The Art of the Blog Giveaway: Case Study #1 (The Failure)

I figured I’d start off with a giveaway that, while it was not a dismal failure, didn’t go quite as well as I’d envisioned.

The Big Lesson of this Giveaway: Know what your audience wants from you and expects of you. Keep that in mind as we are going through this.

So here's the basic information about this giveaway:

• The brand:       Big Train Fit Frappe protein powder
• The prize:        A full-sized container of Fit Frappe in the flavor of the winner’s choosing
• The objective:  To get my readers to think up creative shake recipe ideas to win!

The Setup

This promotion was tied to a series of product reviews. I’d been given each of Fit Frappe’s flavor offerings at the time (Mocha, Espresso, Vanilla Latte, Chocolate and Vanilla) to try.

As I posted reviews of all the flavors, I invited my readers to think up ways to get creative with the protein powders and make them into new recipes.

What I Did Right

Now I knew up front this was a multi-component promotion (a review of many flavors plus a giveaway). In any such instance, I highly advise what I call an “abstract post,” or, basically a post that tells folks how things will work. This also serves as an advance promotion…of your promotion.

Here’s the abstract post I did for this review/giveaway.

I also promoted pretty heavily in advance on social media. A lot of folks seem to think you can’t “reveal” a giveaway until the moment you post about it. I largely reject that idea, partly because I work in communications for a living. Yes, talking about something in advance of doing it builds anticipation, but that’s a good thing! I often let my readers know when to look out for special promotions (even if I don’t tell them straight-off what those promotions will be) so they can come back and take advantage of them.

Remember, your objective is engagement, not mystery. The more people you can get interacting with you, your blog and the brand, the more likely you are to create a “win-win-win” situation.

What I Did Wrong

Remember above when I said my big lesson is knowing what my audience wants from me and expects of me. Well that’s the big mistake I made – not heeding that advice!

Although I pride myself on my tagline, “Play With Your Food” to a certain degree my readers look for ME to live out that tagline with them coming in after and tailoring it to fit their lives. So in short, I take the risk of trying to reinvent a recipe, post about it once it works, then they get to tweak it after they know it works (as evidenced by my pictures and ravings).

So…many of my readers had little interest in inventing protein shake recipes to begin with.

Add to that fact that I reviewed many flavors. In the interest of the promotion not going on forever, I did one flavor a day for five days. That means I moved through flavors pretty quickly. The nature of blog platforms can be pretty easily summed up like this (especially if you use Blogger): whatever is front and center is what gets the most attention.

Basically, I was removing former flavors from the “front page” faster than folks could (or probably would) respond to them. That, along with the fact that many of my readers were not apt to invent recipes, just meant even lower response. (NOTE: For folks who use Wordpress themes that are set up like web pages this is less of a problem as you can easily employ rotating images, etc. to keep everything front and center. We'll talk more about templates at a later date!)

Add to that, the fact that I was asking them to invent recipes for a product they’d never tasted and did not have access to (save for buying it) in order to test a recipe out. Yeah…not a smart move on my part, I know.

Finally, and this is a big one, know your product and how it relates to your audience.  In the case of Fit Frappe, it came in so many delicious flavors that folks didn’t really feel like they needed to do much with it besides mix it up and drink it.

The Result

From the very start, I began to water this promotion down, encouraging people not to give me new and exciting recipe ideas, but to give me ideas for how they already make protein shakes. That’s not a good sign.

From there I took to social media: begging, pleading, cajoling my readers to respond.

What I Learned

My readers lack of response should in no way be blamed on them. It wasn’t that they didn’t “get it” or that they “didn’t see a good thing staring at them.” I didn’t “give it to them the right way.”

Now I am committed to NOT resigning myself to simple “like and share” contests (like so-and-so’s Facebook page for a prize!) for several reasons. Firstly, to me it’s the equivalent of cattle herding with people. Go here! Now go there! Like this one! Now like that one! I have a lot of respect for my readers intelligence and I think they are informed and smart consumers. So any promotion I do seeks to not only give them the opportunity to try something for free but to get information, knowledge or services that can help them even if they don’t win.

So all that is to say I don’t think I should have done a “like and share” contest. I think I should have designed a better, more accessible contest.

I also learned that desperation reeks. If your audience picks up on it, you’re in trouble! I don’t think it got too, too bad with this promotion but here’s my big lesson: you want people to respond to your promotion because they are an interested and engaged reader, not as a favor to you. If you are seeking to build an audience around your blog or movement, it sort of needs to transcend you, and with good reason. Simply put, there are only so many people in the world who like you and it’s about 50% fewer people than you think.

So that’s a giveaway that was a bit more complex than the standard that did not work out in my favor. Next up is one that did…although it took a while to get that way! But now it’s one of my biggest events. We’ll go over it in detail in the next blog post!

NOTE: If you look at the abstract post for my Fit Frappe giveaway I made a few more critical mistakes in the design of that giveaway. See if you can identify them. If you do, leave a comment on this post!