You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king.” It means that content is often what brings people to your site, helps them develop an affinity with you/your brand, and even entices them to purchase. It also means that it can help your giveaway be amazingly successful. How can you create a giveaway content plan of your own? Read on…
Crafting a Giveaway Content Plan
As with most things in marketing, your content will perform best—and help your giveaway most—if you plan it out ahead of time.
There are really three phases to your giveaway content plan: The pre-giveaway phase, the giveaway phase, and the post-giveaway phase.
Each one of these phases should have multiple pieces of content, each piece of content should build on the last, and they should also likely be different kinds of content (images, blog posts, videos, etc.).
Let’s break down each phase.
The Pre-Giveaway Content Phase
As you might expect, the “pre-giveaway” phase comes before your giveaway goes live. The purpose of this phase is to pique interest in your giveaway and get people excited about it in advance.
Getting people excited about your giveaway before it even goes live helps to increase people’s emotional attachment to the giveaway prize and can even help drum up a frenzy of desire for the prize. Those “Oh my gosh, I want to win this so bad! I can’t WAIT until I can enter!!!!” comments on Facebook? Those are the result of pre-giveaway content.
You can keep the content in this phase relatively simple, posting “a huge prize is coming soon”-style posts and pictures, teasing interest. The most effective way to do this is gradually releasing more and more information about the prize and how amazing it will be.
The Giveaway Content Phase
After you’ve spent some time getting people excited about your giveaway, it will be time to reveal your full prize. And when do you do that? The first day your giveaway is live!
The content in the giveaway phase is likely what you think of when you think of “marketing your giveaway”—you post things on Facebook, you post images on Instagram, etc.
But content during this phase of your giveaway content plan is exceptionally important for driving entrants, so challenge yourself to get creative with your content. You could post a video of someone using your prize or even post a video of someone talking about how much they want to win the prize.
You could post images of the prize with different backdrops and in different scenarios, and you could create blog posts about how best to use the prize.
The more interesting content you create during your giveaway, the more people will enter—and the more people will share your giveaway with their friends.
The Post-Giveaway Content Phase
This is the phase that most people neglect…and that’s a big mistake.
The purpose of your post-giveaway phase is to, first, reassure people that someone did actually win the prize. But, after that, it’s your opportunity to get people further involved with your brand—and get them excited for your next giveaway.
Your winner might let you post a picture of them (make sure you get their permission!) but even if not, you can post his or her first name, last initial, and the city they live in. This just helps prove that you’re trustworthy and that real people do win your giveaways. (No one wants to enter a giveaway if there’s no chance at all of winning.)
Once you’ve done this, though, the follow-up posts in your giveaway content plan should connect your brand to the prize you gave away.
Say, for example, that you own an aromatherapy online store and the prize you gave away was an essential oil diffuser. You could create blog posts or videos about how to use the diffuser, tips for maximum relaxation using the diffuser, or other things that will make people want to purchase the diffuser from you!
Then you can also tease your next giveaway—but you need to be clear that the next prize won’t be the same as the last one. If people think they have the chance again to win a diffuser, they won’t buy one. But if they might have the chance to win something that goes with it? They might buy a diffuser and enter your giveaway.
With a little planning, your content can add a lot of fun and excitement to your giveaways and help keep the momentum going!
