How To Run A Giveaway Contest On Instagram

What's up, bud? It's Rob. This is a parallel success and on this YouTube channel here I like to give you really really deep insights into how things actually work and some really really deep perspectives into how you should actually be viewing the clothing brand industry. But at the same time I also want to offer you the really really technical videos where I get into like the nitty-gritty details of how to do something and this is one of those videos here, okay? I want to show you how to run a successful giveaway contest on your Instagram account, okay? I'm going to get into how it works and what exactly you need to do. It should be a really good episode. Stay tuned. You may have heard me talking to some of my other videos about how important it is to push your marketing, okay? and get your clothing brand in front of new eyes and work and hustle and just force your brand in front of new eyes. But what I'm going to show you in this video here when it comes to contests is actually a counter example to that, okay? Instead what we're going to be doing is making a post where we're basically drawing people in and creating organic growth. Running giveaway contests where you have friends tagging their own friends inside of your contest is probably the absolute best way that you can market your clothing brand. The difficulty with this is that when you're first starting up as a clothing brand and you don't have a lot of followers, you can't necessarily run contests all the time because you don't have a lot of people seeing the contest and therefore the contest isn't really able to grow and get the momentum that you really need. At the same time, if your audience size on Instagram is still small, you should still definitely be running contests on your Instagram page, okay? Friends tagging friends in your giveaway contest is probably the best way that you can go about gaining social proof right now, okay? Not only that, but you're also showing people that you are a company that gives, okay? You're a company that offers value, you're willing to give away free things and this is a sign that as a company, you are currently thriving. Now you don't need to run giveaway contests all the time, okay? You don't need to be like Oprah, all right? You don't need to be like, and you get a shirt and you get a shirt, all right? You can literally just stick to giving out shirts, maybe one shirt per month in a giveaway contest, okay? And these posts are super easy to make and that one shirt that you give away, you can just chalk up as a marketing expense. Now when you're making the giveaway contest and especially if this is your first giveaway contest, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to enter the contest, okay? Probably one of the biggest mistakes I see with people who try to run contest when they're first starting out is they make it super difficult to enter, okay? There's so many different things that these people have to do, so they're like, you know, in order to enter this contest and win a free t-shirt, tag three friends like this post and follow our account. People are like, are you serious? Like, this is way too much. I'm just going to go like, scroll and look at some girls on Instagram. So what you want to do is make it as easy as possible for people to enter the contest that still will end up benefiting your company, okay? So what we do is we literally have a post where it's a giveaway contest and we just say in order to enter the contest, tag a friend, okay? tag one friend and what happens is, you know, instead of having three people who tag three friends, we get 500 people who tag one friend, okay? And that's a lot more social proof that you're generating than having people go through a crazy process where they have to follow your account like the post and tag like six friends. We've you running contest on Instagram as a nice boost for our marketing, but it's still not what's at the core of our marketing strategy, okay? While we're running these contests on Instagram, I am constantly still hustling on Instagram and working our Instagram marketing system. And by the way, this course that I've been working on for Instagram marketing for clothing brands is incredible, okay? I've been working on it so hard and there's amazing content in there and I'm super excited about it. It'll be launching soon. All right, so when it comes to this contest, let me give you a breakdown of what it is that you have to do, all right? The first thing that you're going to do is you're going to design a post where inside of the post you either say tag a friend to win or something like that, or you can just say, you know, January giveaway or just give away contest. I'm going to give you a quick breakdown of what it looks like for me to design a post like that. So this isn't a full blown tutorial. I'm just going to basically show you the steps that I go through. This is using a free application called paint.net. You want to start out with a square canvas size so that when you post it on Instagram, it looks really, really good in your Instagram thumbnail. So all I've done here is I've created a transparent canvas and I'm just going to be using a hoodie of ours and a wood background. The first thing that I'm going to do is just go to the hoodie and get rid of the white background and make that transparent. I'm going to use the magic wand tool just so that I can place the hoodie on top of other images. So here I've removed the background and I'm just dropping in the hoodie and placing it in the right spot. Then I'm going to go into the wood background that I brought in which you can find on Google and I'm going to copy and paste this onto a separate layer underneath where I pasted the red hoodie. I thought the wood background was a bit too bright so I'm just changing the brightness contrast and saturation here just to make it a little bit more subtle in the background. Then you'll notice that when I zoom in here, you'll notice that when I remove the white background, there's still a bit of white around the edges of the hoodie. And I'm just going to go in really close with the eraser tool and get rid of some of that extra white and really clean it up. Now I'm going to add a separate layer where I'm going to add text over this where I'm going to write tag a bud for a chance to win. Once I've written all the text and all the text is on separate layers, then I'm just going to go through each of the layers and resize each of the text so that it's all in a nice straight line and everything's aligned. Once all the words are aligned and it's straight up and down line, I'm going to just resize all of it together so that it fits nice on the left side in the middle of the picture. Once that's done, I'm just going to play around the color and I'm adding red to bud and to win, just to let it pop a little bit. That's really all that it is and I'll do a bunch of designs like this in different ways and I'll really just play around with it until I feel like it looks good and you can do the same thing. If you want, you can take a bit of what I've done here and apply it to your own contest. But just generally play around with it, make something like that and that'll work amazing as a giveaway contest on your Instagram account. Once your post is designed, you can just send it to your phone and I suggest posting the giveaway contest between about 5pm and 7pm on a weekday. That's when most people are hopping on to Instagram and those evenings will really help drive your contest forward. Inside the caption, you can just write giveaway and use branded emojis. We say tag a bud because that's our branded language but you can just say tag a friend. So tag a friend below to win a pair of K-Bud joggers or whatever it is that you're giving out. Draw will be held tomorrow, mention when the draw will be held, good luck everybody. Then when the next day comes, all you have to do is make a post and inside the caption of that post, announce who won the contest and then on the same day, we'll also announce who won the contest inside of an Instagram story. So you can say something like congrats and then tag whoever it is that won and then just put you've won our blah blah blah contest. Thanks to everybody that participated. That's pretty much everything that you have to do in order to run a successful giveaway contest on your Instagram account. When we first started doing giveaways, we only had a thousand followers on Instagram and we were getting about 60 or 70 people tagging their friends on it. Now we have you know over 16,000 followers and we'll have you know over 500 comments on a post. So that's 500 people tagging their friends which is another 500 people who are all participating and all building interest in our products. If you've made it to this point in the video, I want to tell you about the closed Facebook group that we have going on for a parallel success. There's a link in the description below. Follow that link, join us in the Facebook group. We're a bunch of clothing brand owners all in there to support each other and answer each other's questions. Thanks a lot for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.