Back to School Giveaway Ideas
and Social Media Contests

#1 Choose a goal for your contest

Contests are a great way to grow an email list and audience and expand your reach. Before anything else, set your goals. Think carefully about what would you like to achieve in order to choose the right promotional activities.

You may want to:

#2 Select a relevant incentive for Back to School shoppers

This is your next step. Decide how you’re going to reward participants or winners. The prize should be related to your brand and the back to school season and relevant to your target audience. School products and items such as school supplies for kids, lunch boxes, lunch bags, water bottles, backpacks, bookbags, stationery, or even free shipping are the most attractive for your participants. School kids and their parents with a long school supply list will always be looking for one school item more for the upcoming school year.

Choose something that will encourage consumers to participate. Evaluate if that what you could give away will affect your financial gain.

To help you get started, here are some back to school giveaway ideas:

Excitement similar to a giveaway with a grand prize can be created by offering a limited-edition product. It gives us a sense of exclusivity. And we all like to feel special.

#3 Contest rules and conditions

To provide a fair and equal chance of winning to all participants, make it easy to participate. Minimize contest restrictions. Limit the entry requirements to three or four steps. Make sure you clearly communicate the start date and end date of the contest. The easier the promotion is to access, the more likely it is to go viral.

If you choose social media channels for your contest, first check regulations per channel. For instance, Instagram makes it relatively easy to run contests. On the other hand, Facebook regulations are more demanding and limit entry requirements and conditions.

#4 How to choose and notify winners

You can use a random generator tool to choose winners or entries can be judged. For instance, you can ask participants to vote for the most interesting or the funniest image or video. In regards to notifying the winners, you can publicly announce them on social media or you can send the winner announcement email by using the entry email address.

#5 Launch and promote your Back to School competition

If you have high expectations from this marketing tactic then you spread a word around it. A good promotion is what separates the successes from the failures.

Here are some ideas on how to promote your giveaway:

Host the contest on your website and use email marketing, social media, and sponsored ads to amplify its reach. This way, you will have better control over the success of your contest. Place a welcome pop-up to your website and invite visitors to take part in your contest and win valuable rewards. You can ask them to like your Facebook page or give you their email addresses. Use this to create a database of leads and new customers.

Back to school contest ideas to run in the social media:

Encouraging users’ creativity will result in viral activity and maximize the reach of your contest. Your customers can participate with the content of their choice, e.g. family summer photos, their favorite song of the summer, videos of summer adventures, or similar. User-generated content (USG) has a great power to generate new and fresh content.

If the requirement of your contest is to tag a friend, participants do the work of sharing your content with their friends. This way, your contest will go viral and reach more people and help you increase awareness of your brand awareness.

Hashtag contests are an easy, flexible option. Users can participate from any social network by sharing content with the hashtag of your Back to School campaign.

#6 Create a unique hashtag for the Back to School promotions

Hashtags provide additional strength toward your customers’ engagement. They tend to be great marketing resources. For your contest, hashtags could be a call-to-action phrase that will invite users to interact with your brand and action. Obviously, the contest hashtag is one of the most important elements of your promotion. Make it simple but catchy. To get a unique hashtag, combine the back to school theme with your brand’s name.

Here are some interesting ideas on how to create branded hashtags:

#BacktoSchoolHaul
#BacktoSchoolPrep
#BacktoSchoolGift
#BacktoSchoolSelfie
#BacktoSchoolwithLove
#BacktoSchoolatWalmart

As a school year approaching kids and parents are tapping into getting the best school items or products worth their money. It’s a moment to elicit feelings of excitement in consumers. Have that in mind when you brainstorm your marketing ideas for the school season.

Once when you get lots of participants, you’ll want to turn them into leads. That requires the whole experience relevant to your ideal prospects from the way you advertise your competitions, contests, or sweepstakes to the prizes you offer. Make sure that your promotion is aligned to your target audience’s interests and goals.

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Back to School Giveaway Ideas and Social Media Contests

Back to School Giveaway Ideas
and Social Media Contests

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