When to Promote Your Giveaway

When to Promote Your Giveaway

While you should always be thinking about promoting your giveaway while it’s running, there are four specific promotion periods where you should concentrate on your promotion efforts:

During these four different promotion periods, the mood of your messaging will change and the contents of what you promote will differ. In the sections below, you’ll learn more about each of the four promotion periods and how you should message your audience to drive the most excitement.

In the following section titled ‘where to promote your giveaway’, you’ll find examples of how to utilize the four promotion periods below on various locations & social networks.

Below is an example calendar of a giveaway that lasts two weeks, starting on Tuesday morning, showing the four promotion periods described above:

Giveaway Calendar

Pre-launch: 48 hours before your giveaway starts

In the several days leading up to your giveaway’s launch, besides making sure you have all your promotion materials in place, your plan should be to drum up some excitement & create some buzz. Giving away a cool prize? Tease or foreshadow your upcoming promotion.

Some examples of terms you could use before your promotion launches:

Launch: 48 hours after you giveaway starts

When your giveaway launches, it’s vital that you promote your giveaway effectively in the first 48 hours. Depending on the length of your giveaway, it’s not unusual to see up to 40% of your entries come within the first two days.

Now that you’ve launched and the prize has finally been revealed, promote it using prize images or graphics describing the giveaway while using terms like:

Do your best to describe the promotion. Tell your followers the reason for running the giveaway, what they have the ability to win, the ARV of the prize, who is eligible, how to enter, and where they can enter.

During the promotion: post-launch but before the giveaway’s ending

While you’ll receive many of your giveaway entries during the first 48 hours and the last 48 hours before your giveaway closes, the longer your giveaway is, the more entries you’ll receive. While it’s critical you promote your giveaway at the beginning and end, forgetting to promote your giveaway during the middle is a mistake you don’t want to make.

Promote the giveaway, reminding your followers if they haven’t entered yet:

Your goal should be to keep the ball rolling. Don’t lose momentum that you generated from your giveaway’s launch. Continue to remind people the promotion is still running. Similar to an hour long presentation you’d prepare for at a conference, your giveaway should start strong and end strong, but still have quality content in the middle.

Ending: 48 hours before your giveaway ends

It’s the last two days of your giveaway - time to go out with a bang! Similar to the amount of entries you receive in the first 48 hours of your giveaway, the last 48 hours of your promotion will receive an explosion in entries as well. All those procrastinators and latecomers who have yet to enter your giveaway will be drawn to enter your promotion through messaging and copy that brings a sense of urgency.

Give a sense of urgency in the copy that you use while promoting your giveaway that’s about to end. Several examples:

When you promote your giveaway in the final several days, make sure you give enough time for your message to be received. If you’re going to send out a newsletter promoting your ending giveaway, don’t send it out a few hours before the giveaway ends. Give your subscribers at least 24 hours notice.

  
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