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Looking for the best giveaway ideas for businesses?
If you want to transform your site visitors into loyal customers, a giveaway is one of the best ways to achieve your goal. This article will share the best giveaway ideas for businesses to secure customer loyalty and ultimately get more sales.
But before we share those ideas with you, it’s helpful to know why businesses do giveaways in the first place.
Running a giveaway or contest is a great way to raise awareness about your business. And because contests are super engaging and cost very little to run, it’s an inexpensive way to reach your target audience and encourage them to interact with your brand.
With a contest or giveaway, business owners can achieve the following goals:
Essentially a successful giveaway is a quick way to grow your business.
The secret to running a great contest is coming up with the best giveaway ideas for your business. And we’ve got some great ideas to help you get up and running.
Since this article is pretty long, here’s a breakdown of the best giveaway ideas for businesses:
Ready to get started?
A photo caption contest is a fun giveaway idea for businesses to get people engaged in your product or service. It works by posting a photo and challenging participants to write the best caption to go along with it.
The image could be your product in a funny setting or your team behind the scenes. Just be sure to keep it relevant to your audience so they’ll be interested.
You can then get people to enter by writing their captions in the comments, making it a giveaway idea ideal for posting on your blog or social networks.
Another engaging giveaway idea for businesses that’s similar is asking your audience to fill in the blanks to enter the contest.
You can start by writing a simple sentence and leaving a blank space where a word should go. Entrants have to add their own words to complete the sentence.
Here’s an example:
“This product makes me ________in the shower” - Fill in the blank! What does it make you do?
This is a great way to get people thinking about your products. You could even offer a free version of the product as the prize.
A super-effective way to promote products to your audience is to ask them to customize your product for a chance to win the contest. This is a fun way for people to show off their creativity while keeping your brand top of mind.
You could even ask participants to vote for their favorite design once you’ve created a shortlist of potential winners.
Using RafflePress, the best giveaway plugin for WordPress, makes running a voting contest easy. Choose the Polls and Surveys action to allow people to choose their favorite submission.
Then the person with the most votes wins!
The good thing about extending your giveaway is that it still generates engagement after people have submitted their entries.
If you have the budget, a great prize idea is to offer a fully customized version of the product to the winner.
People love the opportunity to tell a story, so why not use this as a way for people to enter your giveaway? This is a valuable way for small business owners to generate a buzz. Especially if the stories people tell are about the services you offer.
Have people enter the contest by sharing how they first heard about you. Or the story could be about how your product or service helped them improve their lives. You can then pick a winner based on the most compelling story or choose a winner at random.
Photo contests are excellent giveaway ideas for businesses that help you collect user-generated content and are a great way to engage your audience by getting them to participate. You can choose a theme related to your business or even have participants share a photo of themselves with your products.
RafflePress even has a Submit an Image Action to make gathering image submissions simple.
Even better, it solves 2 problems with a single solution:
So if one of your main goals is to increase site traffic, running a social media photo contest is the ideal solution.
Like photo contests, running a video contest works well to get people excited. But where video contests shine is when they’re used alongside video submission sites like YouTube.
For example, let’s say you want to get more subscribers on YouTube. A smart move for this goal would be to run a giveaway that asks people to submit a video to enter. Participants could then unlock more entries by visiting your YouTube channel and watching one of your videos.
But what would they include in their videos? Entrants could video themselves talking about your product. Or, to be even more creative, they could design an advertisement for your product. With these giveaway ideas for businesses, the options are limitless!
Want to really get your audience involved with your business? Then why not have them make some of the decisions for you?
Picking a new logo, for example, isn’t easy. But getting your audience to help you choose will make them feel more invested and play a large part in securing their loyalty.
By posting the different logo options and polling your audience for their favorite version, you can make this happen. Then the logo with the most votes will be the winner.
As a thank you to everyone who entered with the winning choice, you could offer a gift card to spend on your site.
How about you pitch your customers against each other in a brand trivia giveaway? This is the perfect giveaway idea for businesses to find out who your most loyal fans are while offering a way to reward them for that loyalty.
First, put together a list of questions about your business. Then ask participants to submit their answers which you can easily do with the Answer a Question action. Then you can pick the winner from all valid answers.
Another giveaway idea for your business is to ask people to spot the difference between 2 almost identical images.
This is particularly useful if your business offers graphic-heavy products or services. Design agencies, for instance, would have no trouble putting this contest together. And it provides the perfect opportunity for your team to show off their skills.
The person who spots the most differences could win a money-off coupon code or even a free design session.
Giveaways that run for a limited time are the perfect way to create a sense of urgency amongst your audience. For instance, a high value and desirable prize, coupled with limited time to enter the contest, makes people fear they’re going to miss out, which spurs them on to enter.
Add a countdown timer into the mix, and people will be scrambling to participate.
