Creating a Successful Instagram Giveaway

After spending some time on Instagram, you’ve probably stumbled upon giveaways. Maybe you’ve been enticed to enter them yourself. Entering a giveaway for free and possibly winning a prize is an exciting idea. Every beauty professional should consider hosting giveaways as they are cost-effective, easy to set up, and can push your business in the right direction.

Hosting an Instagram giveaway is a great way to build your clientele. They help your beauty business by generating engagement and excitement. If structured properly, they will help to increase your brand awareness. With giveaways, you will offer something for free in exchange for a follow, engagement, or any other predetermined requirement. This will be entirely up to you depending on your goal.

There are many reasons why you would want to host an Instagram giveaway. The main and most common reason behind any marketing campaign is to grow your business and increase your clientele. It’s important to note that giveaways may not help you book appointments right away. They will gradually help you get there by building awareness.

This is a way for you to get your business in front of potential clients. You want more people to know about your business and consider booking an appointment. It will also work to help you increase engagement and followers, drive hype around special events, and as a way to show your appreciation to current and future clients.

Zysareane Medrano, Zy for short, is a Lash Artist and Owner of Zy Lashes Academy. She offers classic, hybrid, volume, and mega volume lashes, along with teeth whitening services. To promote her services and grow her business, she enjoys hosting Instagram giveaways. “They help you attain a wide range of clientele. If they enter the giveaway, it means they are interested in your services. They can be one of your clients in the future,” she says.

Set Your Goal

You will need to determine why you’re hosting the giveaway. What are you trying to get out of this? This will help you set the entry requirements accordingly. Many of these goals will work hand-in-hand in one another.

Gain Brand Awareness

Instagram giveaways help to encourage engagement and grow brand awareness. When people are liking and commenting on your post, the engagement will increase. This is recognized by the Instagram algorithm and more people are likely to see it. They work by sorting user content based on relevancy. Social media platforms, such as Instagram, prioritizes which content a user sees in their feed by the likelihood that they’ll want to see it.

This will expose your giveaway post to others on Instagram. Once it sparks an interest, users will likely want to learn more and explore your profile. If you decide to collaborate with another beauty professional to run the giveaway, you will reach their audience and vice versa. We encourage collaborations between businesses because you already have similar audiences. If you’re in the early stages of your business, you can collaborate with an established brand to jumpstart your online presence.

Take for example this giveaway by Jessica Vuong Artistry with a Lash Artist and Teeth Whitening Technician. All three businesses are working together to give away three prizes in their respective specialties. While they could have done the giveaway alone, they are working together to expand each other’s online presence and following.

If you have multiple businesses or services to promote, you can host a giveaway to join forces. Zy hosted a back to school promotion to cross-promote her services. While her lash academy is her main business, she has recently gotten into teeth whitening. She used this giveaway to increase brand awareness around both brands–most importantly, her new one.

Increase Followers

Most Instagram giveaways require you to follow their account as part of the entry. This will help your profile grow in followers. It ensures that those entering will stay in the loop of your business even after the giveaway is over. While the number of followers you have isn’t always relative to how busy your business is, it helps to establish your online presence.

Once you obtain over 10,000 followers, you’ll also gain access to the Instagram story swipe up tool. It’s an effective tool to link your Instagram story to drive traffic to your website. This is great for linking details to new services and events. Your audience will be able to swipe up for details instead of going through your Instagram bio.

Giving Back to Your Clients

Running an Instagram giveaway can drive hype around your promotions or events. A popular example includes anniversary giveaways to celebrate your beauty business and clients. It’s a way for you to give back to your current and future clients. It shows your appreciation for your loyal clientele to further develop your relationships and strengthen your image.

Your business is striving because of your clients. Emphasizing your appreciation for your clients will help establish the connection you have with them. Clients will feel good knowing that you care more about the relationships you’re building and the community you’re in. The money value is the earned result of the business you’ve built.

Picking the Prize

What are you willing to give away as a prize? It should be relevant to your business and what your audience wants. You will have to decide on what is worth giving away in return for engagement and a stronger brand presence. Don’t think of it as lost income because you’ll be giving away free services. Think of it as another marketing campaign, similar to if you were to promote your services with paid advertising.

