The most successful brands have always been the ones to the first to adopt innovative social media strategies. Instagram has become a strong marketing tool for 86% of leading businesses, including Nike, H&M, and Victoria’s Secret, to mention just a few. As one of the social media networks with the greatest interaction rate, Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media networks.
According to Business Instagram, the social media site has more than one billion active users, eighty percent of users follow at least one brand, and sixty percent of Instagrammers find new products within the app itself. It should come as no surprise that there are currently 25 million company profiles on Instagram, as well as 2 million advertisers using the platform to promote their goods and services.
However, Instagram marketing is not only for large companies; it is also becoming increasingly vital for smaller companies that wish to advertise their products and communicate with their target audience. Why? Because Instagram is not just effective but also within the financial reach of small businesses, 39% of those businesses intend to raise the amount of money they invest in Instagram marketing.
If you are a marketer or the owner of a small business, you are aware of the fact that it can be challenging to break through the noise unless you have a large following of devoted customers or clients. You’ll be happy to know that you can successfully host a giveaway on Instagram to obtain the results you want quickly. Here are seven reasons why it makes sense for small businesses to host giveaways on Instagram.
1. Build Brand Awareness
It is not a secret that the goal of every firm is to increase their revenue. It is to your advantage to have a large number of customers. If you own a small company, it’s possible that you haven’t earned many clients just yet because your brand isn’t as well-known as larger competitors’ brands. Consequently, it is essential to increase brand recognition.
According to Venngage, the most important objective for 89% of marketers is to enhance brand recognition, and 77% of brands believe that establishing an online community is a means to increase the level of consumer consciousness of a firm.
An Instagram giveaway is a tried-and-true method for attracting the attention of your target audience and getting the word out about your company. This is due to the fact that people enjoy receiving free products. You may also invite your participants to tag their friends in the comments section, which helps to increase organic reach and attracts more interested individuals who might eventually become your followers or even customers.
If you want to generate excitement about your giveaway and make it go viral, it is essential to maintain your inventiveness and select a prize that is both desirable and worth the effort required to enter it. The more desirable the prize, the greater the number of people you’ll be able to entice. Due to your limited financial resources, you may wish to consider partnering with another business in order to provide more desirable prizes.
2. Increase User Engagement
The unfortunate reality is that simply having a large number of followers on Instagram isn’t enough to make money off of your profile; only engaged followers actually buy things. When there is a higher level of user involvement, it is easier to acquire new users. Why? Because Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes content that is already popular, it is essential to attract followers who like and comment on your posts. But if you’re not a huge corporation with a legion of devoted customers, increasing user engagement on Instagram might be challenging unless you host freebies on the platform.
Freebies and surprises are always well received by people. One study on the efficacy of a call to action (CTA) found that incorporating the word “free” in the CTA increased the number of clicks it received. These posts create more engagement than others because the majority of giveaways require participants to like and comment on the post. In addition to this, Instagram gifts contribute to the formation of a favorable first impression.
3. Get More Instagram Followers
When it comes to Instagram, the majority of small businesses concentrate their efforts on expanding their follower base. This is because having a substantial following on Instagram makes it easier to obtain social proof and add clickable links to Instagram Stories. You need to run giveaways on Instagram to speed up the process, and the vast majority of small businesses employ this strategy. This is due to the fact that gaining the followers you want can take a lot of time and work.
It is crucial to construct a marketing plan if you want to grow the number of followers you have. This is because a marketing plan is a tried and true method for understanding the major goals of your marketing campaigns and ensuring that you are progressing in the appropriate direction. In addition to this, it is helpful to have an understanding of which Instagram giveaway ideas you should modify in order to accomplish your objective.
4. Build an Email List
Email marketing has long been an effective and inexpensive method for reaching out to prospective customers, establishing a positive reputation for a company, and increasing sales. The results of the calculation speak for themselves: Email is cited as the primary lead generation medium by 89% of marketers, and it is 40 times more effective at acquiring clients than Facebook and Twitter combined. When you’re first getting started, it’s more probable that you’ll need to work on expanding your email subscriber base. The good news is that holding giveaways on Instagram is a fantastic method to acquire email addresses from people in your target demographic in exchange for the chance to win something helpful.
