Try running an Instagram viral sweepstakes
No matter what size your brand is, you can grow on Instagram with a slim budget and smart strategy.
The most important thing here is planning and forethought.
Don’t just post impulsively because someone else said to. Think through what your objective is, and design your campaign accordingly.
K&J just helped an account with 1,200 followers gain over 9,800 comments on a single viral post, with 60% organic/viral reach. All in a single day.
Here’s the account (go follow if you’re into design, their content is beautiful!)
1 – Decide on the goal of the initiative: reach, followers, comments, leads, sales, or whatever!
Your objective decides the strategy and every tactic involved in a campaign. For this one, our goal was first – followers, then engagement.
So we made sure that in order to enter our contest, all entrants must follow the target account.
Then we had users engage with our Contest post by commenting and tagging 5 friends, each extra being another entry into the giveaway. This took care of the secondary goal.
Next, we needed a sure-fire way of generating traffic to the contest.
We also know that by having a lot of engagement upon launch, we’d naturally get into the Discover section on IG – so we isolated our launch day and had all content and partner posts go live on the same day.
2 – Recruit the right partners and curate your giveaway / content accordingly
Next, we contacted local influencers in Austin TX who were into home building, interior design and photography.
We found accounts from 10K all the way up to 800K and reached out with a simple message “are you open to doing paid promotions?”.
With that, we gained responses from about 10 of the 50 we reached out, and secured 7 total influencers to post on the day of the contest.
We made sure to ask for screenshots of their “Insights” or analytics, and checked for strong organic reach before partnering. If you’re new to this, these insights allow you to see if they have real or fake engagement.
Next, we got sponsors to donate products for the contest, valued at $1,300 with a 1st and 2nd prize.
To enter, users needed to follow our client’s account, tag 5 friends on the contest post. The contest lasted 2 weeks so we’d gain strong engagement after the initial launch day.
We had the client create behind-the-scenes content, founder bios and a portfolio of their work posts for Stories.
That way all the new followers would get value right away and continue to engage.
3 – Plan a launch date and align all your activities to that day to create a serious splash
Knowing your goal, you can now set a clear date to align your activities to.
As mentioned, we had 7 influencers recruited. We had the two big ones with 300K and 700K post on the launch day of the contest.
Over the next two weeks, we had smaller accounts continue to post and drive engagement on the contest.
At the end of the day, the client hit all their goals of the campaign and is incredibly thrilled with the outcome. They also got a ton of traffic to their new website upon launch, which was in the Link in Bio.
Hope this was helpful! Want to speak with an Instagram Content Specialist at K&J? Apply for a free session here ($500 value): https://bit.ly/2VHa6Zq
Good vibes to ya,
Jonathan, Chief Contest Dork at K&J