How to Promote Your Contest or Giveaway in Some Easy Steps

As a business owner, throwing an event is a demanding task that requires a lot of time and effort to make the thing a success.

Nowadays, of course, many events and even seminars are organized and held online, but that doesn’t mean that putting them together has become any easier. Indeed, to make an online contest or a giveaway a success, you’re going to need to advertise it six ways till Sunday, so that the members of your target audience know that it’s taking place.

The thing is, today’s online audience are scattered throughout different social media platforms and various other forums and online community hubs, so gathering all of them and pointing them towards your event is going to take some serious preparation and marketing work.

That said, you can pull this off if you have some general idea of what you’re doing and more importantly – if you have a plan in place to approach this mini marketing campaign systematically.

Of course, if you don’t think you would have the time to take care of the many intricate social media-related posts and other marketing undertakings, you can always enlist the help of an SEO company. For folks from Australia, for example, there is an SEO company in Sydney that you can contact for this purpose. The great thing about these companies, too, is that they tend to operate online, so no matter where you are in the world, you can sign up for services of a business that’s not even in your country. (If share a common language, of course.)

In this article, we’re going to propose to you some ways you can use to promote online contest or a giveaway. As you will see, thorough preparation and research play the key roles in pulling this off, so as long as you’re willing to put in the work hours, you will have a good chance at succeeding in your online contest or giveaway promotion.

Here’s the deal.

Make Good Use of Your E-mail List

As we said in the introduction to this article, throwing an online event is all about letting as many possible people know about it and then somehow making them attend.

Now, the thing about this statement is that it is true, but what you want more than anything here is to attract the right sort of customer, because they are more likely to participate. The way you do this is fairly obvious – invite people you already know or that are already a part of your business’s cultural sphere, so to speak.

This means that you should reach out to your old customers and let them know there’s going to be an event. (A contest where they can win something, or a giveaway where they can get something for free if they’re lucky.) The thing is, your old customers are more likely to get onboard with whatever you have in store for them than someone new to your products and services, as well as the entire franchise in general.

A great way to find these faithful customers that are likely to attend is to simply take a look at your e-mail list. If these e-mail folks are willing to read your newsletters all the time, they will be happy to see you’re throwing an event where you give something away for them, instead of pitching them new products.

So, first things first – consult your e-mail list and extract from it the contacts you want to send the event notification to. This way, you’ll have some basic idea of how many people you can expect to take part in your contest or giveaway.

Another important thing to mention here would be that the messages you send out to them should be well optimized for SEO, because that way your customers are more likely to get hyped up.

Organize SEO-Optimized Facebook Posts

The thing about throwing an online event is that if you want to do it properly, you have to take into account your followers from great many social media platforms out there, which is what the most difficult part of the task is. So, organizing a giveaway or an online contest is more complex than hard.

That said, you cannot afford to exclude a large portion of your audience just because you couldn’t find the time to post on one social media platform or the other. If you find it difficult to keep track of the great many social media accounts your business probably has, what you want to do is make a list of them and then go about posting on them one by one.

Facebook, for example, as the largest social media tool in the world, represents an important marketing platform that you simply cannot ignore. What you want to do to invite your Facebook audience to attend your online event is make posts about it regularly.

For example, if you’re throwing a giveaway in two weeks, you may want to start posting right now, and then post every couple of days reminding your Facebook friends and group members that the event date is drawing nearer. During the last couple of days, you want to be the most active and give your audience members exact time when the event will be open as well as issue instructions for what they need to do to participate in case the event is more complex, for example.

Of course, when it comes to the content of the posts themselves, the tone and the creativity is entirely up to you, but the important thing to remember is that posts that are optimized for SEO tend to do much better than those that aren’t, so paying attention to keywords, the optimal word count, and other relevant parameters is fairly important for the success of your posts.

The great thing about social media, of course, is that if you generate enough hype, you can even get your audience members to repost and invite other people, thus helping you out spread the message to users you couldn’t otherwise get to.

