Are Customized Business Giveaways Still An Effective Marketing Tool?

Through customized business giveaways, you can expose your products or services to your target audience in an engaging and loyalty-building manner. The giving away of custom-made promotional gifts leaves a lasting impression on customer’s minds and allows them to perceive your brand in a fresh and positive light.

In the same way that rewards promote loyalty, giveaways incentivize new customers to engage with your brand. They also increase the likelihood of them choosing to make a future investment with your business.

In this article, we’ll break down exactly what giveaways are and take a closer look at the most successful giveaway trends and strategies

What are customized business giveaways?

Similar to a raffle, giveaways require people to enter their details or share promotional content online in exchange for a chance to win a prize.

For example, a fashion brand may want to generate interest in a new line of clothing by putting together a selection of their best items and offering them to one lucky customer in the form of a giveaway. This marketing tactic would be costly and exhaustive by traditional standards, but the internet makes giveaways easy and highly beneficial for big companies.

Giveaways provide customers with an opportunity to experience a new service or product, ultimately drawing attention to the brand and encouraging positive testimonials. A customized business giveaway is much the same as a regular giveaway, only with emphasis on the uniqueness or customization of a business’s giveaway package.

Some enterprises will partner up with other businesses to bulk up the giveaway prize and extend a further reach into the online public.

Most giveaways are advertised on social media platforms. There are billions of active users who have nothing to lose by commenting, tagging or sharing promotional content in exchange for a chance of winning an exciting assortment of prizes.

What are the benefits of including customized business giveaways in your marketing strategy?

There are many powerful benefits of running giveaways for big brands and enterprises:

1. Generate more leads

If you want to increase sales and generate more leads for your business, giveaways are one way to achieve that.

In exchange for the chance to win, you can require each entrant to complete an action or task, such as following you on social media, subscribing to your newsletter or completing a survey. Essentially, it can be anything you think will lead to business growth. 

2. Improve your product/services exposure

Offering a new product or service can feel risky because its success will depend on how well it’s initially received. You can use giveaways to spark interest and excitement around your new product, improving exposure and building further awareness for your brand.

3. Boost website traffic

Even though most giveaways are advertised on social media, studies suggest they can boost website traffic too.

One way to achieve this is to use a third-party app that requires entrants to land on your website before their entry is deemed official. If you incorporate a webpage into the entry process, it will attract many new customers who might never have seen the website if not for your giveaway.

4. Engage with your existing customers

It can be easy to get distracted by new customers when it comes to online engagement, but your existing followers make up the bulk of your audience, and they deserve your full attention.

Online followers need maintenance. Running an exciting giveaway every few months can serve as an incentive to continue paying attention to your brand. Plus, it allows active followers to feel as though you’re making an effort to interact with them.

How to get the best giveaway marketing results

Every marketing idea needs a backbone strategy. Now that you have gathered enough information about what giveaways are and why they are so important. Let's find out exactly how to get the best results out of your giveaway.

Create a timeline

Before anything else, you and your marketing team will need to create a timeline. Determine dates and times for the promotion, launch and winner announcement several weeks (or months) ahead of time, and prepare all necessary content for the giveaway.

Pick a relevant prize

The success of your giveaway will largely depend on what the prize is. Ideally, it should be customized, useful and relevant to your brand. You can also offer smaller runner-up prizes such as keychains, customized koozies, or t-shirts that feature your company logo. This adds value to your promotion and ensures even more potential customers are exposed to your brand.

The best giveaway prize will be one that appeals to both your brand and its audience, not one over the other.

Partner up with non-competitive brands

Partnering up with other brands can not only bulk up the prize and make people more likely to enter, but it will also drastically improve your audience reach.

Each additional brand or influencer that contributes to the giveaway will promote it on their own pages. This exposes your business to a whole new list of potential customers.

Promote and upload your giveaway

Once you have finally smoothed out all the above details, it’s time to start promoting your giveaway before it becomes officially active.

Most brands will leave the giveaway open for several days (or just over a week) to give followers ample time to discover the content and choose to enter.  

Final thoughts

The concept behind a customized business giveaway is simple. People like to receive complementary goods, especially when it comes to big brands. Giveaways appeal to this instinct, attracting both new and old customers in a fun and interactive way.

Don’t forget to track the performance of your giveaway on an analytics app to see what areas work best and which areas can be improved upon. This provides clear metrics that you can base future promotions on.

When correctly executed, customized giveaways add value and are an incredible marketing tool with a high ROI.