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KickoffLabs Blog:

How to Run a Successful Instagram Giveaway


By Meagan Kral

Jun 17th, 2023


Instagram giveaways have become a popular and effective strategy for businesses to create excitement, generate user-generated content, and increase their reach. And for good reason, as Instagram is one of the most popular social platforms worldwide. Businesses that use Instagram can reach more than 1 billion people or roughly 16 percent of the world’s population. With the right strategy in place, Instagram can be used as a vital business tool to build your brand, boost visibility, and grow a loyal customer base.

However, organizing and executing a giveaway requires careful planning and strategy. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the essential steps and share valuable tips to help you run a successful Instagram giveaway. From setting clear goals and choosing enticing prizes to promoting your giveaway and measuring its impact, we’ll cover all the crucial aspects you need to know. Get ready to take your Instagram presence to new heights by mastering the art of running a successful giveaway!

Instagram giveaway social share imnage

What is an Instagram Giveaway?

Instagram posts often serve as the jumping-off point for giveaways and contests on the platform, with participants being asked to follow a particular set of instructions to be eligible to win a free product or prize. With the right strategy, this campaign may bring in new customers and significantly expand your brand’s audience and participation.

An Instagram giveaway is a wise choice for getting your customers excited and bringing in new customers or clients.

Instagram giveaway Blacksteel

Elements of a Successful Instagram Giveaway

Before you launch your giveaway, you should establish your goals, audience, prize, how your followers will participate, and how long your contest should run.

You should use all possible avenues to advertise your giveaway with plenty of notice so your audience isn’t caught off-guard.

Contest rules template

Include relevant regulations when promoting the contest on your website, a dedicated landing page, and other social media channels. Within the rules/terms, you’ll want to include specifics such as the campaign length, prizes, if the giveaway is only open to certain residents, what would disqualify a lead etc. Not sure where to start? That’s okay! We’ve created a best practices guide here along with a boilerplate template to help get your giveaway started on the right track. You can also download a copy of the template here.

Maven Pet IG

Why You Should Run An Instagram Giveaway

Attract A Larger Audience

Customers must follow that brand on Instagram to enter a contest hosted by a major company. With this method, you may increase your Instagram followers and the number of people who enter your contest without doing anything extra. Although most of your submissions will come from those already following you, as word of your giveaway spreads, you may expect a rise in the number of people who enter.

Raise Participation Rates

Instagram contests may increase interaction on the post announcing the offer and all your posts. Suppose the algorithm determines that your material is receiving much higher levels of engagement than normal. In that case, it will show it to even more people, increasing the overall level of interaction.

Get the fort IG

Boost Exposure And Impact

Your Instagram giveaway may do the same for your brand’s exposure. There is a direct correlation between the amount of interaction with your giveaway posts and the number of times those posts are displayed to followers. Keeping your material in the forefront of your audience’s feeds by encouraging them to engage with it can help you get more followers.

Collaborate With Other Brands And Businesses

And last, Instagram giveaways are a fantastic chance to work together. Many businesses conduct giveaways together. If your business produces a complementary product to another’s, you can work together to offer a nicely packaged combination of your products.

Setting Goals For Your Instagram Giveaway

You should first establish your objectives before organizing an Instagram giveaway. You might adjust your approach in the preliminary phases by considering your giveaway’s end aim. After the giveaway, you can also use this method to evaluate the outcome and determine whether it successfully achieved your goals.

Before you start giving something away, stop for a second and consider your goals. Depending on your situation, you might have one or many objectives.

Some of your possible goals might be as follows:

  • Increase your Instagram followers.
  • Expand your list of newsletter subscribers.
  • Acquiring more people to visit your site or blog can help you reach more people.
  • Promote brand-new goods and services by increasing their visibility.
  • Capture fan-created content (UGC) and utilize it in your advertising.
  • Boost sales through advertising.
  • Acquire more Instagram likes to skyrocket your interaction rates.

Keeping track of your results is one of the most important things to remember regarding your objectives.

You shouldn’t stress if you can’t immediately conceive of a way to evaluate your success. As you will see in the coming paragraphs, there are some really easy ways to do this.

Nobo IG

Instagram Giveaway Post Strategies

Boosting your Instagram followers and increasing engagement and brand awareness are important goals to have, but what if we told you there’s a tried and true marketing strategy that goes hand in hand with running successful online campaigns? Yep… you gussed it, OG email collection.

