Countdown to Christmas: There’s still time to run festive promotions!
With a Christmas period unlike any other in recent history fast approaching, we felt it was important to spread the word about running festive promotions before the 25th December.
This year, the focus on compassion and kindness towards others is required more than ever, and prize promotions have the potential to boost morale during the Covid-19 era, whilst also being an effective way to provide some of those impacted hardest with gifts, prizes and other such help. Meanwhile, your brand benefits from spreading festive cheer whilst potentially gaining sales and new customers, so whilst it is clear that promotions can help us all have a merry Christmas – is it simply too late?
How to run a promotion in time for Christmas
There is still plenty of time to run a promotion on one of the established social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. As a result of conditions imposed by the pandemic, social media promotions have become increasingly popular and effective. This is not only because of the large audience that they can reach, but also due to the ease with which they can be run. Our talented team can help you to arrange them with great speed, for relatively little cost and a big impact. Crucially, it’s not too late to do this if you follow our list of top things to consider for your Christmas promotions:
1. What kind of promotion to run?
Our advice would be to run a daily Advent Calendar style prize draw if time is short. Giving away a range of different and exciting prizes each day in the run up to Christmas builds excitement, generates lots of shares and deepens the engagement of those entering day after day – and they don’t all need to be high cost either. The easiest way for followers to enter would be by commenting on the daily post, using a unique and festive hashtag, to make it easy for our team to extract all the data and then select a daily winner.
2. What prizes to give away?
One important consideration when giving away prizes this year to those in need is practicality. With lots of people struggling with the financial impact of the pandemic, certain gifts will have a profound and important effect. For instance, kids having access to meals has been a topical discussion lately, and a promotion to win your Christmas dinner with all the trimmings would probably be welcome. Likewise, games and toys that are popular with children this year would also increase the entries and the likelihood of followers sharing the promotional post. Another popular prize we’ve been giving away is the chance to send a gift to others or donate to charity instead. It seems that values of compassion and selflessness are going to be most important this Christmas.
If your prize is something that would be needed in time for Christmas make sure that you leave our team plenty of time to select and verify your winners and then deliver their prizes. The best way to do this with a time constraint would be by giving away e-vouchers quickly so that the winner can organise their prize conveniently.
3. Always follow the rules
No matter how short or simple your promotion is, it must have Terms & Conditions to set out all of the important information that entrants need to know – opening and closing dates, prizes, how to claim as well as the legal blurb that’s required by all of the social platforms you want to run the promotion on. Our legal team have a 24hr turnaround service for when time is of the essence.
4. Remember to plan properly
Although running Christmas promotions on social media is relatively simple you still need to plan ahead to make sure they are risk free. Consider things like how you are going to extract all the data compliantly, or who is going to select a winner if the promotion ends at midnight on 31st December and your team are on holiday for the week – PromoVeritas are on hand to help you with all these concerns.
5. Continue spreading the cheer
And finally, January can be a bleak time for many, and this next one will be no exception. So, be extra generous and offer a wrap up draw for all those who entered to win a star prize in the New Year to keep the festive spirit going even longer.
PromoVeritas can help with all aspects of running Christmas promotions from drafting T&Cs, to setting up hashtags and data extraction, to quickly putting together a winner page for gathering details and automating prize fulfilment – our team can do all this and more, and are around during the holiday period. So, if you are interested in running a promotion this Christmas and spreading some festive cheer, please do get in touch with us at info@promoveritas.com.