A scheduled contest can create the same kind of buzz. Instead of a one-off giveaway, you can run an online contest regularly to reward loyal customers.
An easy way to do this is to run a giveaway every month and use the Automatic Entries action in RafflePress. All people will have to do is visit your giveaway and sign up without doing anything extra.
To ensure only customers enter, you could publish the contest on a landing page and only share the URL with customers via email.
This business giveaway idea is perfect if you’re about to launch a new product and want to raise awareness around it. All you need to do is create a contest where people have to create a catchy product name to enter.
You could promote the giveaway by sharing the best suggestions on social media as they come in. And as for the prize, winners could receive the product in question.
Need to do some market research for your local business and want to find out what people are looking for in your brand? Asking your audience to develop a slogan is a great way to get the local community involved. You could then have the community vote on their top 5 slogans and offer prizes to the winners.
Hashtag contests are terrific if you’re running a social media giveaway and want your business to stand out. This type of giveaway is ideal for Twitter, Instagram giveaways, and other social networks that use hashtags extensively.
But what is a hashtag contest?
A Hashtag contest is where you ask people to post on social media using a specific hashtag during a certain time frame. Then winners are drawn at random from among the verified entries.
The time limit creates a feeling of urgency, while the hashtag makes your brand much more visible on each social media network you use. Want to take your business giveaway ideas to the next level? Learn more about the best giveaway hashtags to use in this guide.
Quizzes are a fantastic way to increase conversion rates, but it’s essential to understand your audience well to make quizzes work. For instance, if your audience loves beauty and fashion, they probably won’t be interested in a quiz about football.
So analyze your audience and create a quiz they’ll genuinely love. Then on the last page of the quiz, you can add your giveaway.
The result for you is more information about your customers and the chance of winning a fantastic prize for your audience.
Guess the object games are business giveaway ideas focused on boosting brand loyalty. To run one, you can post an obscured image of one of your products and ask people if they are familiar enough with your brand to guess what it is.
The winner could be the first person to guess the answer correctly, or you could draw the winner randomly from all correct answers.
You can even use this idea to run an Instagram giveaway.
A spin-the-wheel contest is a fantastic way to encourage optins to your email list, which is another way to nurture customer loyalty.
The way it works is participants enter their email addresses for a chance to spin the prize wheel and be in with the chance of winning them. It’s a fun way for entrants to participate, and if they win, the sense of achievement will make them feel amazing.
This guide shows you how to create a Spin to Win optin easily.
Scavenger hunts are another way local businesses can get their local community involved with their brand. You can hide objects in and around your business location and have participants post pictures when they find them.
Alternatively, if your business doesn’t have a physical location, you can hide graphics around your website for people to spot and have them take screenshots as proof. Then you could offer a bundle of prizes to the top 3 winners.
These business giveaway ideas are a way for your audience to perform an act of kindness for someone else. To enter, they have to nominate someone they think deserves to win, and the winning nominee can receive a special prize related to your brand in return.
You can use the RafflePress Invent Your Own action to set this type of contest up. Just ask people to leave the name of the person they’re nomination and a brief description of why they deserve to win.
Alternatively, you can ask them to comment on your blog or social media and paste the comment URL as proof.
One of the best ways to build a buzz around a new product is to run a promotional giveaway before the launch date. The prize can be an advance copy of the product.
Doing a contest like this can help you build a stronger relationship with your customers. After all, they’ll be in with a chance of getting their hands on something no one else has yet. Just make sure you promote the giveaway effectively. These contest promotion ideas will help with that.
You can run a business giveaway easily with RafflePress, the Best WordPress giveaway plugin. It only takes a few minutes to set up a giveaway contest, customize it with your actions that meet your marketing goals, and launch it to your audience.
Get started with RafflePress today!
To choose the right giveaway for your business, you should consider your target audience, your goals, and your budget. You should also think about what type of giveaway will best represent your brand and resonate with your customers.
To measure the success of your giveaway, you should track various metrics such as the number of entries, shares, likes, comments, and conversions. You should also analyze the quality of your leads and the impact of your giveaway on your brand image and customer satisfaction.
The frequency of your giveaways will depend on your marketing strategy and resources. You should aim to run giveaways regularly enough to keep your audience engaged and excited but not so often that it becomes predictable or overwhelming.
A good rule of thumb is to run giveaways once or twice a month or during special occasions or promotions.
There you have it!
We’ve come to the end of the best giveaway ideas for businesses to secure loyal customers. Now all that’s left is for you to create an online giveaway yourself.
If you’re going to take our advice and run a photo contest, this step-by-step guide will get you started.
We hope you found this article helpful. And if you did, check out our YouTube channel. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
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Tha k you so much! I’m starting a new Facebook business, but am on a very tight budget, and these are wonderful ideas!