Collecting emails is vital when running an Instagram giveaway for several reasons. First and foremost, email collection allows you to build a direct and personal line of communication with your audience whether they are on our off Instagram. By obtaining participants’ email addresses, you can establish a long-term relationship with them, keeping them informed about your brand, promotions, and future giveaways. Email addresses provide a valuable asset for your marketing efforts. With a well-curated email list, you can segment your audience, send targeted campaigns, and nurture leads to drive conversions. By integrating email collection into your Instagram giveaway strategy, you unlock the potential to maximize your brand’s reach, foster customer loyalty, and generate tangible business results.

Successful Instagram contests may be done in a variety of ways. These are some of our tried-and-true post strategies for increasing interaction and fostering brand loyalty:

  • Create a giveaway post with a link to your giveaway landing page or newsletter where the leads can sign-up for further details on the giveaway, share with friends, and complete additional actions for extra points.
  • Add the contest URL to your Bio + Linktr.ee. You can even add UTM parameters to the end of the URL that gets captured with the lead for even more in-depth tracking.
  • Post the giveaway on Instagram Reels and Stories to further increase your reach! Be sure the pin them

We’e also included some quick, fun, optional contest posts that you can create alongside your main giveaway campaign to further engage your followers:

  • Caption contest
  • Collaboration with other brands
  • Follow, like, or comment to win.
  • Follower reward milestones
  • Hashtag contest
  • Link in bio forms/email list signups
  • Photo Challenge/user-generated content
  • Repost or share to your Instagram Story
  • Tag a friend
  • Trivia contest

Fuzzy Pet IG

How to Use KickoffLabs to Set-up Your Next Instagram Giveaway!

When it comes to running a successful Instagram giveaway, utilizing a reliable and efficient platform is crucial. With our robust features and user-friendly interface, KickoffLabs offers the ultimate hassle-free solution for maximizing the impact of your giveaway. Seamlessly connect your Instagram account with our Instagram Actions, track entrants & referrals, and generate leads effortlessly.

kol ig landing page template

Simply visit KickoffLabs and get started with our ready to launch Instagram template or select from our other awesome landing page design templates Already have an existing site set-up? Integrate your own external page with our Anyform integration or KickoffLabs pop-up. Your custom landing page acts as the hub of your giveaway, funneling visitors and entrants to your Instagram profile and content.

kol Instagram campaign type

KickoffLabs automatically sets contest settings based on the Instagram campaign that you chose. For example, the scoring is set to referrals + actions which is excellent for boosting your Instagram follower count with little effort on your part. You simply design and launch the contest (with the help of KickoffLabs) and send out your launch hype announcements. As your first participants respond and enter they will be incentivized to spread the word about your contest to their network of friends and followers to earn additional entries for themselves.

kickofflabs instagram curated scoring

To help gain Instagram followers even faster, our Instagram Growth campaign automatically includes Instagram specific actions that leads can take in exchange for a bonus point or two.

kickofflabs instagram actions

Take the difficult decision of choosing a winner off your plate by letting KickoffLabs choose the winner for you with our Pick a Winner feature! Choose from a weighted contest that increases entrant’s odds of being selected based on their participation and referrals, or opt to have the tool select a winner or winners at random. Either way, the winner is selected with no heavy lifting (or complex math skills) required on your part.

kickofflabs pick a winner feature

Follow-Up After The Giveaway

Users enter contests for the possibility of winning. Therefore, rewarding them for their participation is essential through revealing the winners. If you don’t announce the winners of your contest publicly, people may start to doubt your legitimacy since they may assume the whole thing was a scam.

contest ended message

Best practices for announcing the winner:

  • Add a “Giveaway ended, winners have been notified” message on the landing page.
  • To announce the winner, make a new Instagram post and tag them. Announcing the winners publicly helps to build brand trust.
  • Post the results to Instagram Stories, but highlight them, so they stay up longer than a day and in turn receive more engagement.
  • Be sure to also send an email out directly to the winners, just incase they didn’t catch the results on social.
  • Send a follow-up email to those who didn’t win thanking them for taking the time to participate. Consider adding in a discount code or small freebie in the email. This can delight your runner up(s), and encourage them to participate in a future campaign or even become a customer.

Conclusion

Running an Instagram giveaway has never been easier, and you can get started today with the help of KickoffLabs. By leveraging our expert resources and viral referral capabilities, you can quickly set up an engaging giveaway that captures the attention of your target audience, expands your follower base, and boosts your brand’s visibility on Instagram. Don’t wait any longer, take the leap and launch your Instagram giveaway today, and watch your social media presence soar to new heights. Need help getting started? email out support team at support@kickofflabs.com.

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