This March 2021, we are giving away a Series 6 Apple Watch via our website. If you haven’t entered, you can do so here. Just like when we bought 1,000 Instagram followers, so you don’t have to – we are committed to pulling back the curtain on marketing we undertake to give you a peek into marketing you can use. 

Do Giveaways Work?

Last year we did a giveaway featuring Apple Airpods Pro. The giveaway was a success with over 1,500 entrants. We grew our Facebook likes to almost 300 (from nothing), had a couple of hundred new Instagram followers, and about 280 sign-ups for our newsletter. 

If you do the math, we paid roughly $0.16 per entrant on that campaign. I consider that a success as it is almost impossible to pay that little per action via Facebook or Google Ads and have every lead give their email address and have many also follow and like us.

As a bonus, our website traffic goes way up during giveaway periods, producing a higher ranking in search results. 

June 2021 Update

Our Apple Watch Giveaway ended up with just over 5,400 entrants, a 200% increase from our AirPods Pro giveaway. We saw a 329% increase in e-mail subscribers, 90% of which have stayed subscribed even 2 months after the giveaway ended. Our Facebook page jumped from 300 likes to 1,444, a 381% increase.

What lessons can you learn from our Giveaways?

• Higher priced items bring in more leads, generally obvious, but we only had to spend twice as much for three times as much engagement.
• Keep building on your list. Email your list with your new giveaway and get a compounding effect.
• Use a viral loop where invitations to other users are a big source of entry points. This is how you keep scaling giveaways as an effective strategy for awareness marketing.

We are in the process of using Google Surveys to choose our next giveaway; we want to have some market research to get the most bang for our buck.

Speaking of bang for the buck, the Apple Watch cost only $.09 per entrant. When comparing the AirPods to the Watch, that is a 47.5% decrease in cost per lead. If you are considering a giveaway for your business, consider spending a little more to maximize your total value!

Know Your Goals

The key is to know your goals. During our current giveaway, we are aiming for general awareness of The Sky Floor and also social lift. The idea is to get more numbers to our website, drive more shares of our content and increase our Facebook-like numbers. 

We also launched “No Call Thursdays” and want to get an audience to check out the idea. In short, we are increasing our general audience – this is the shotgun approach to marketing. We are throwing mud at the wall and hoping some sticks enough to create future engagement with our content. 

Only time will tell how well we do toward achieving these goals, but we will make sure to write an update so you can track along. 

How to Intentionally Target

You can get highly strategic with giveaways by when choosing what you giveaway. We chose an Apple Watch because it implies you are an iPhone user already. We are big Apple fans here and feel more aligned to an audience who uses Apple products. Not to mention, Apple users tend to spend more money online, making them a great target. 

You can get even more strategic, though. If you make a product, giving it away is the perfect way to capture interested leads. If you have a book on Photography tips, consider giving away a camera or subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. Tailoring your giveaway to your audience will capture information for those likely to buy from you in the future. 

Years ago we had a client who sold one of the nations best selling parenting books. We wanted to use a giveaway to target new moms so we found a high-end diaper bag to giveaway. It sounds preposterous that a diaper bag could raise awareness and get leads for our client, but it worked! We had over 900 entrants, many of whom were expecting mothers – the perfect audience for the book.

We aren’t trying to sell our services via our giveaways, so we are happy to build a general audience. You have to know what you want out of your giveaway. Knowing what you want out of any of your marketing efforts helps you to define and measure success. 

When to Run Your Giveaway

Giveaways are a great way to build an audience. Here are some ideas of when to use them: 

• Product Launch
• Course Launch
• To accompany a press release for a milestone.
• An anniversary
• Around a public holiday
• Anytime you want more traffic and a bit of fun!

Future Giveaways

The Sky Floor will be continuing to run giveaways 1-2 times per year. If you’d like to be alerted when the next one goes live, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

If you’d like help creating and running a giveaway of your own, contact us today!