Five ways to get the most out of a competition giveaway
By Publicity Heaven’s editor Pete Wadsworth
The competition giveaway is a well-known part of journalistic life, but many people don’t realise that it’s not the magazine ‘doing its readers a favour’ (which is the way it will always be written) it’s just another way for you to publicise your product or service.
The main advantage of offering something for a competition is that you get a direct response, you will be able to find out how many people entered the competition and it can make you look ‘good’ if you offer the right prize to the right audience. The pitfall that, of course, must be avoided at all costs is that you end up giving away a couple of hundred pounds worth of time or product and getting nothing back.
So, here are five pointers on how to get the most out of competition giveaways:
Think carefully before you commit
From the journalist’s point of view, competitions are a great way of filling up page space with solid, reader-centric copy. Journalists like it because they basically have to do no work and there is nothing readers like more than ‘free stuff’.
But, it’s up to you to think carefully if what they’re offering you is actually going to work in your best interests. Do not allow yourself to be sweet-talked into providing your services for free so a journalist can fill space. If you’ve got any doubt as to what the competition will do for you, walk away, there will always an opportunity to give something away for nothing!
Check the publication
Have a close look at the readership of the magazine – the magazine should be able to provide this for you, but there’s a searchable database on the ABC Website (who keep track of magazine readership numbers) and, as always, a good Google session will work wonders.
You want to make sure that the readership of the magazine matches, as closely as possible, the demographic of your intended customer. The central idea of a competition giveaway is to make people aware of your business and what you do – you won’t get this effect unless you can be sure that the people who are thinking of entering the competition are your potential customers. Even if you got ten thousand entries, that won’t mean a thing unless some of the 9,999 people who didn’t win are now seriously considering using your company. Everyone wants a free thing, but you want to make sure that some of the losers come to you as well.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch – but don’t tell them that!
You want to give the impression that you’re doing a favour to all the potential winners of the competition by offering them the chance to ‘have a thing, for free!’
But, as well making sure that you’re hitting the right demographic (covered in point 2) there are some clever little ‘tricks’ you can use to get the best out of what it is that you’re giving away.
There’s a classic example that can be used to demonstrate this, which you should be able to interpret and apply to your product quite easily.
If you’re a photographer, you can offer a ‘photo session’ as a prize giveaway. Let’s say, an afternoon at your studio that incorporates a makeover, a professional shoot and one print.
There are two keys to this offer that make it effective. The last part states ‘and one print’ – this is crucial because theoretically when the person sees the photos they will almost certainly be thinking something like, “this would make a nice present for my boyfriend or mum” or “one of these isn’t enough” or “I want a bigger one”. At this point you can offer them a ‘special’ price on extra prints and you’ve effectively turned a competition giveaway into a sale. You can apply this theory to any service or product – just make sure that the winner can always add something on to the prize to make it better.
If you’ve hit the right audience, up-selling won’t be an issue.
It will still feel like a freebie, even though it’s not.
The second key: Make the prize as good a value for you as you can
You want a giveaway prize to be as little hassle for you as possible, especially if you offer a service rather than a product.
Think carefully about how much you’ll have to spend on it and how much you think you’ll get back. If you have any doubts about the ‘ratio’ then walk away – this competition, possibly competitions in general, isn’t right for your company.
Use it to draw people in
Where possible, make sure that you have control of the competition question. Unless you’re paying to have the competition in the magazine (which we would never recommend) you should be able to negotiate this very easily.
Now, the trick to a competition question is to make it pretty obscure and specific to your business, making sure that the only way a reader can find out the answer is by looking on your own website. Using the kind of smart data capture and lead pages that Publicity Heaven’s clients use, you can turn a giveaway into several strong effort-free sales leads.
Bonus tip! You don’t need a magazine, website or radio station to run a prize giveaway
The title says it all really, but you shouldn’t be afraid of running your own prize giveaway.
You can do this through your own website, or your shop front and it can work as a great lead generation tool. You can insist entrants provide an email address or phone number part of the conditions for entry.
Very important point: When you’re running your own competition, you must ask entrants to answer a question if you’re charging them to enter the competition – if they have to phone you or text you to enter then that counts as charging, emails and postal entries do not count as charging. This is a legal requirement. The question can be as easy as you like (see competitions on TV) but if you don’t require a question to be answered in these circumstances, your competition will be defined as a lottery, which requires strict adherence to rules and regulations.
Thanks to Sarah Burns from Spark and Fuse for helping us out with this legal bit.
You should follow Paul Green on Twitter here.
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