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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Looking for small business giveaway ideas?
Small businesses often face an uphill battle against big-budget competitors. Giveaways offer a powerful, budget-friendly way to level the playing field, attract new customers, boost brand awareness, and nurture lasting loyalty.
In this guide, we’ll look at 23 giveaway ideas for small businesses to help you win more customers.
While the theoretical benefits of giveaways are compelling, let’s look at some real-world case study examples of how successful giveaways have driven results for businesses:
These case studies show the power of giveaways. When done right, they can grow your email list, drive brand recognition, increase your social media followers, and ultimately boost sales.
Since this article is pretty long, here’s a breakdown of the best giveaway ideas for businesses we’ve found:
Giveaways and sweepstakes that run for a limited time are the perfect way to create a sense of urgency amongst your audience. For instance, a high-value and desirable prize, coupled with limited time to enter the contest, makes people fear they’ll miss out, which spurs them on to enter.
Add a countdown timer into the mix, and people will be scrambling to participate.
A scheduled contest can create the same kind of buzz. Instead of a one-off social media contest, you can run an online contest regularly to reward loyal customers.
An easy way to do this is to run a giveaway every month and use the Automatic Entries action in RafflePress. People will simply visit your giveaway and sign up without doing anything else.
To ensure only customers enter, you could publish the contest on a landing page and only share the URL with customers via email.
Pro Tip: Let your audience know about your giveaway by sharing links to it on social media and in your email newsletter. But don’t stop there.
To maximize participation, promote your giveaway relentlessly through multiple channels. Consider partnering with influencers, running targeted social media ads, and prominently featuring the giveaway on your website.
A spin-the-wheel contest is a fantastic way to encourage optins to your email list, which is another way to nurture customer loyalty.
The way it works is participants enter their email addresses for a chance to spin the prize wheel and be in with the chance of winning them. It’s a fun way for entrants to participate, and if they win, the sense of achievement will make them feel amazing.
This guide shows you how to create a Spin to Win optin easily.
A photo caption this photo contest is a fun giveaway idea for businesses to get people engaged in your product or service. It works by posting a photo and challenging participants to write the best caption to go along with it.
The image could be your product in a funny setting or your team behind the scenes. Just be sure to keep it relevant to your audience so they’ll be interested.
You can then get people to enter by writing their captions in the comments, making it a giveaway idea ideal for posting on your blog or social media platforms.
Another engaging idea that’s similar is asking your audience to fill in the blanks to enter the contest.
You can start by writing a simple sentence and leaving a blank space where a word should go. Entrants have to add their own words to complete the sentence.
Here’s an example:
“This product makes me ________in the shower” - Fill in the blank! What does it make you do?
This is a great way to get people thinking about your products. You could even offer a free product giveaway as a prize.
Pro Tip: Choose a prize that your target audience will find exciting and valuable. The prize must appeal to and be relevant to your business and the lucky winners.
Offering something loosely related might attract entries, but not necessarily from your ideal customers. A tightly focused prize will help ensure the people entering are genuinely interested in what you have to offer rather than simply a chance to win free stuff.
Photo contests are low-cost giveaway ideas that help you collect user-generated content (UGC) and are a great way to engage your audience by getting them to participate. You can choose a theme related to your business or even have participants share a photo of themselves with your products.
For example, you could ask users for a photo submission wearing your swag, such as a tote bag or company T-shirt.
RafflePress even has a Submit an Image Action to make gathering image submissions simple.
Even better, it solves 2 problems with a single solution:
So, if one of your main goals is to increase site traffic, running a social media photo contest is the ideal solution.
Like photo contests, running a video contest works well to get people excited. But where video contests shine is when they’re used alongside video submission sites like YouTube.
For example, let’s say you want to get more subscribers on YouTube. A smart move for this goal would be to run a giveaway that asks people to submit a video to enter. Participants could then unlock more entries by visiting your YouTube channel and watching one of your videos.
But what would they include in their videos? Entrants could video themselves talking about your product. Or, to be even more creative, they could design an advertisement for your product. With these online giveaway ideas, the options are limitless!
Hashtag contests are terrific if you’re running social media giveaways and want your business to stand out. This type of giveaway is ideal for Twitter, Instagram giveaways, and other social networks that use hashtags extensively.
But what is a hashtag contest?
A Hashtag contest is where you ask people to post on social media using a specific hashtag during a certain time frame. Then, winners are drawn at random from among the verified entries.
The time limit creates a feeling of urgency, while the hashtag makes your brand much more visible on each social media network you use. Want to take your business to the next level? Learn more about the best giveaway hashtags to use in this guide.
Another of my top contest ideas for businesses is to ask people to spot the difference between 2 almost identical images.
This is particularly useful if your business offers graphic-heavy products or services. Design agencies, for instance, would have no trouble putting this contest together. And it provides the perfect opportunity for your team to show off their skills.
The person who spots the most differences could win a money-off coupon code or even a free design session.
A super-effective way to promote products to your audience is to ask them to customize your product for a chance to win the contest. This is a fun way for people to show off their creativity while keeping your brand top of mind.
Once you’ve created a shortlist of potential winners, you could ask participants to vote for their favorite design.
Using RafflePress, the best giveaway plugin for WordPress makes running a voting contest easy. Choose the Polls and Surveys action to allow people to choose their favorite submission.
