To draw an audience, one must always look into various ways of reaching out. A great way to drive a lot of targeted traffic, quickly is by utilizing viral giveaways in your overall traffic generation strategy.
Giveaway Essentials
Giveaways are promotions commonly used by business owners for a variety of reasons. Some of which include sampling a product to potential customers, or incentivizing current customers to buy a new product. Before we can get into making a giveaway go viral, we first need to understand the key elements that make a giveaway appealing in the first place.
Reaching out to potential customers
Giveaways have a practical aspect to them. Customers are more inclined to try something if it doesn’t cost them anything. With minimalization of risk, and maximization of reward, you are more likely to get business.
However, the downside is that there are many consumers guilty of simply sampling a product for a quick reward, with no regard to the company, nor its mission.
The solution
Ideally, when a company does giveaways for a product or service, they want to keep the customer coming back. Some ways for the company to produce returning customers include:
- Marketing Email Lists: Updates the potential or actual consumer of product/service trends, and product/service news that may pertain to the consumer. You link the giveaway to the email list by having the potential customer enter their email address.
- Add in subscriptions: When constructing the giveaway, some businesses make the product part of a trial, from which converts in a standardized subscription (i.e. Amazon Prime).
- Miscellaneous benefits: New consumers look for incentives aside from the product or service. With the previously mentioned subscription, consumers have the possibility of receiving their product at a discounted rate, or having their purchase contribute to another benefit (i.e. cash back rewards for credit cards).
As far as these strategies go, they are perfect for bringing more customers in, while also gathering data on how to keep them. Such data for customers include:
- Demographics
- Product purchase history
Using data to keep customers
One of the most important (and least emphasized) aspects to keeping an audience is that you have to analyze them. In terms of demographics, some key players are often:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
Age
1) To market toward someone based on age, one example could be:
Joe (24) sees an ad pertaining to an investment account through an app called Acorns. He is tempted to search further into it.
Effectiveness: Approaching the age of mid-20’s to early 30’s, Joe may be among a financially concerned generation, and may find difficulty in the idea of investing.
Gender
2) To reach out to someone based on gender, one example could be:
Mary (17) is searching for a dress to wear to her high school homecoming. She does an internet search, and Google’s SEO (Search Optimization) returns results of retailers based on her search criteria.
Effectiveness: Because certain products are in demand at given times, companies use SEO to reach out to specific audiences. With said specifications, they may limit themselves to a single group (i.e. homecoming dresses for girls).
Location
3) To effectively gain someone’s business based on location, one idea may be:
Josh (19) and Jacob (20) live off campus from their central university campus. As they’re commuting about, they see billboards for a new coffee shop, and drive over to inquire further.
Effectiveness: In a college town, consumption of novelty items like coffee are more frequent. Those residing in the area are more tempted to give certain startups in the area a try.
Using Purchase History
As a business owner, or manager, you should have an idea of what items are selling most, and to whom, specifically. Knowing and understanding the purchase history of a product, in relation to its consumer, sets you up for promoting that same product, introducing another one, and overall maximizing profits by reducing unnecessary shrink from other products.
As an example, Amazon tracks any purchase made on your account. From there, they will post similar and/or related products. As part of that example, a consumer buys a new laptop. As part of a simple recommendation, Amazon will often display laptop cases. The displays take place in the form of “Those who bought this product also bought…” It is using data, based on a consumer’s shopping history, to not only further the service mission of the company, but to maximize profits for the company.
What to take away from this
Overall, as a business owner in a society of heavy consumerism, you have to pay much closer attention to the behavior of your audience. Their behavior is based on unlimited wants within a limited economy; an economy, in which, you will contribute towards.
