In the rush to spend money on social media advertising and content marketing, many companies have forgotten the incredible power of combining exciting prize ideas and promotional products with giveaways. 

According to a study by the Advertising Specialty Institute, most people hold on to promotional products for an average of eight months. That’s eight months of them being reminded about what a great company you are running and how nice you were to give them something.

Compare that to the few seconds they’ll give your pay-per-click ad! 

Though giveaways can be a powerful way to send potential clients down your sales funnel, you will need to have the right prize ideas to make your campaign successful. 

The wrong prize ideas nearly guarantee that your giveaway flops. However, by combing the right prize with the right WordPress plugin to manage the contest, your giveaway campaign can make a significant impact on your target audience.

Here are some things to keep in mind while you’re planning the details:

Prize Ideas Must be Relevant to Your Business

If you’re a tech company, don’t offer lawn care for a year as a top prize in your giveaway. 

Though that might sound obvious, the reality is that companies often come up with a prize idea that is clearly valuable — such as a camera or television — but that has nothing to do with their products or services.

Brainstorming prize ideas that are relevant to your business and connect with your target market is the first step in rolling out a prize that will help you achieve your goal for the giveaway — whatever that goal happens to be.

Of course, you can continue to build brand loyalty by creating giveaways that resonate with your current customer base. However, your real goal for a giveaway should be to hook potential target customers. 

The best prize ideas walk the fine line between engaging a new segment of your target market without drawing in too many people who are already on board with your products or services.

Ideally, your prize ideas will be derived directly from the products or services you offer because these will, of course, be most relevant to your business.

Skip Generic Products

Visa gift cards, iPads, phones, cash, and other generic prize ideas have a terrible return on investment. 

One of the primary gripes business owners have about giveaways is that they bloat their contact lists and dilute engagement. However, this really only occurs when a giveaway does a poor job of connecting with a target market. 

As they say, those who cast wide nets end up hauling in a lot of things they’d have rather left in the sea. So, don’t make your prizes so generic that everyone and their grandmother wants to enter the giveaway.

For example, if you want to target rock climbers, then you will want to come up with prize ideas that will only interest rock climbers. 

In such a case, you can give away climbing shoes or ropes or other gear that non-climbers would have no use for or interest in. This also ends up working in your favor with regards to keeping prize ideas relevant to your businesses, as it’s hard to imagine why you’d want to target rock climbers or any other demographic if they weren’t in some way connected to your business.

Push Branded Promotional Products

If you’re a new company, people might not be chasing down a hoodie with your logo on it like they would one branded Supreme. However, if your giveaway prize is a product that is well-built, fashionable, and functional, you better believe they’ll hold on to it.

More importantly, they’ll very likely become a customer. It turns out that 85% of people end up doing business with a company after receiving a promotional item. That’s huge in terms of return on investment — and a good reason to be giving away more than just a grand prize as part of your giveaway.

An additional underlying benefit to using promotional products as prizes is that about 63% of people will end up gifting promotional products to others when they’re done with them. This means that not only will your giveaway prize have an impact on whoever wins it, but it will have another round of influence on whoever receives it down the road.

Once a promotional product has found its way to a dusty shelf at The Salvation Army or into a landfill, its impact isn’t lost. In fact, 89% of consumers remember a company for at least two years after receiving a promotional product. 

Throw in Some Fun Freebies

More often than not, promotional products might not be exciting enough to get the level of engagement you need. That’s where freebies enter the sweepstakes. 

Just don’t be stingy when it comes to handing out promotional products. Even if you don’t mention that they’re part of the giveaway, you can send them out to a handful of people who entered and didn’t win (especially if they’ve been acting as your brand ambassadors on social media). And, of course, you should send several extras to the grand prize winner.

Ask Yourself Why Now

When coming up with prize ideas, you want to coordinate what you’re giving away with the time of year and any current events or holidays that might impact it. 

Holidays always provide an easy path for prize ideas. The themes are apparent, the keyword searches are hot, and the only tricky part is keeping your prize thematically on-point, while also keeping it relevant to your business.

Final Thoughts: Grow Your Business with the Rocking Prize Ideas

Having the right prize ideas for your giveaway is essential to ensuring success. However, that’s only part of the process of creating a successful giveaway campaign.

At the end of the day, you need to develop prize ideas that are exciting, relevant to your target market, and that are well-branded. Combining that prize with a well-designed campaign implemented through a WordPress plugin, such as Simple Giveaways, will put you on the path of meeting your giveaway goal.

Do you have a winning giveaway idea that you’re ready to put into action? Try the Simple Giveaways free plugin today!