Then, the person with the most votes wins!
The good thing about extending your giveaway is that it still generates engagement after people have submitted their entries.
If you have the budget, a great prize idea is to offer a fully customized version of the product to the winner.
These giveaway idea for businesses are perfect if you’re about to launch a new product and want to raise awareness around it. All you need to do is create a contest where people have to create a catchy product name to enter.
You could promote the giveaway by sharing the best suggestions on social media as they come in. And as for the prize, winners could receive the product in question.
One of the best ways to build a buzz around a new product is to run a promotional campaign before the launch date. The prize can be an advance copy of the product.
Doing a contest like this can help you build a stronger relationship with your customers. After all, they’ll be in with a chance of getting their hands on something no one else has yet. Just make sure you promote the giveaway effectively. These promotional giveaway ideas to grow your business will help with that.
Encourage a wave of purchases with an irresistible offer: a free gift with every purchase. This strategy delights your customers and adds an element of surprise to their shopping experience.
Whether it’s a complementary product or a sample of your latest offering, this gesture can boost customer satisfaction and drive immediate sales. It’s a win-win: customers feel valued, and your products get the spotlight they deserve.
Guess the object games focus on boosting brand loyalty. To run giveaways like this, you can post an obscured image of one of your products and ask people if they are familiar enough with your brand to guess what it is.
The winner could be the first person to guess the answer correctly, or you could draw the winner randomly from all correct answers.
You can even use this idea to run an Instagram giveaway.
Want to really get your audience involved with your business? Then why not have them make some of the decisions for you?
Picking a new logo, for example, isn’t easy. But getting your audience to help you choose will make them feel more invested and play a large part in securing their loyalty.
You can make this happen by posting the different logo options and polling your audience for their favorite version. The logo with the most votes will be the winner.
As a thank you to everyone who entered with the winning choice, you could offer a gift card to spend on your site.
How about you pitch your customers against each other in a brand trivia giveaway? This is the perfect giveaway idea for businesses to find out who your most loyal fans are while offering a way to reward them for that loyalty.
First, put together a list of questions about your business. Then, ask participants to submit their answers, which you can easily do with the Answer a Question action. Then, you can pick the winner from all valid answers.
Do you need to do some market research for your local business and want to find out what people are looking for in your brand? Asking your audience to develop a slogan is a great way to get the local community involved. You could then have the community vote on their top five slogans and offer prizes to the winners.
People love the opportunity to tell a story, so why not use this as a way for people to enter your giveaway? This is a valuable way for small business owners to generate buzz, especially if the stories people tell are about the services you offer.
Have people enter the contest by sharing how they first heard about you. Or the story could be about how your product or service helped them improve their lives.
For example, you can ask them to comment on the giveaway social media post and add the link in your giveaway widget to confirm the entry.
You can then pick a winner based on the most compelling story or choose a winner at random.
Quizzes are a fantastic way to increase conversion rates, but it’s essential to understand your audience well to make quizzes work. For instance, if your audience loves beauty and fashion, they probably won’t be interested in a quiz about football.
So analyze your audience and create a quiz they’ll genuinely love. Then, on the last page of the quiz, you can add your giveaway.
The result for you is more information about your customers and the chance of winning a fantastic prize for your audience.
These creative ideas allow your audience to perform an act of kindness for someone else. To enter, they nominate someone they think deserves to win, and the winning nominee can receive a special prize related to your brand in return.
You can use the RafflePress Invent Your Own action to set up this type of contest. Ask people to leave the name of the person they’re nominating and a brief description of why they deserve to win.
Alternatively, you can ask them to comment on your blog or social media and paste the comment URL as proof.
Keep the momentum going by offering discount vouchers for customers’ next purchases. This clever tactic thanks them for their current purchase but also gives them a reason to return.
It’s a gentle nudge towards building loyalty and ensuring that your brand stays top of mind. Tailor these discounts to match your customers’ interests, and you’ll see them coming back, voucher in hand, ready for their next delightful find.
Expand your reach and tap into new audiences by partnering with other businesses for your giveaway. This collaborative approach introduces your products to a wider audience while offering a diverse and appealing prize package.
Choose partners whose products or services complement yours, ensuring the partnership feels cohesive and aligned with your brand values. This strategy broadens your exposure but also fosters community and cooperation amongst local businesses.
Scavenger hunts are also unique giveaway ideas for businesses. Local businesses can get their local community involved with their brand. You can hide objects in and around your business location and have participants post pictures when they find them.
Alternatively, if your business doesn’t have a physical location, you can hide graphics around your website for people to spot and have them take screenshots as proof. Then you could offer a bundle of prizes to the top 3 winners.
While the ideas outlined above are excellent starting points, here are some additional strategies to consider:
Run a business giveaway easily with RafflePress, the Best WordPress giveaway plugin. It only takes a few minutes to set up a giveaway contest with its templates, customize it with actions that meet your marketing goals, and launch it to your audience.
Get started with RafflePress today!
We’ve come to the end of our list of small business giveaway ideas. Now, all that’s left is for you to create an online giveaway yourself.
If you’re going to follow our advice and run a photo contest, this step-by-step guide will help you get started.
For even more marketing and giveaway ideas to promote your business, check out the following guides:
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Tha k you so much! I’m starting a new Facebook business, but am on a very tight budget, and these are wonderful ideas!