Let’s say you’re looking to give away a full set of lashes, valued at $100. This $100 is put towards marketing your business. If your entry requirement includes sharing the post or tagging a friend, this is an organic way of promoting your giveaway. Your giveaway will quickly drive engagement without the need of paying for additional advertising. How much you can offer will depend on how much you’re willing to spend on marketing.

Looking at Zy’s giveaway again, she was giving away prizes for three lucky winners. The prizes include any full lash set and teeth whitening service bundle, any full lash set of choice, and a $25 Sephora gift card. Zy was generous with her giveaway and had more to offer to her clients.

“Make sure you give what they love,” Zy says. She likes offering different prize options and having multiple winners to encourage more people to enter and follow the page. However if your marketing budget is low, you can simply offer something small though still desirable.

When your giveaway goes live, it’s helpful to put the value of your prize. This way, the participants know how much the prize is worth and feel more determined to enter. For Zy’s first-place prize, she wrote that it’s valued at $300. The idea that you can enter a free giveaway and have a chance to win a package valued that much makes it much more worthwhile.

Determine the Rules

Once you have established the goal for your Instagram giveaway and the prize, you will need to lay the rules out. Think about how the audience will particulate and gain entry to your contest. The requirements need to be clear and should include a deadline to instill time sensitivity and urgency.

For Zy’s giveaway, each entry had to include all of the following:

• You must follow both of her accounts
• Tag three friends who would also love to win
• Share the post on your Instagram story while tagging her accounts
• Multiple entries are allowed as long as the people tagged are different

All of her rules focus on increasing brand awareness and her following. With each entry, she gains a follower on each of her business accounts. By having contestants tag three friends and share the post on their Instagram story, it exposes her business to their following.

If you want to increase engagement and learn more about your clientele, you can ask participants to leave a comment with an answer to a question. For example, you can ask clients to comment with their favorite memory at your studio. Future clients can leave a comment with what they look for in a service. This works as a review or survey system for you to learn about what is working best in your beauty business or what you can improve on.

When determining the rules, try to make the giveaway easy to enter. Clicking the follow button, leaving a comment, or sharing doesn’t require much effort. If you use email marketing to increase your bookings, you can use your giveaway to grow your list. However, it will require a bit more work from participants. Asking them to go out of their way to visit a landing page and enter their email can cause some resistance. Another suggestion is to either make it optional for an additional entry or increase the size of the prize.

Instagram Promotional Guidelines

To run the giveaway on Instagram, you will need to ensure it’s compliant with their rules and regulations. You are responsible for the lawful operation of your giveaway by including the official rules and offer terms and eligibility requirements such as age or residency.

Most people are unaware of this, however, you will need to include a statement of release on all contests posted to Instagram. This acknowledges that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram.

Be sure to include the statements at the bottom of your giveaway. Here is an example of a statement: “Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are at least 13 years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram’s terms of use.”

Designing and Sharing Your Giveaway

As with any marketing promotion, you should have an eye-catching visual. You want your giveaway to stand out and capture your audience’s attention. The word “giveaway” should be strongly emphasized to stop people as they’re scrolling through their feeds. You can use an easy design tool such as Canva to create a stunning graphic. We also have customizable Instagram templates available for you to use!

Another option is to use a photo of your work to promote the Instagram giveaway. Pick out your favorite photo and start forming your giveaway around it. However, be sure the first line of your caption states that it’s a giveaway! You want to be clear about your message or else people may scroll past it.

When it comes to promoting your Instagram giveaway, be sure to share it across every platform you have. This includes Facebook, email marketing, in your studio, and word of mouth. The more people you can get to take part in your giveaway, the farther it will go in terms of reach.

Choosing and Notifying the Winner

Once your giveaway comes to an end, you can either select a winner yourself or use a randomizer. Be sure to notify the winner publicly on Instagram to update everyone who was involved. It’s also a good idea to edit your post caption and state at the top that the giveaway has been closed. This will ensure that users who see the post after the giveaway expired won’t attempt to participate.

After running the Instagram giveaway, look back at your results to see if you’ve obtain your goal. If you wanted to increase the number of followers, how much growth did you see? If you wanted to show appreciation to your current clientele, what were some of the comments they left? Analyze what went well and how you can make your next giveaway even better.

While running a giveaway is mainly to gain awareness and your online presence, there is a chance the winner and/or participants will book with you in the future. As a result of running a giveaway, you will have new followers that are aware of your business and exposed to your work. From here on out, you can continue building your online community, push your promotions, and turn those potential clients into appointments.