A run down of how to run a good influencer competition from Nicola Snell, Founder of Press loft.
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Many influencers love giveaways, it gives their audience a treat and, if the collaboration is structured well, it drives lots of new social followers for your social account and drive brand awareness.
HOW much?! Minimum prize values:
Some larger blogs and influencers with tens of thousands of followers will have “minimum prize values”. This means your products have to be worth at least, say, £500. Often you can offer multiples so 10 items worth £50. Smaller blogs and influencers with less than 5000 followers often don’t have minimum prize values but then the competition will reach a smaller audience.
If you have expensive products it is worth considering doing a paid post instead of a competition to keep the cost down.
Driving followers:
Here are a few ways to structure a competition to Increase followers
1. Make someone follow you. So, in order to enter the competition, the reader needs to follow both the influencer and the brand.
2. Ask them to tag a friend in a comment
3. Repost / Retweet / Share
4. Add a hashtag in a comment based on your target keywords or certain key trends / dates
You might want to do some but not all of these – but as a minimum make sure you are doing point 1.
So for example, you might want to ask the influencer to structure the competition like this:
1. Follow the brand
2. Like this post
3. Mention a friend or two in a comment with the hashtag #lovebrandname / #mothersdaygifts #cornersofas (use a keyword that is on your target list)
Partner up with other brands
I saw a cracking giveaway a few weeks ago with a range of baby products on instagram:
It was hugely appealing, the chance to win 9 amazing items, and it also got each brand in front of the followers of the other brands.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BNFex5aA-f0/?taken-by=thetipi
You can see they structured the post like this:
1. Like this post
2. Follow us @yourbrandname and all stores in the giveaway. (tag the next brand in the image) Just tap the image to see where to go next, and when you are back with us you have completed the loop.
3. Tag a friend or two in a comment below.
Another example – this time on twitter:
(Remember with twitter to ask the influencer to include an image to get maximum impact.)
Even on twitter always Include a picture of the product they can win
RT (retweet) and Follow
Nice competition from Little Tikes here:
https://twitter.com/LittleTikesUK/status/829263334381875200
Pinterest competition:
One way of using pinterest for competitions is to partner with a large pinterest influencer and ask them to collaborate. For example you can structure it like this:
1. ask entrants to create a board around a theme and use a hashtag to name it
2. follow the influencer & the brand.
3. you may also want to entrant to mention the brand in the comment of the
It definitely requires more work from the entrant than the other competitions – but it drives real engagement and you will know those participants are keen on your brand.
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/201817627030837162/
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/201817627029706361/
How to create marketing material to promote the social competition:
1. Create a pin summarising the competition (we love Canva)
2. Create a landing page with more information and to share across all channels. If you don’t; have a simple way to add landing pages to your own site you can try instapage
Picking the influencer – Relevance:
The followers you get may not always be ideal – they can include serial competition-ers (I think I made that word up – but you know what I mean). But you minimise irrelevant followers by making sure the blog is good quality so check their DA and take a quick look at the types of followers they have. (link to blog post on influencers)
Reporting
A couple of good ways to measure the success of a working with an influencer on a competition are:
a) increase in your followers – don’t forget to take a note of your follower numbers before the competition starts!
b) referral traffic and sales from the social channel on google analytics during the competition. Again before and after stats are important here.
c) Number of shares of the competition post
d) Comments on the competition post
e) Number of uses of the hashtag
f) Any direct traffic peaks s
g) Brand search peaks
I would suggest keeping a spreadsheet of this data for each competition you run so you can track the impact of competitions so you can work out the best influencers for you to work with in future campaigns.
UTMs
Another way to get even more accurate data is by using UTMs. This is a unique URL for a specific campaign so you can directly track traffic from specific sources. There is a lot of great information in this article:
https://funnel.io/resources/google-analytics-utm-tagging-best-practices?gclid=Cj0KEQiAw_DEBRChnYiQ_562gsEBEiQA4LcssiVAYbheC6lGgup3680E603A_F2GjIfVIUXC_iFe8WMaAiRk8P8HAQ
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Press Loft offers a service to set up competitions with influencers
What is Press Loft?
Press Loft www.pressloft.com is a PR platform specialising in the home, gift, and lifestyle sectors that helps thousands of brands to get their products into the press.
Their PR tools allow companies to easily secure press coverage and quality backlinks for SEO by connecting with their network of 20,000+ journalists, bloggers, and influencers.
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