How Small Businesses Can Offer Giveaways and Compete Like Big Business
- Giveaways and gamification are long-proven ways businesses can generate more leads, increase sales, and reinvigorate their audience.
- Sweepstakes and Co-registration lead generation are ways that small businesses can offer giveaways that compete with big businesses and top brands.
- Interest Media is an owner-operator of a variety of host & post sweepstakes and co-registration offers utilizing first-party and self-declared data for precise targeting with solutions that can help small businesses compete.
Getting Big Results Without a Big-Budget
“32.5% of brands host one monthly giveaway, and 16.1% host two or three,” – Online Dasher
When it comes to giveaways, big business often has deep pockets and resources that give them advantages that smaller businesses may not be able to compete with. It costs money to give things away.
So, can small businesses really compete with big businesses when it comes to giveaways? It’s a matter of scale. Experts say that with the right strategy, small businesses can be effective on a limited budget. Smaller businesses have to be more laser-focused with their strategy.
Focus on relationships
“Companies with gamified loyalty programs experienced a 22% increase in customer retention,” –Adact
Personal relationships are becoming a key focus in marketing. They are just as important when you engage in giveaways.
Build on the relationship you have already established with your audience. You may want to focus on a specific segment of your audience for your giveaway. For example, your most loyal, or most active, or those who make the most purchases. Giving them something for free reinforces the relationship. It may also make them feel special if this giveaway is only to select customers, or not to the public, and only to subscribers or customers.
Small businesses often have personal relationships with the local community and this can be used as leverage to keep customers coming back.
One strategy might be giveaways that also support the local community. You are giving something away to individuals, while also giving to your local community. This creates a sense of reciprocity. Because you support the community, those in the community will want to support you.
If you are an Internet-based business, you may want to focus on personal relationships with the audience you already have. Hopefully, you are already using personalization as much as possible with your current marketing efforts.
Focus on a Target Audience and Strategy for Your Giveaway
“Businesses that utilize gamification in their sales processes experience a 25.3% increase in sales conversion rates,” –Adact
Of course, the potential for drawing in a crowd that’s only coming for the freebies can affect any company, large or small. This risk always exists whether a company takes the route of deals, coupons, limited-time offers, or giveaways.
On the flip side, giveaways don’t always mean you’re going to draw a crowd of non-returning customers.
Giveaways are often very successful, not only in attracting new customers but also in invigorating sales and up-sales. Dr. Larry Chiagouris, a marketing professor at Pace University, said that there are advantages to giveaways such as gaining new customers, reinvigorating existing ones, or introducing a new product offering to the market.
What’s important is having a strategy behind the giveaway. Using the freebie to attract the right customers at the right time in a way that results in additional sales or keeps customers coming back.
Therefore, the audience segment you choose to target is very important. Broad targeting and/or giveaways may not attract your ideal customer.
Watch Out for These Pitfalls with Giveaways
In a recent interview with Inc., Dr. Kelly Goldsmith, a marketing professor at Vanderbilt University, warned of the potential pitfalls that can accompany giveaways. For example, giveaways can have the effect of pulling in an audience that’s only interested in free stuff. Unless there are freebies or a deal, they won’t come back.
“If there was a gas station that was an extra 10 miles out of your way, but you heard they were giving away free gasoline that day, you might drive the extra 10 miles to fill up your tank,” Goldsmith says. “But that doesn’t mean all of a sudden you’re going to keep driving 10 miles out of your way to go to a gas station.”
Another pitfall is what the cost of the giveaways could ultimately cost your business. While Dunkin’ may be able to give away a free doughnut on National Donut Day, a local donut shop may not be able to afford it. Such promotions are risky even for big businesses. For example, Red Lobster lost over $11 million last year on their endless shrimp deal. The bottom line: Make sure your giveaway campaign isn’t going to break the bank.
Sweepstakes and Co-Registration
“An average of over 34% of new customers are acquired through contests,” – Online Dasher
Sweepstakes, or sweeps, and Co-registration, or co-reg, are two methods of giveaways that can generate new leads to grow your audience or reinvigorate existing customers and increase revenue. Let’s take a look at each and what their strengths are.
