How to Run a Delightful Holiday Giveaway

What better way to bring joy to your customers this holiday season than to run a holiday giveaway? Everyone loves the chance to win a prize. And winning a giveaway prize can be especially exciting and helpful during the costly and sometimes stressful holiday season.

Giveaways don’t only please your customers and your target customers though. Giveaways are also great for your business. A successful giveaway can drive more traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, grow your social media following, and even generate more sales. In fact, according to HubSpot, an average of over 34 percent of new fans are acquired through giveaways.

‘Tis the season for giving!

Here’s how to run a delightful holiday giveaway.

Set a Goal

Before you jump into running a giveaway, you first need to decide what the goal of your giveaway is. Of course, you want to run a holiday giveaway to delight your customers and your target audience, but what do you want to achieve in regards to your business?

Do you want to increase brand awareness? Boost sales? Grow your email list or your social media following? Choose one main goal for your giveaway that aligns with your business goals and build your giveaway with that goal in mind. Setting a goal for your giveaway will help give your contest more focus and you’ll be able to track your results better. With the work that goes into running a giveaway, you want to make sure your business sees the benefits from it—setting a goal will help you do that.

Choose an Awesome Prize

The key to a successful holiday giveaway is an awesome prize. It’s essential to choose a giveaway prize that excites your audience. After all, if your prize doesn’t have any value to your audience, they won’t bother to enter your giveaway.

One of the most common prizes companies will offer in a giveaway are free products and services. But because this is a holiday giveaway, you should also choose a prize that is relevant to the holiday season.

For example, check out this awesome holiday giveaway prize from the Hallmark Channel: 41 Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments and a Balsam Hill Christmas tree. The prize is holiday-themed and it promotes their own products at the same time.

If your business doesn’t sell any holiday-themed items, don’t worry, you still can find a way to tie in your products/services with the holiday season. For instance, a grocery store or restaurant can offer a holiday feast as a prize. And a hair salon could create a giveaway for a holiday makeover.

If you really can’t find a way to tie in your products/services to the holiday season, you can always partner up with another company (like a Christmas tree farm) for your holiday giveaway. Or, simply choose a gift card for your prize—something that everyone could use during the holiday season.

Keep It Simple

With any giveaway, you have to decide on the type of giveaway you’ll run and the rules for it. For example, some giveaway contests require users to submit something like a photo, video, or letter in order to enter for a chance to win. While this is a great way to collect user-generated content for your brand, you may get fewer giveaway entries because not everyone has the time to create something just to enter the giveaway.

If you want to get a ton of contest entries, it’s best to keep it simple. Many online giveaways only require users to provide their name and email address, a “like” on Instagram, or a share on Facebook because it’s simple but effective. And remember your goals! If the goal of your giveaway is to grow your email list, only require users to sign up for your newsletter in order to enter. The fewer actions users have to take to enter your contest, the better.

Promote Your Giveaway

In order to create a lot of buzz online and get a ton of entries for your holiday giveaway, you need to promote it. One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to promote your giveaway is with social media. You can create posts on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that include an eye-catching photo of your prize along with a short description of the contest and instructions for how to enter.

Check out how Sukoshi Mart does it below to promote their 12 days of giveaways. This one Instagram post has over 1000 likes and comments!

Don’t forget to use relevant hashtags like #HolidayGiveaway, #Giveaway, and #GiveawayContest to widen your reach and make your contest easier for social media users to find.

Announce the winner.

Once you’ve chosen a winner for your holiday giveaway, don’t forget to announce the winner publicly. Instead of only contacting the winner personally by email, announcing the giveaway winner on your website and social media will let you keep engagement up until the end of your contest. Everyone that’s entered the giveaway is invested, so they’ll want to know who won. Plus, a social media post announcing the winner will create a lot of excitement.

So, make sure to create a fun social media post announcing the winner and take the time to thank everyone for entering the contest as well.

You can also use this post to get people excited about the next giveaway you’re running—if you’ve already got it planned. That way, people will know to watch your social media feeds closely, so they don’t miss out on the next giveaway.

Here’s a great example of an Instagram giveaway winner announcement that also encourages social media followers to keep an eye out for the next giveaway:

Over To You

Congratulations on running a successful holiday giveaway, all that’s left to do now is plan your next one! After you see what a success your first holiday giveaway was, you’ll want to keep it going. With a delightful holiday giveaway, you can grow your business and attract new customers that will shop with you year-round.

Christmas Gifts -DepositPhotos

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