Maybe you own a local business, get your side hustle on as an affiliate marketer or service provider or have a new book you want to promote but have little website traffic or money to spend on paid ads?
Good news!
With the help of UpViral and multi-brand giveaway events, you can instantly boost traffic to your landing page, generate tons of fresh leads, and get tons of backend sales from your event.
Even better? You don’t have to spend much (or anything!) on prizes for these events, and ad costs are minimal, too!
Sounds too good to be true?
Believe it!
Recently, our UpViral Head of Marketing, William Vanhout, sat down with Tasha Mayberry from Damask Digital. Tasha generously revealed how she used UpViral to generate the following results for Order Out of Chaos:
- Almost 10,000 visits to the contest landing page
- 4300 unique leads
- An additional 1579 referred leads
- A 20% boost in back-to-school sales
This was accomplished in just 30 days with a multi-brand giveaway campaign.
What Exactly is a Multi-Brand Giveaway?
Multi-brand giveaways are events where a giveaway host reaches out to other brands in order to offer massive prize bundles to the lucky winner (s).
These contests are win/win/win for the host, the prize contributors, and the winners.
If you’re thinking, “Why would a business agree to provide prizes for free,” here’s why the prize providers are happy to get on board.
The sponsors get brand exposure from having their logos on the contest landing page, as well as receive shoutouts on social media from the event host.
The larger prize bundles offered by multi-brand events get people more excited to enter and share the contest than if only a single prize was offered. This ultimately leads to lots of exposure for all brands involved and generates a bigger host email list.
The Problem Tasha Solved With this Multi Brand Giveaway
Order Out of Chaos’ primary product is back-to-school planners. Because of the time-sensitive nature of this product, their sales are concentrated in the months from June to September.
They wanted to generate a list of leads the company could use year-round for their marketing efforts, and also get more Instagram followers and Facebook likes.
So Tasha leaned on prior experience and knew that a multi-brand giveaway was the perfect fit to help Order Out of Chaos.
She researched brands with products that would resonate with Order Out of Chaos’ audience. This way, Tasha could leverage the social following and email lists of the brands taking part in the campaign.
Tasha says:
This move is very strategic.
If you offer prizes that don’t directly appeal to your audience, it is going to be difficult to get them to sign up for your giveaway. There is also another problem with offering prizes that aren’t closely aligned with your brand.
You don’t want people who enter your contest for the prizes, but have no interest in your core business offers. If your leads aren’t aligned with what you have to offer, you waste time, money, and effort putting your contest together.
After you have researched giveaway partners, the next step is to invite them to your giveaway. There is a right way and a wrong way to do this.
Make It Easy for Prospective Partners to Say Yes
After you have found brands you’re interested in working with, it’s time to approach them to sponsor a giveaway prize. The key to get brands to say yes to being a sponsor is to make it easy for them to work with you.
Before Tasha starts contacting potential sponsors, she creates a nicely branded PDF invitation. This invitation contains all the contest details and the benefits the sponsors receive from participating. Tasha said:
“We have a giveaway invite PDF we send out and there’s a signup page so we can keep track of all the brands that signed up. After that we establish a deadline for the brands to sign up to participate. When we have a two-week period where we get all the marketing collateral together. I design the graphics, the landing page, and all the share posts. In short, we provide everything a sponsor needs to promote the giveaway.
That way, everybody knows what they’re doing, and it’s just smooth for all involved. We do a 30-day promotional period where everyone participating shares the contest on their social media.”
Piggyback Your Way to Success
The key to a blockbuster multi-brand giveaway is having all the participating brands share the contest on social media and tag the host. This allows the host to piggyback on the established audiences of the brands and amplifies the number of contest leads captured.
Tasha takes strategy a step further and recruits bloggers and influencers to share the contest. They don’t have to donate a prize but share the contest with their audience.
Here’s an example of a graphic that was shared on social media:
This sets the stage for future mutual reciprocation between the host and the influencer.
The Contest Period
Because there are multiple brands participating in the giveaway, a contest duration of 30 days hits the sweet spot.
This allows everyone participating to post about the giveaway once or twice a week without constantly hammering their audience to enter. New followers of the brand over the contest period get a chance to participate as well.
It’s optional for the brands to share the contest with their email list, but most do.
The host of the giveaway also does a few promoted posts. The budget needed for the promoted posts is small, maybe $20-50 per week on Instagram or Facebook. We also ask the participants to do an optional boosted post. About 90% of the time they do it, and it helps the ultimate results.
To keep contest engagement high throughout the promotional period, Tasha offered a cash prize to the entrant who generated the most referrals. To keep interest high, Tasha sent out emails throughout the contest period to remind entrants to keep sharing.
Here’s an example of one email she sent:
Tasha also has a couple of tricks up her sleeve to boost engagement even more. If there are a substantial number of brands participating in a giveaway, she bundles prizes together so there are more winners. She also offers a bonus prize to winners who have referred at least two other people to the contest.
Hint: The latter is a brilliant strategy to encourage sharing for any type of sweepstakes or giveaway contest.
A Caveat on Lead Sharing
At the end of the giveaway period, the participating brands share the leads generated by the contest. The brands also benefit from being tagged in posts from the sponsor and other participating brands.
However, there is a catch to this strategy. Some jurisdictions have stringent privacy laws that prohibit sharing leads.
One way to get around this is to place an opt-in to receive marketing from participating brands on your registration page. (The contest participant gives consent by checking a box.) This opt-in must be voluntary; it cannot be used as a condition to win a prize.
If in doubt, always check local laws before you send out invitations to brands to take part in your giveaway.
Another way to give contest sponsors value without directly sharing leads is to feature them in digital or print magazines or highlight their company in your newsletter.
The Giveaway Results
The Order Out of Chaos contest generated almost 10,000 visits to the landing page.
These were not all unique visits, as it encouraged people to bookmark the share page and come back often to share the contest to get more entries.
The actual number of leads generated from the contest was 4300 unique leads and 1579 additional no-cost leads from referral marketing.
According to Tasha, this number of leads hits the sweet spot for a multi-brand giveaway.
The contest increased Order Out of Chaos’ email list significantly without sacrificing lead quality.
One of the contest partners also generated $1500 in sales from a thank you email for participating in the contest. In the email, the partner presented a coupon code for a unique discount not available anywhere else on their website.
It’s an excellent strategy that’s been used several times in the past by other UpViral users. Speaking of UpViral, here’s why Tasha loves the software.
“There’s Just No Comparison”
After using another viral contest software, Tasha says there is no comparison in the market to UpViral.
Not only is UpViral easy and intuitive to use, but its built-in features like autoresponder integration, robust analytics, and a beautiful visual editor also make it a dream to use.
In particular, Tasha appreciated viewing campaign details at glance inside the dashboard without having to spend hours crunching data.
She can simply screenshot directly from the UpViral dashboard and send the results to her clients. The clients love it, and sending the screenshots builds trust between the client and Tasha’s agency.
If this case study has inspired you, isn’t it time to create your own UpViral multi-brand giveaway for yourself or for a client? After all, there is a multi-brand campaign template ready to go and waiting for you inside the UpViral dashboard!
If you’re not already an UpViral subscriber, simply grab yourself a 14-day, $1 trial here to get started.
Let us know if you’ve ever succeeded with a multi-brand campaign or plan to run one soon in the comments below!
