveaway for beach gear is a natural fit.
9. Refer-a-Friend Contest
You know the power of referral marketing, so why not gamify it through a giveaway? Run a contest where people can earn bonus entries or sweepstakes tickets for every friend they successfully refer to enter your giveaway. It’s a brilliantly simple way to expand your reach exponentially.
10. User-Generated Content Challenge
For brands really looking to crowdsource creativity from their audience, run a user-generated content challenge giveaway. You can invite submissions across various formats – written content like blog posts, visuals like graphics or art, video content like skits or how-to tutorials, and more. Then award prizes for the very best fan-made content related to your brand.
11. Scavenger Hunt
Make your giveaway into an interactive digital or physical experience by turning it into a scavenger hunt. Release a series of clues or challenges related to your business or products, with each solved piece revealing the next step. The first participant to complete the entire hunt wins a grand prize. It’s one of those giveaway contest ideas that creates buzz and chatter as people work through it.
The possibilities are endless for putting a creative spin on these proven giveaway contest ideas. The key is understanding what will excite your specific audience while also aligning with your marketing goals. Mix and match concepts for something truly unique!
How Do You Get People Engaged in a Giveaway?
Just having an attractive prize for your giveaway contest ideas isn’t enough to ensure success. You need to put in the work to create an engaging, interactive experience that keeps your audience excited and participating from start to finish. This is what separates a “meh” giveaway that gets quickly forgotten from one that has people buzzing and naturally spreading the word.
Clear Communication
Your instructions and requirements need to be crystal clear. Lay out the rules, deadlines, and entry steps in a straightforward way that leaves no room for confusion. Use visuals and video to explain things too when possible. Ambiguity will just frustrate people and kill their enthusiasm. Regular reminders throughout your giveaway are helpful as well.
Incentivize Sharing
One of the biggest benefits of smart giveaway contest ideas is their shareability and ability to expand your reach organically. Incentivize and encourage sharing by offering bonus entries or other rewards when people spread the word on social media or refer friends. You can make sharing an actual entry requirement too.
Keep Things Dynamic
Don’t just kick off your giveaway and let it run stale. The best giveaway contest ideas keep things dynamic and interesting throughout with surprise bonus prizes, new mini-contests or challenges, fresh content or behind-the-scenes looks at the grand prize, and other delightful updates. Repetition and stagnation are buzz-kills.
Foster Community
While the prize may be the initial draw, it’s the sense of community and social experience around your giveaway that keeps people engaged. Facilitate this by interacting with participants, sharing their stories and content submissions, prompting discussions, and making people feel heard and involved. It makes them invested in sticking around.
Make It Easy
Finally, don’t overlook the technical side of keeping people participating. Make sure your website, landing pages, and official rules load quickly and work perfectly across devices. Offer convenient entry options like Facebook sign-ins. The easier you make it for people to join and stay involved in your giveaway contest ideas, the better.
Nailing both an amazing, desirable prize and a stellar engagement experience around how you execute and promote it are the two key ingredients for giveaway contest ideas that pack a serious punch.
How to Know If Your Giveaway Was a Smashing Success
After putting in all that hard work on your giveaway contest ideas, you’ll definitely want to measure just how successful your efforts were. Evaluating your giveaway’s performance is crucial for understanding if it achieved your business goals and figuring out how to make your next one even better. Here are the key metrics to analyze:
- Engagement Metrics: Look at hard numbers like total entries, shares across social media, comments, and other indicators of engagement. The higher these figures, the more successful your giveaway contest ideas were at capturing your audience’s interest. Don’t just look at the total, but analyze the engagement levels over time to see when people were most excited.
- Website Traffic & Conversions: One of the biggest benefits of clever giveaway contest ideas is driving traffic to your website and turning visitors into customers. Check your website analytics for any spikes in traffic that coincide with your giveaway dates. More importantly, look at conversion rates – how many of those visitors took action like making a purchase or signing up for your email list?
- Social Media Growth: Promoting your giveaway on social platforms is a great way to expand your reach and attract new followers. Check if you got an increase in fans/followers on each channel, as well as your overall growth during the giveaway period. Look at social media engagement too like likes, comments, and shares of your giveaway contest ideas content.
- Lead Generation: A smart giveaway strategy will incentivize people to hand over their email address or contact details to enter. Those leads are pure marketing gold! Count up your total new leads from the giveaway and analyze their quality – are they from your target buyer personas? Engaged leads mean your giveaway contest ideas resonated.
- Overall Sales Impact: While gaining followers and website visitors is great, the ultimate measure of any marketing giveaway contest ideas is the bottom line impact on sales and revenue. Look for correlations between your giveaway dates and any upswings in sales, both short-term from purchases tied to entering, and longer-term from increased brand awareness and loyalty.
Having solid data on engagement, traffic, leads, and sales will clearly show if your giveaway contest ideas were a smashing success – or give you insights into how to fine-tune your approach next time.
Conclusion
Now, you know the secret sauce when hosting giveaways is understanding your audience, nailing an awesome prize, and cooking up an experience that keeps people hooked from start to finish. So take the plunge on one of these 11 giveaway contest ideas and watch what it can do for your business! And if the thought of managing all the moving pieces involved with planning and executing an engaging giveaway or innovation challenge sounds tiring already, Innobear can help.
Our cloud-based software can be used to reduce the complexity of moving pieces involved in hosting innovation or engagement challenges. It also manages the pipeline of arising ideas and solutions all the way to their ultimate production implementation.
So, why wait? Start planning your next giveaway today and watch your business grow! Have you tried any of these ideas before? Share your experiences or favorite giveaway tips in the comments below!
This post was all about giveaway contest ideas.
