I’ll start with a disclaimer: I’m personally repulsed by online giveaways. I consider them shortcuts for lazy marketers. Yeah, sure, they work, but they can’t be your only strategy on the long term – as I’ve seen it happen with so many brands. Giveaways usually attract people that are irrelevant for your business, so are they really worth the energy? What’s more important: having 100 fans who really trust you and buy your products, or 10,000 fans who hit the like button just so they could win a prize, but don’t care about you and your mission?
That being said, at The CEO Library we really want to help the future generation of entrepreneurs. That’s why we thought of a giveaway that can provide real value and make a difference in the journey of those with an entrepreneurial mindset, who are always curious to learn more and improve themselves.
I started by putting together a list of 10 books about… learning. Learning is one of the meta-skills that can make anyone unstoppable.
Just think about it: most of what we learned in schools has nothing in common with the skills and knowledge we actually needed once we entered the work field. What kids are learning these days will be rendered obsolete over the years. There are so many jobs that didn’t even exist a decade ago.
That’s why it’s important for us to learn how to adapt, identify what we need to learn, accelerate our learning and reach mastery in the shortest time possible.
Which brings me back to how we’re helping those who follow our work at The CEO Library. We’re giving away all those books about learning. We split the giveaway into 7 separate prizes – about $300-worth:
– One big prize: the winner will take all 10 books about learning.
– 6 small prizes: 6 winners that can choose one of those books and we’ll send it to them.
The prizes are focused on such a small niche (books about learning) that we basically eliminated the possibility of having the wrong people enter the giveaway.
We’re also using this giveaway to build our mailing list – of course, people can unsubscribe at any time if they don’t feel that our emails are helpful. We also unsubscribe them automatically if they don’t open what we send them.
As you know, I’ve always been encouraging brands to focus on building clean mailing lists and use them to communicate directly with their tribes. Before launching The CEO Library, I’ve worked in the music industry for almost a decade, promoting local hip-hop and rock artists. I’ve seen most of those artists doing the mistake of building their house on a rented land. When they realized the potential Facebook has, they grew & entertained their fans only there and completely gave up on their websites or newsletters – something I’ve repeatedly warned them it’s a mistake. With the risk of sounding like a broken record: people, please stop making your business addicted to social media’s algorithms that always change overnight!
Ok, enough ranting, back to the giveaway. By using KingSumo to organize the giveaway, we also solved another issue that’s characteristic for giveaways: when people enter an online contest, they don’t want anyone else to find out about it, cause it only decreases their odds to win. Well, not this time: if you share it with your friends (through a personalized unique link), you’ll get extra entries – extra odds to succeed. And you can reshare that unique link every day, on multiple networks, thus turning the giveaway into something that’s viral.
The giveaway is still active for 9 more days, I’ll be back with some stats and more thoughts after it ends. Until then, good luck.
1 comentariu. Leave new
Not all giveaways are created equally.
Most are lazy tactics from a marketing point of view, but some can really work in your favor. If done right, this means extra work, of course. 