Sweepstakes and their benefits
Sweepstakes are a powerful giveaway method that can expand your audience or reactivate existing customers.
8 ways sweepstakes can benefit your business
- Live data collection, analysis, and actionable results.
- Drive new product launches.
- Drive purchases and increase sales of all your products.
- Draw attention to anything new you want to highlight in your brand.
- Drive traffic to your website or app.
- We engage in active customers.
- Incentivize customers to refer others to you.
- Incentivize customers to leave reviews and ratings.
Co-Registration
“Studies reveal that gamified experiences can increase customer engagement by 48%,” –Adact
Co-reg can help you capture more leads and generate more revenue for advertisers and publishers. But it’s also a win for the customer, as it gives them more relevant offers.
Co-registration is highly targeted and exclusive, which means it results in higher-quality leads.
With co-registration, typically, leads are negotiated on a cost-per-lead basis. This makes this form of lead generation far less costly than the average pay-per-click method on Google or Facebook.
Benefits of co-registration
- Low cost makes it inexpensive to try.
- Co-reg generates higher quality leads.
- Easy implementation. Uses “host & post” websites maintained by the provider (owner-operator).
- Scalable. Co-reg offers are measured and tracked which allows you to scale over time according to your budget.
Let Interest Media Help You with Sweepstakes and Co-Registration Offers
Why try to build your targeted offers from scratch when you can partner with a company that can help you hit the ground running with an effective solution? Legal compliance can be a major hurdle for newbies.
Interest Media owns and operates several properties that can help publishers and advertisers with sweepstakes and co-registration offers, as well as other forms of lead generation. Rewards features some of America’s top and most well-known brands.
Interest Media’s network boasts over 100 million fully registered consumers. We’ve been an industry leader in providing data-driven results. Our first-party data has been acquired with absolute precision. We combine our data with real-time optimization that provides a positive user experience. We can help you drive higher earnings. Our publishing partners earn more for their inventory than anyone else in the industry today.
Sweepstakes and lead generation with interest media solutions
Interest Media owns and operates several sweepstakes properties that feature high-quality offers that can make all the difference when it comes to enticing prospects to enter the contest.
American Sweepstakes Example – Interest Media
Some examples of rewards that have been available from our “The American Sweepstakes” property include Amazon Prime, DeWalt tools, a Dyson vacuum, Gas money for 1 year, Groceries for a year, HBO Max, Jeep, Kylie Cosmetics, Live rent-free for 1 year, McDonald’s, Netflix, Nike shoe collection, Samsung appliances, Taylor Swift tickets, a Tesla, and more.
Interest Media owns and operates sweepstakes sample properties as well, such as Free Samples Pro USA. Our variety of available offers appeal to a wide range of demographics.
Consumers can sign up to receive free samples of some of the top brands including Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, Estée Lauder, Godiva, Huggies, Sephora, Starbucks, Yankee Candle, and more.
Legal Compliance
One of the most important things in making a sweepstakes offer is to ensure that it complies with the laws in the territories in which you are making the offer. If you’re a newbie or inexperienced at running online contests, you can get tangled up in several pitfalls if you’re trying to do an online giveaway yourself.
To ensure your success, it makes more sense to work with a reputable sweepstakes provider who can make the whole process easy, while ensuring compliance and success.
Interest Media offers expertise and a range of services and solutions to help you achieve effective promotions.
Co-registration and lead generation with Interest Media solutions
Among the properties are “The American Sweepstakes,” Free Samples Pro USA,” “Top Survey Spot,” and “Prime Reward Spot.”
Among the available traffic types are co-registration, host & post, offerwalls, linkouts, and warm transfer calls. Offer categories such as insurance, debt, home services, mass torts, and more are available.
In all of its advertising efforts, Interest Media puts its primary focus on the consumer. Interest Media understands that the most important component of a successful advertising campaign is the positive experience of the consumer.
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