Running a Giveaway? Use Popular Brands as the Prize.

Giveaways can be great promotional tools, driving lots of traffic to your website and introducing your company and products to tons of new consumers. That is, if you do them right.

One not-so-successful approach to giveaways that we've seen is when unknown/new brands feature their unknown/new products as the top prize. And what happens? Well ... not much. The giveaway gets relatively little traffic and few entrants.

Now we know that featuring your own products as the top prize seems like the sensible thing to do. You're a new green company with a great new green product and you want everyone to know about it. Why would you feature some other company's product in your giveaway?

Because consumers, even eco-conscious ones, want to win things they want. And they tend to want things they've heard of. And if they've never heard of your product, they're not as likely to want to win it. It's that simple.

So what can you do?

Leverage the power of popular brands and products; meaning, make the top prize something people want. Then, slip your product into the prize package -- maybe in tandem with the grand prize, or as a runner-up prize.

And what do green shoppers want? Let's assume for a moment that you're not able to partner with another company and get the "popular" prize donated; rather you're picking up the tab. So, putting the most expensive prizes aside (like cars and solar roofs), some popular and affordable prizes we've posted on Ecobunga! are:

• Gift cards to green grocers (like Whole Foods)
• Cookbooks (organic/vegan/vegetarian, etc.)
• Basic bikes (we're not talking high-end race bikes, just your basic $200 beach cruiser)
• Eco-friendly cleaners (especially Seventh Generation)
• Solar backpacks or chargers

Of course, it's best if you can find something thematically related to your product, but it doesn't have to be. We've seen organic tea companies give away bikes and musicians give away Whole Foods gift cards with great success.

The point of a giveaway is to drive traffic to your site and create interest in your products. If you need to "borrow" a better known brand or popular product to make that happen, that's okay. Down the road, who knows? With any luck, some brand new company will be "borrowing" your product to feature in its giveaway!