A low number of contest participants is like your tires getting flat in the middle of the highway.
It stops your contests and giveaways from reaching their destinations (a.k.a. achieving their goals).
And that’s why contest promotion should be on your to-do list before and while running contests.
If you’ve invested in a gift, giveaway tool, and planning, you can hit your targets by getting your contests in front of thousands of participants.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through contest promotion steps to drive thousands of participants to your contests and giveaways.
Giveaway & contest promotion tactics to drive participants
1. Broadcast promotions to your email subscribers
All things being equal, your email subscribers have a high level of trust in you or your business. This trust will even be higher if you’ve provided value to your subscribers over time.
So, if you promote an opportunity to win a gift to your subscribers, most of them will take it.
You can create an email sequence on your email marketing software to send emails to your subscribers at intervals.
For instance, you can send emails to your subscribers during these periods:
- Before your giveaway starts to build anticipation
- The day your giveaway starts
- During your campaign as reminders
For emails during your giveaways, ensure you add a link to the giveaway landing page. To promote its sweepstakes, Thomas Nelson Bibles sent an email to its subscribers:
Without a doubt, this email provides a high level of motivation as a single entry gives you the chance to win for months ahead.
2. Publish a blog post about your giveaway
Your blog is one of the most popular ways to reach your audience and build trust.
So, a thriving blog is a great platform to promote your giveaway to a large number of your prospects and customers.
With a blog post, you can provide details such as:
- Why you’re running a giveaway
- The gift your readers stand a chance of winning
- Entry requirements
- The link to the contest landing page
To make this blog post more visible to every visitor, stick it at the top of your website sidebar during the giveaway.
Here’s a giveaway blog post by Anthony Ryan:
In the post, he explains when the giveaway will come up, and other details participants need to know.
By publishing a blog post about your giveaway, you’ll ensure that most of your loyal audience can have the opportunity to win the gift.
3. Use a sticky website bar
While your blog post will reach many visitors, some will still miss out. For instance, a visitor who landed on a page through a Google search may not see the post about your giveaway.
Luckily, a sticky website bar can solve this problem. With a sticky bar at the top or bottom of your website, every visitor will be aware of your giveaway.
Here’s a sticky bar example from The Ridge:
Once you click “Learn More,” you’ll land on a page that provides more details about the sweepstakes.
Using a sticky bar will ensure you promote your contest to most website visitors during your contest campaign.
4. Use referrals as an entry method
One of the best ways to promote your contests is to let your early participants do the work for you. After all, if you invite your friend to enter a giveaway, they’ll likely do so.
Through referrals, participants can bring in more of their friends to enter the promotion. To encourage referrals, allocate many entry points to the task.
Since referring their friends will increase their chances of winning your giveaway, they’ll do it. If this snowballs, you can easily gain hundreds of extra participants.
Most giveaway tools you use will allow you to add this option. For instance, this is the setup for Sweepwidget:
Here, you can indicate the number of entries a referral is worth. Beyond that, you can set up display options, sharing platforms, and more.
Referrals let participants do the heavy lifting of your contest promotion.
5. Publish contest posts on your social media pages
Many social media users look out for giveaways on social media pages.
Even if they currently don’t follow your page, they can find your giveaways through search and hashtags.
Just like emails, you have to publish many contest posts on your brand pages. In most cases, it’s better to publish more on social media channels that have your ideal audience.
For instance, if you’re giving away a fashion item, you can focus more on Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
Your contest posts should come up:
- Before your campaign
- When your campaign starts
- During your campaign
- After your campaign
For example, here’s Designer Bathware promoting a giveaway before it starts:
If possible, pin your giveaway post to the top of your profile. Thereby, every profile viewer will see it.
Then, use an image that includes “giveaway,” “contest,” or similar words. This will attract viewers skimming through their timelines or your profile.
Beyond these, you should add hashtags to your contest posts. These will include:
- Popular contest hashtags
- Industry contest hashtags
- Brand hashtags
Check out this contest announcement where Droom used contest hashtags and also instructed its audience to use the hashtag #Guessthecar to enter the contest.
Another way to attract more people to your giveaway is to design your cover image to provide details about your promotion.
After your giveaway, ensure you announce the winner on your social media pages to build trust with every participant. By doing this, you’ll encourage them to enter your next giveaway.
6. Submit to giveaway directories
Giveaway directories list giveaways and contests from various businesses. Submitting your giveaways and contests to these directories makes sense since people on these directories are looking for giveaways.
Through your submission, you can reach more potential participants.
Some popular giveaway directories include:
- Giveaway Frenzy
- Contest Listing
- AnyLuckyDay
- Contestgirl
- Online-sweepstakes
- Sweeties Sweeps
- Sweepstakes Advantage
You can go through these directories to know their requirements.
Luckily, these submissions are free and will only take a few minutes to submit to each platform.
7. Promote contests on your YouTube channel
YouTube is the biggest video site online. And if you run a YouTube channel, you can promote contests to reach your YouTube audience.
Before and during your contest campaigns, you can talk about the contest in your video. In addition, you can link to the promotion landing page in the description.
After watching your videos, some viewers will visit your contest landing page to register.
See this giveaway from Mrwhosetheboss on YouTube:
There’s a link to the giveaway landing page in the description. Without a doubt, hundreds of thousands of people clicked on the link and entered.
Even if you have a small audience on YouTube, some popular YouTubers are open to promoting your contest on their channels.
However, if you want to go through this route, you need to ensure that the influencer has the type of audience you want to reach.
8. Promote your contest on Reddit
As one of the most popular websites online, Reddit is a great source of traffic. During your giveaways, you can share on Reddit to get more participants to your giveaway landing page.
However, Reddit has written and unwritten rules. Therefore, just visiting a subreddit and posting your giveaway may get your post removed or your account banned.
You can publish on general giveaway subreddits such as r/giveaways and r/sweepstakes.
Apart from that, you can also post your giveaways on subreddits where members will find your promotion relevant. But you have to be a regular participant in such subreddits before posting your giveaways.
9. Use “tag friends” as an entry method
Just like referrals, tagging friends can make more people aware of your giveaway. And since participants are tagging their “friends,” those users will likely enter your giveaway.
While presenting your entry requirements, you can include tagging friends as one of the entry methods.
Here’s an example from a Bloomtown giveaway:
In this giveaway, Bloomtown makes each tag a separate entry. Therefore, a participant who tags their friends will have a better chance of winning the giveaway.
10. Use social media shares as an entry method
When contest participants share or repost your contest on their social media profiles, their followers will see it.
Thereby, you can attract more participants to your contest. Here’s an example from Designer Bathware:
In this giveaway, participants will gain 3 extra entries when they share the giveaway on their feed or story.
Apart from sharing your giveaway on their profiles, participants can also share it on their stories and tag your handle.
Conclusion
Without participants, it’s impossible to achieve your giveaway goals. That’s why you must think about your contest promotion before launching a contest.
Go through this post and create a checklist for your future contest promotion. If you think your friends will need it, kindly share it with them.
What is your favorite way to promote giveaways to get more particpants? Is there a tactic I’ve left out that you think should be on this list? Let me know in the comments!
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