How to Plan a Co-Branded Giveaway
There’s no better way to welcome the most wonderful time of the year than with a good ol’ Instagram giveaway. Giveaways are a great way to gain recognition, followers, and business on social media platforms. Plus, they provide an opportunity to give back to your followers during the season of giving! Read on to learn more about how to plan a giveaway.
COLLABORATE WITH OTHER BRANDS
Our biggest tip is to participate in co-branded giveaways! The goal when doing this is to partner with brands that have a similar target audience to you, but is also not your competitor. For example, if you’re a baby clothing brand, you might want to coordinate a giveaway with a lactation specialist or a nursing clothing brand. Both brands target mama’s with babies, but sell entirely different products! Another general rule of thumb is to find brands that have the same range of followers as you. You can find an example of one of our client’s co-branded giveaways here.
Once you’ve conducted research, note all of your findings in a spreadsheet, like our Giveaway + Influencer Outreach Spreadsheet. This will be a master list of potential brands you could collaborate with. Be sure to include their Instagram handle, following, email, and a notes section to indicate the current status of your communication with them.
Before you reach out, we recommend creating a 2-4 page PDF to attach to your email that details more information about your brand. Include images of your product or service and share a little more about what you have to offer. Once this is complete, begin emailing your pitch and PDF to brands!
SHOOT IMAGERY
Once you have brands on board and a date is selected, it is time to shoot imagery! You can either send all brands an address to ship product and have them photographed together or you can have each brand send you their own images that you will incorporate into a graphic and/or carousel post. If you’re on a time crunch, opt for the graphic, but if time allows, we love when giveaways have prizes photographed together!
DEFINE GIVEAWAY GUIDELINES + CREATE COPY
When writing copy, there are a few things to ensure you include. First, have “GIVEAWAY” written in the first line of your caption to capture the attention of your audience. Follow this with a clear explanation of what the winner will win, what they have to do to enter, and when the giveaway will end. For co-branded giveaways, a typical giveaway guideline involves following all participating brands. Other requirements could include liking the post, tagging a friend in the comments, or sharing the post to their story and tagging you. To sum it up:
Suggested Giveaway Guidelines:
Like the post
Tag a friend (or more) in the comments
Share the post to their story (typically for extra entries)
How long should the giveaway run for?
We’d say one week is pretty standard, but definitely max should be two weeks!
SHARE, SHARE, SHARE
After drafting imagery and copy, send it over to all brands for approval. Once everything is finalized, get ready to SHARE! Promote the giveaway both on your feed and stories to increase the chances of your followers seeing it. For extra exposure, consider sharing the giveaway in Facebook groups, with your email list, or even on your website!
PICK + CONTACT A WINNER
One to two weeks later, your giveaway will come to a close. We recommend picking a winner using commentpicker.com and double checking that the selected winner completed all entry requirements. Run the giveaway winner by all brands for approval and then reach out via DM to let them know they won. Be sure to collect their email and mailing address from them so you can ship them their prizes!
We hope this blog post was helpful for you in planning your next giveaway! In the meantime, we’ll catch ya on the ‘Gram and in our weekly social media newsletter. Chat soon!
xx- The Homies
