Why run an Instagram Promotion?
With its unique reach, Instagram has become the perfect platform for brands to run promotions on and increase awareness of their products and services. Active users of the platform total over one billion, mainly composed of Millennials and Gen Z – key target audiences for prize promotions. Instagram’s appeal is not just about audience, with the relative ease of running promotions on the platform being a huge bonus. Ed Cleaver, Legal and Marketing Assistant, takes a closer look.
Why Instagram?
Running promotions and campaigns on Instagram has the advantage of making the most of a social media audience who are constantly engaged and who love to interact with their favourite brands online. By carrying out exciting promotions, brands can expand their following even further and foster greater affection from consumers. In fact, some figures suggest that Instagram giveaways and contests have the ability to potentially grow your account a massive 70% faster.
Major brands like Adidas and ASOS are able to target a gigantic audience through Instagram promotions but what are some of the watch outs?
The Small Print
As well as being aware of local regulations and rules, brands who run Instagram prize draws, and competitions, also known as contests or giveaways, must follow Instagram’s own set of rules. Most importantly all promotions must have their own full set of Terms & Conditions (which must be included on the post) including a statement that the promotion is not sponsored, endorsed, administered or associated with the platform. Failure to comply risks heavy punishment. Other key information such as eligibility, how, when and where to enter and the prizes on offer are essential too.
How To Be Effective
The key is to just keep it simple. Comment-based giveaways which include a specific hashtag draw a wider audience – and are the most popular way to do this. Nonetheless, these still require T&Cs, and PromoVeritas will be able to take care of these with minimal fuss.
Another way to engage is by posing questions to consumers – perhaps sharing a memory of something about your brand, with rewards for the best answers. This helps to highlight your popularity among existing consumers to prospective ones and can encourage community spirit.
User-generated content (UGC), e.g. sharing entries to a competition on your brand’s stories is shown to have a profound impact on consumers. The authenticity it displays by, for example, re-sharing consumers’ content, is shown by some research to make consumers up to 50% more likely to continue purchasing from that brand.
Influencers
Influencers provide a great opportunity, especially for smaller brands, to reach a diverse, wider audience with their promotions. By teaming up with influencers to advertise a brand’s promotion on their account, this could have a potentially transformative impact.
In spite of the undeniable benefits influencers can bring, they also need to be very careful with their marketing on the platform. As demonstrated by Molly-Mae Hague’s recent troubles, it is easy to get into tricky situations with very public ramifications without the proper consideration and care – an assured service here at PromoVeritas.
Running promotions on Instagram Stories
Although they can attract large audiences, Instagram stories are not the ideal way to promote prize draws, competitions, instant wins and other promotional mechanics. Stories are popular for signposting promotions, or highlighting Q&As which can be staged on them, however, as there is no means of automatically collecting entries from Stories you would have to manually record each individual entry. This significantly slows down the promotion running, while being an ill-advised means of extracting promotional data. Although Instagram’s appeal to Promoters is considerable and the positives of using the platform to market a campaign far outweigh the negatives, the platform has room to develop even further to help promotions run successfully.
Here are some examples of Instagram promotions we have run
Karl Lagerfeld recently ran a social media prize draw with the chance to win a gift worth €400. Influencers on Instagram, using a Karl Lagerfeld filter on one story and engaging their community on a separate story, helped to stimulate awareness of the promotion. The PromoVeritas team had an important role in reviewing the pertinent legal and promotional compliance issues.
Vype, British American Tobacco’s vapour brand, ran an Instagram competition to promote their partnership with the Fratellis offering a once in a lifetime chance to record and release a single and then support the band at a virtual gig. Entrants were directed to a microsite built by our team, and to then upload a track which we helped to judge.
Warburtons recently ran a caption competition – a ‘crumpetition’. In order to enter, consumers had to comment on any of the 9 promotional posts with a creative caption alongside the hashtag #CaptionOurCrumpet. The prize for the winning entry on each post was 9 packets of 9 Warburtons crumpets. PromoVeritas arranged all aspects of judging the entries, to see how well the captions met the criteria set out in the Terms & Conditions.
Beyond Instagram
Instagram clearly provides many unique benefits to brands on the platform itself and is also very useful for expanding elsewhere. Using promotional posts to gain consumers’ attention, brands often also include a link to a registration form. Here other contact information can be requested, such as email addresses or LinkedIn accounts, which, if provided, can considerably broaden the scope for personalised offers, appealing more directly to consumers.
The use of personal data is stringently regulated, but our team of legal experts at PromoVeritas are up to date with the latest regulations. They are here to prevent any major difficulties arising for our clients. Our operations team can also build fully branded entry pages to capture the data of your followers; they can also set up your Instagram promotion so that the extraction of entries, the selection of winners and their verification is taken care of within the platform. We can contact winners on your behalf and organise prize delivery too. PromoVeritas, from start to finish, can be the power behind your Instagram promotion.