RafflePress Logo
RafflePress announcement for review actions

New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation

Introducing RafflePress's new leave-a-review giveaway actions. Boost customer engagement and build trust effortlessly by incentivizing reviews in WordPress.
How to Run an Influencer Giveaway in WordPress

How to Run an Influencer Giveaway in WordPress: Best Practices & Tactics

Written By: author image Stacey Corrin
author image Stacey Corrin
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.
     Reviewed By: John Turner
reviewer image John Turner
John Turner is the co-founder of RafflePress. He has over 20+ years of business and development experience and his plugins have been downloaded over 25 million times.

Do you want to run an influencer giveaway?

Running a successful influencer giveaway is an effective way to boost brand awareness, grow your social media followers, and drive traffic to your business website. In this guide, we’ll show you how to run an influencer giveaway in WordPress step-by-step.

What Makes Someone an Influencer?

An influencer is someone with persuasive power over your target audience. They typically have expert knowledge or authority on a specific topic, which makes their content valuable to their fans. 

The large presence of influencers in their niche makes influencers the ideal launch pad for brands looking to boost their credibility. In fact, research shows that 93% of marketers have used influencer marketing, considering it a key marketing strategy.

Initially, influencers were high-profile figures like celebrities or athletes. However, the rise of social media has made different types of influencers more popular.

Nowadays, influencers can fit into the following categories:

  • Celebrities like artists, pop stars, and athletes
  • Thought leaders and experts in a specific industry
  • Social media influencers, known as micro-influencers
  • Content creators and bloggers

Micro-influencers, content creators, and bloggers form the bulk of influencer marketing today. They’re more cost-effective for growing brands, giving them quick access to the credibility they need.

Why Run an Influencer Giveaway?

Running an influencer giveaway campaign allows you to tap into the credibility and authority of an influencer’s reputation. When an influencer promotes your giveaway, their followers are more likely to take it seriously because they trust the influencer’s recommendations.

Moreover, teaming up with an influencer helps more people learn about your brand.

By increasing your brand awareness on various social media platforms, you can reach a new audience interested in your niche. As a result, you can gain new followers, boost engagement rates, or even make more sales.

Renowned YouTube influencer Pewdiepie teamed up with Clutch Chairs in this influencer giveaway example.

Pewdiepie influencer giveaway example

They offered a huge bundle of big-ticket prizes, including a Clutch desk, Pewdiepie merch, a gaming monitor, and more.

To enter, participants were required to enter an email address, follow on social media and optionally share the post and tag their friends. On Facebook alone, the campaign generated almost 300 comments and over 2,000+ shares.

With that being said, let’s look at the steps to run an influencer giveaway on your WordPress website.

How to Run an Influencer Giveaway on WordPress

You can run giveaways virtually anywhere online, including social media platforms or online forums. However, these platforms leave little room to customize your giveaway and inevitably own the content you create.

That’s why we recommend running a giveaway on your business website. You’ll have full control over your giveaway’s design, content, and promotion, with the benefit of sending direct traffic to your website instead of a third-party platform.

For this guide, we’ll show you how to run an influencer giveaway in WordPress, the most popular website builder.

Step 1. Find the Right Influencers

First, you’ll need to find the right people for your influencer marketing campaign. These are the people with sway over your target audience and the following to increase your brand awareness.

To find the right social media influencers, you can:

  • Search LinkedIn for thought leaders and authority figures in your industry
  • Browse hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to find micro-influencers
  • Use Google search to find blog posts relevant to your niche
  • Try tools like Buzzsumo to find trending content and the authors who write it
  • Use social media tools to look for trending hashtags and topics
Find influencers using Buzzsumo

After finding the perfect influencer, you’ll need to convince them to work with your brand. The best influencers are often in high demand, so they’ll need a good reason to choose you over your competitors.

Here are some effective ways to connect with influencers:

  • Find influential figures who share an interest in your niche and gift them products or services in exchange for promoting your giveaway.
  • Look for bloggers with an impact in your industry and offer sponsorship to write a blog post advertising your giveaway.
  • Ask influencers to launch your giveaway on your website with a guest post.

The key is to find influencers with an audience who will find content about your brand relevant and valuable. This will ensure you get the best possible results.

Step 2. Plan Your Influencer Giveaway

After finding an influential figure to collaborate with, you’ll need a solid giveaway marketing plan. Your plan should include your campaign goals, the type of prize you’ll offer winners, and the rules for taking part.

Setting Giveaway Goals

Goals are crucial for ensuring your giveaway stays on track and can help measure its success when it’s over. Think about what you want your giveaway to achieve for your business, and devise a plan to accomplish it.

For example, if your main goal is to increase brand awareness, you’ll need a way for people to share your giveaway on social media. Alternatively, if the goal is to grow your email subscribers, entering your giveaway should require users to sign up with an email address.

Keep your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely to avoid confusion and overwhelm.

Choosing a Giveaway Prize

The giveaway prize is the incentive that will convince users to engage with your campaign. It should be relevant to your brand while offering enough value to your target audience to take action.

For instance, if you’re working with Instagram influencers in the beauty industry, your prize could be a new product not available elsewhere. An exclusive Instagram giveaway like this is an excellent way to generate hype, especially if it’s a trending product everyone wants to get their hands on.