Organize SEO-Optimized Twitter Posts

Sticking to the social media platforms in this third paragraph, the Twitterverse represents a massive pool of often highly-opinionated users that will certainly show interest in an online event if you invite them or simply let them know that it’s happening in the first place.

Here’s the thing – while Twitter differs from Facebook in the way the character limitation works and how the members of the two social media communities interact with each other, the thing about posting regularly and making your posts optimized for SEO is as true for Twitter as it was for Facebook.

That said, you do need to take into consideration the Twitter’s character limitations, so what you want to do is make your posts short and energetic, with plenty calls to action, especially as the date of the event comes closer.

What you may also want to do here is pin the post about the contest or the giveaway you’re throwing, so that whenever someone checks your profile, they know that this event is coming up soon. This will also send them a message that you’re 100% concentrated on this event and that it’s not just an afterthought for you.

Of course, once the event you were advertising is over, you need to get rid of the CTA pinned post, because leaving it sitting there for days will make you look lazy and disinterested in your company’s social media presence, which is pretty much the last thing you want to happen.

Utilize Your Website

This is a place where you have all the freedom in the world to post whatever you want, at whatever rate you want, and there’s no one to control over the word count, so you can write a War and Peace type of post if you feel like it. (Note that it’s a recommendable practice to bore your viewers and page visitors to death with overly long posts, for the record.)

Assuming you have already amassed some sort of online audience for your website, you can go forth and make announcements regarding the giveaway or the contest event you’ve had in mind to your audience.

Now, since on your website you can do whatever you want, you can utilize many different strategies to make it known to the people about you that you’re throwing a giveaway.

For example, you can dedicate a small portion of the sidebar to remind your visitors constantly on the pending event. Or, you can make a pop-up which will be the first thing your users see whenever they enter one of the links leading to your website.

Also, you can take a page out of your social media accounts books and for the duration of the giveaway make the homepage an advertisement for it.

Hire Influencers to Help You Out

If online influencers are good at one thing, it’s, well – online influencing.

These folks can be great allies in times of need, if you only approach the right influencer for the task at hand. The great thing about enlisting influencers to help you out is that the entire collaboration is mutually beneficial as both the influencer and yourself will have access to a larger audience, which in turn means more visitors for both.

Of course, the event you’re throwing and they’re advertising will be the centerpiece of this collaboration, so it’s also important you pick the right sort of person to help you out with this.

The trick here is that getting a popular influencer doesn’t necessarily mean that this will help you reach new customers. What you want to do is look for likeminded people more than as many people as possible.

So, if you’re giving away some sunglasses, for example, you may want to team up with a sunglasses aficionado, because their audience will be immediately on the same page as you on the account of your common love for shades.

Also, while influencers will retain their style when it comes to posting on their social media, on your part you may want to make sure that your joint posts with them, or posts mentioning them are well optimized for SEO, because that way, you’ll have the opportunity to attract even more people.

Use Youtube to Your Advantage

One other fairly potent promotional tool that you can use to spread your message across the World Wide Web would be Youtube.

On your company’s Youtube channel, you can make announcements, reminders, and if needed post videos where you explain to your subscribers what it is that you’re giving away (if it’s a giveaway), or what they need to do to participate in the contest (if it’s a contest you’re throwing).

The great thing about using Youtube for this purpose is that you can come up with titles that are optimized for SEO attracting more people to click on it, as well as that you can make creative videos, so that people who see them will be interested in learning more about the event you’re throwing.

What’s more, what you can also do here is not only post on your Youtube channel, but also reach out to a famous Youtuber who can help you promote your event the same way an influencer would. This way, you can enjoy the double advertisement impact of both yours and the channel of the influencer in question – which is bound to increase the attendance on your event.

All in all, throwing an online event is all about letting as many people know about it as possible. Of course, you want to make sure those are a particular sort of people you’re notifying, too, as the folks who share common interests with you are more likely to participate.

As long as you take your time to cover all the social media pages you’re on as a company and pay special attention to also optimize your posts for SEO, you are certainly going to be in a great position to make your online event a resounding success.