What are the goals of your giveaway? 

You could choose anything for your giveaway; a bottle of champagne, a helpful book, a membership, or a shout-out on your social media channel, but what do you want to achieve and how can you make the experience memorable? Is ordering a bottle of prosecco from Amazon and shipping it to your winners enough? What do your winners want, and expect and how can you exceed expectations? 

What was the first or last thing you won, can you remember? 

From a marketing perspective do you want.... more social media engagement, community building, and brand awareness or do you want to capture email addresses, newsletter sign-ups, or feedback survey completions to get your hands on some valuable data? 

Whose budget is your giveaway coming from?

We all like to get what we pay for, so if it's coming from another departments budget, make sure you know what their goals are and how much they have to spend. 

- Events dept 

- Sales dept 

- HR/People and Culture dept 

- Cost code for a particular brand or office? 

- Part of a stand-alone project? 

- Or is everyone dipping their fingers in the marketing pot? 

When have you got planned for your giveaway mechanic? 

From start to finish, how do people find out about your giveaway, how do they take part and what are the T's and C's (When does the competition end, how many times can they enter, when and how are winners notified, etc.)?

- Are you going with a social media post, tag a friend, and ensure you're both following the page? 

- Maybe you're launching a podcast and want to encourage listening so you're sending an email campaign? 

- You'd like to grow your audience and database with like-minded folk to that of your current fanbase so you've come up with a        recommend-a-friend giveaway you'll be sending out via email. 

- You running a social media ad with a form? 

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• You host regular events and you’d like to give away a gift to those who sign up as part of the FOMO campaign - if you sign up at the early bird price we’ll send you a gift.

• It might be as simple as you are attending an event or tradeshow and looking for prizes on the stand.

Whatever it might be and whatever your budget might be, this is where branded merchandise can lend itself so well.

Branded merchandise for competitions and giveaways

‘The recall rate for a promotional product is a recorded 85% for some products.’ (Forbes) The article also goes on to tell us that ‘Consumers have learned to ignore most forms of advertising,’ that gets you thinking about where your budget might be better spent doesn’t it?

We say go branded for your competition every time, and here are a host of reasons why:

1. Always promote your brand, and boost brand awareness at every opportunity.

2. The recipient will know and remember where the gift came from throughout the lifespan of the gift.

3. If your winner posts a photo on their social feed of their prize everyone within reach of their post will see your brand.

4. You can buy and brand in bulk, choose the quality and purchase gifts for marketing campaigns across the year while benefitting from the scale.

5. You can ensure branches, brands and cost codes within your organisation are using your branded merch stock and not putting random meaningless treats on their company credit card, keeping promotional gifts and prizes firmly on brand and good quality.

6. If you are collaborating or donating a prize, what a great way to spread awareness by providing a branded offering.

7. Just because an item is branded does not mean it’s cheap or low quality, we provide branded gift hampers full of well-known branded treats, branded merch from well-known eco-suppliers, products made to last from stainless steel, from recognisable consumer brands such as Fossil and Black and Blum.

8. If you are giving away prizes at a large event or tradeshow, your winners will likely collect a lot of stuff throughout the day from brochures to gadgets, pens, pens and more pens and be taking it all home. You want your merch to get on that train or in that car and go home with them, and remember which stand and lovely people the prize came from.

Giveaways with prize gift codes and redemption sites

If your competition is large-scale with lots of prizes, or different tiers of prizes, or it runs for a long period of time, you could benefit from a redemption site - we create online branded web stores for multiple winners to claim their gifts. In a nutshell, you procure your branded merch and issue a gift code to your winner to claim their prize. You can have different codes, and different tiers of gifts without them even knowing. You can even pick out a selection of gifts for the store to the value of the code issued and your winner gets to choose their prize (who doesn’t love to choose their prize? Think of those holidays when you went to the arcade on the pier!). Prize winners enter their own address details for delivery of their gift, another job you don’t have to take care of!

If we haven’t convinced you that your next competition prize should be branded then get in touch and we can talk to you about it a little bit more.

Find us on all the usual social channels, email us sales@initialincentives.com or catch us on the online chat (bottom right of your screen).