What if you sell software? Consider offering a bundle of software products to give away to the lucky winner.

Thrive Themes did this with their Ultimate Tech Stack giveaway:

Thrive Themes tech stack giveaway RafflePress

They partnered with influential brands in their niche to offer the ultimate prize, with excellent results for everyone involved.

Thrive Themes tech stack giveaway prizes

For more inspiration, check out our in-depth list of giveaway prize ideas.

Setting Giveaway Rules

Your giveaway rules lay the groundwork for what entrants can expect when participating. It’s where users learn how to enter, who can participate, the prize on offer, and other relevant details.

You’ll need to display your rules clearly on your website and any giveaway posts on social media.

Some key giveaway rules include:

  • How to enter your giveaway
  • Any age or location restrictions
  • When the giveaway starts and ends
  • How you’ll choose and contact the winner
  • Partner and sponsor disclaimers
influencer giveaway rules

It’s also crucial to research the giveaway rules on relevant social media platforms. You may need to add a note claiming that your social media giveaway is not endorsed by or in partnership with the platform.

Step 3. Create Your Influencer Giveaway in WordPress

After planning your giveaway, you can start creating it on your WordPress website. The easiest way to do this is by using a giveaway tool or application.

Our favorite solution is RafflePress, one of the best WordPress giveaway plugins. It lets you build and run any giveaway on your WordPress website without code.

Instead of starting your giveaway from scratch, you can choose from several goal-based giveaway templates.

giveaway templates

They come pre-populated with entry methods that align with specific giveaway goals, including:

From there, you can customize your giveaway widget with the drag-and-drop builder, which lets you preview your campaign in real time.

Simply drag and drop from a range of 1-click entry actions to collect user-generated content, referrals, increase your number of followers, promote your Instagram account, or highlight a new product page.

With RafflePress’s settings, you can require users to verify their email addresses, enable spam protection, and even generate a set of giveaway rules automatically.

giveaway rules template

It’s also easy to publish your campaign.

You can use the ready-made WordPress block or shortcode to add your giveaway to posts, pages, or sidebars. Or use RafflePress’s distraction-free giveaway landing page feature, which takes seconds to launch.

influencer giveaway landing page

For a full step-by-step guide, see our instructions on how to create a successful giveaway with RafflePress.

Step 4. Promote the Giveaway with Your Influencers

When your giveaway is live, it’s time to promote it. This is where your influencer partnership is invaluable because they can broadcast your campaign to their followers to drive traffic and entries.

Here are some giveaway promotion tips that both you and your influencer can do:

  • Post an Announcement: Create an eye-catching post for you both to announce the giveaway across social media. This could be an image or a video showing the prize and explaining the rules.
  • Maintain Excitement: Continue the momentum with reminder posts throughout the giveaway. You could also mention the giveaway in blog posts, YouTube videos, live Instagram posts, or newsletters.
  • Engage with Participants: Interact with people who comment on the giveaway post. This will boost the post’s visibility and make the giveaway feel more personal and engaging.
  • Send a Reminder: A day or two before the giveaway ends, post a reminder. This will give people who missed the initial announcement a chance to participate. You can also do this via push notifications, web popups, and email.

Remember, the best influencer collaborations are those where both parties feel valued and respected. Be sure to keep communication open, respect their creative process, and be clear about your expectations. Also, ensure that all giveaway activities follow the rules and regulations of the platform you’re using.

Step 6. Draw the Giveaway Winners

Once the giveaway is over, you’ll need to choose a winner. With RafflePress, this is easy and only takes a few clicks.

From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to RafflePress » Giveaways and click the Needs Winners link.

choose winner for your contest

This will show you the people who entered your giveaway and how many entries each person has. To choose a winner randomly, click the Pick Winner button, select your options, and click the Choose Winners Now button.

Pick a random giveaway winner

The plugin will highlight the winner instantly at the top of the list.

Now you can announce the winner on your website and across social media.

Ask your influencer also to post a winner announcement on their social channels. They could also share the winner’s reaction if they have their permission.

Step 7. Analyze Your Giveaway Performance

After the giveaway, it’s a good idea to ask the influencer you worked with for a brief summary of how the giveaway performed. This could include data such as the number of participants, the number of new followers gained, the number of likes and comments, and more.

You can also check your giveaway’s impact on your WordPress website by looking at your Google Analytics data.

If you find this information confusing, consider using MonsterInsights, the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

MonsterInsights overview report

It reports your most important analytics data inside your WordPress dashboard without any complicated terms or metrics. 

With this data, you can measure the impact of your giveaway, see if you met your initial goals, and learn what to do better in your next giveaway or sweepstakes.

Start Your Influencer Giveaway

We hope this guide has helped you discover how to run an influencer giveaway in WordPress. With RafflePress, getting started is super easy and takes only a few minutes from start to finish.

The best part? Even complete beginners can do it without code. So what are you waiting for?

Get Started with RafflePress Today.

You may also like the following giveaway marketing tips and tutorials:

If you liked this article, please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for RafflePress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

author avatar
Stacey Corrin Writer
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.

Let's Connect

Join Our Newsletter

Subscribe to get Free WordPress Tips and Resources

We do not sell or share your information with anyone.

Copyright © 2024 SeedProd LLC. RafflePress® is a registered trademark of SeedProd LLC

WPBeginner Verified Badge