My $10,000 Giveaway Mistake
This week’s digital marketing success story is about Drift. They provide a messaging app so businesses can chat with website visitors.
What Can We Learn From Drift: How to gain social media followers from a giveaway.
Example: Drift Instagram giveaway to celebrate the success of their podcast.
Why Was This Giveaway Effective?
In order to enter the giveaway, a person was required to do two things:
- Start following Drift on Instagram.
- Input a question for the Drift podcast as an Instagram comment. This question for the Drift podcast must tag* three friends.
The strategy here is to exponentially gain new followers by requiring anyone who signs up for the giveaway to follow Drift and tag three friends.
Not only did Drift gain more followers, they also received good questions for their podcast.
*NOTE: To “tag” a friend in an Instagram comment, put in their Instagram username preceded by the @ symbol (e.g. my Instagram username is claytonjay101, someone would comment @claytonjay101 to tag me). Once someone is tagged, they will get an Instagram notification letting them know they were mentioned in a comment. This will prompt them to press the notification field which will take them directly to the Instagram post.
The Bigger Picture: My $10,000 Giveaway Mistake
A few years ago, I ran a giveaway for a $10,000 piece of capital equipment. It got big league attention since it was an industry first. However, I never capitalized on the momentum.
Here were my problems:
- I only required an email address to enter.
- I did not adequately promote the giveaway.
- Most importantly, I did not run a post-giveaway content sharing campaign to capitalize on the momentum created by the giveaway.
Here’s what should have happened if the giveaway were done properly:
- Generated new social media followers.
- Re-energized existing social media followers.
What if I Were to Run the Same Giveaway Again?
These are the steps I would follow:
- Announce upcoming giveaway.
- Launch giveaway.
- Promote giveaway.
- Announce the winner.
- Launch post-giveaway content sharing campaign.
- Announce next upcoming giveaway.
- Repeat steps 2–6 above.
The length of time between giveaways would be directly related to the value of the post-giveaway content sharing campaign because more valuable content maintains more momentum created by the giveaway.
How You Can Avoid My $10,000 Mistake
Writing about the Drift giveaway made me realize the power of a properly executed giveaway program.
In the weeks ahead, I will share how I would execute the giveaway I ran a few years ago, if I could do it again today using social media.
This might help you avoid a $10,000 mistake.
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Even though I write this on every post, thanks for reading.
Originally published at www.erp101.com.
