Instagram Competitions – A How-To

10 Aug Instagram Competitions – A How-To

Running an Instagram competition or giveaway is a great opportunity to gain more followers and build your brand identity. It also allows you to turn one lucky winner into a brand advocate for life! We’ve looked at the rules you need to consider when you’re setting up your competition, now we take a look at some of the logistics of running a giveaway that you might not have thought about.

Set Goals

You need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, this will dictate what type of competition you run. You will need to make sure that you then put in place a strategy for registering your entries and measuring the success of the competition.

To quote some delicious marketing and business jargon… make your goals S.M.A.R.T.: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

Have a Clear Plan

Once you have your clear and measurable goals, you can plan how to reach them. So what do you need to think about when putting your plan together? Here are some things to think about.

What do you want entrants to do? What rules should you put into place? How long will your competition last? Will you use a competition hashtag? How will you choose your winner?

The answers to these questions will help you to build your plan. When designing your rules make sure you refer to our blog on Running Instagram Competitions – rules.

Make it easy to enter

When you are dealing with social media you must remember to cater for the absolute lowest common denominator. Explain everything as if you are speaking to a child – this leaves less margin for misinterpretation. Instagram is almost exclusively used on mobile devices so the entry process needs to be simple.

Choose a relevant prize

Your prize should be valuable enough to tempt people into entering the contest, but not so valuable that it attracts people who aren’t really interested in your brand. Products or online store gift cards are a great way to not only introduce the winner to your brand but will make them feel a certain amount of loyalty to your company.

Cross-promote

Just because your competition is being run on Instagram doesn’t mean that you can’t promote it on other channels. Not all of your followers will prioritise Instagram, so make sure you use all of your channels to direct people to your Instagram in order to maximise exposure and the number of entries you get.

It’s as simple as including a link to your Instagram post – make it as easy to find as possible.

Instagram ads

You can extend your reach by using Instagram adverts and post boosting if you have some budget to do so. This way you can accurately target your perfect demographic and increase the exposure of your competition.

Setting a budget is an important aspect of any competition. You might want to set your limit at £200 for the total cost, which will leave you with £100 worth of products and postage costs as well as promotion funds.

Measure your results

Deciding what makes your competition a success will depend on what you want from it in the long run. You could look at the number of entrants and comments, your follower count, Google Analytics to see if your engagement spiked, webshop statistics, and general engagement types.

Make sure you learn something from what you’ve done. Did you have questions on how to enter? Maybe you made it too complicated. Did people complain about the prize value? Improve for next time.

All this information will make the next competition more refined.

Use custom audiences

Running a competition should increase the amount of interaction you see through the channel. You can use those interactions to build a custom audience for your Instagram adverts and when the contest is over you can make sure you remain visible to them even if they don’t follow your account.

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