It’s simple to gather email addresses by doing giveaways: Include “enter your email” as one of the prerequisites for participation while you are working on the “how to enter” section of the page. To put it another way, organize giveaways on Instagram and urge participants to provide their email addresses.
Instead of asking visitors to input their email addresses through the link, you could also ask them to subscribe to your email list or sign up for your newsletter. Both of these options are available to you. Overall, the number of your subscribers can be increased in a variety of different ways. Do you want to know the most exciting part? Giveaways have a greater rate of engagement, which helps to attract new followers, who you can then direct towards your email list using various methods.
5. Secure Collaboration with Influencers
Small businesses that haven’t yet established a solid following can find untold riches via the use of influencer marketing. Working with opinion leaders who have an influence on their committed followers is an excellent approach to engage a community that has already been established and spread the word about your product without having to run expensive advertisements. Small firms may have a tough time acquiring brand endorsements due to the large number of companies with which they compete in the market.
On the other hand, you can approach nano- or micro-influencers in order to propose a joint venture, and doing a giveaway on Instagram is the ideal way to begin a relationship with a person who is considered to be an opinion leader. Why? The majority of influencers have the goal of increasing their number of followers as well as the amount of user engagement they receive. Working together with smaller firms helps to give better rewards, which in turn helps to acquire more contest participants.
6. Get User-Generated Content
Visual material is king when it comes to marketing on Instagram. Even if there are a lot of inventive ways to use stock photographs, it’s still crucial to promote material that fans have generated because it helps build trust in the company. According to one analysis from Stackla, the significance of user-generated content (UGC) is on the rise. Specifically, the report states: The incorporation of user-generated content (UGC) into social campaigns leads to a 50% increase in engagement, and 90% of customers say that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support. 79% of people say that user-generated content has a significant impact on their purchasing decisions.
It might be challenging for small businesses to motivate their customers to provide user-generated content (UGC). On the other hand, if you provide your consumers something of value in exchange for taking photographs of your product in use, they will be more likely to do so. As a result, several brands host picture contests in an effort to obtain material made by their customers.
People desire authenticity more than ever in this day and age of sponsored posts; therefore, including user-generated material is a requirement for small businesses who wish to provide visitors to their Instagram page with social proof. You may receive user-generated content photographs more quickly if you organize a promotion on Instagram that encourages users to make UGC.
7. Boost Ecommerce Sales
It would be awesome if there was a way to make money online using Instagram, wouldn’t it?
Almost every firm, regardless of the sector in which it operates or its size, has as one of its primary objectives the expansion of its revenue. Due to Instagram’s recent addition of e-commerce functionalities, companies now view the platform to have significant potential for driving purchases.
To sell things on Instagram, however, requires a significant investment of both time and work. The good news is that Instagram freebies assist to speed up the process, and unlike other contests, you don’t have to require contestants to make a purchase from you in order to participate. It is prohibited to urge contestants to purchase something as a means of admission, so it is crucial to know about Instagram’s “no purchase necessary law” in order to prevent inadvertently infringing one of the platform’s many distinct policies.
On the other hand, you may give out gift certificates that let the winners choose an item that satisfies both their requirements and their desires. Additionally, it helps to improve sales of products sold through e-commerce, since 72% of customers will spend more than the amount of the gift card they were given.
Final Thoughts
Marketing on Instagram is ideal for small businesses because it has the best interaction rate and has the ability to generate a lot of sales. You have the option of hosting giveaways on Instagram, which, if done in the right way, may have many benefits for small businesses and help you stand out from the crowd of competitors who are all competing for the attention of the same target audience.
There are a lot of various reasons to give them a chance, ranging from attracting new followers to improving sales in e-commerce. One of the most important of them is that they can help you build your brand.