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My Lead Generation Marketing Strategy Created 2178 Leads With $60

 Kamila Gornia Updated on May 25, 2016 Tutorials 51 Comments

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With my lead generation marketing strategy I was able to generate a lot of leads in a short period of time using a single giveaway.

By leveraging a mix of partnerships and the viral component, results were quite mind blowing.

Whether you’re a blogger or an entrepreneur, doing giveaways can be a great way to grow your list of potential customers.

Read the case study to see how she did it for her wellness brand.

What You Will Learn

• My lead generation marketing plan
• How I gained 2,178 subscribers by running a single giveaway in only 14 days and only $60 spent on advertising
• Planning your giveaway in a way that attracts quality leads
• What to expect when running a giveaway
• Mistakes most people make when running a giveaway for list building

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Why Should You Care About My Lead Generation Marketing Plan?

Before I dive into this case study, I wanted to make sure I introduce myself. Why should you care what I have to say anyway, right?

Well, my name is Kamila Gornia and I am a digital marketing strategist and I work with entrepreneurs and small businesses to help them get seen and get paid doing what they love, online.

I am also the founder and CEO of a virtual boutique social media agency, Kamila Social. I’ve been doing various forms of internet marketing and brand building for my own ventures since I was 12 years old.

One of my ventures is a wellness blog for women called Sensual Appeal. We’ve got about 55,000 monthly readers and it brings in a consistent income stream without many monthly hours or any advertising spend, so I’d call it pretty successful in my terms.

Why Run A Giveaway?

Like I said, I’ve done quite a few giveaways in the past: some were for my marketing agency clients, some were done on social media, some were for my photography business, most were for Sensual Appeal.

Even Matthew takes advantage of the strategy on his blog! So I’ve seen the traction that can come from running a well-executed giveaway.

I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on a venture that might be going away soon. I didn’t have any products of my own to entice my readers with since we’re just a blog.

And I didn’t have the time or energy to put together live or online events to get more traction.

I wanted more leads. I wanted them fast.

So I turned to the benefits of a well executed giveaway-

• Grow your list REALLY quickly
• No need to spend much money spent on ads (if any at all)
• Positions your business as the hub

My main focus was generating more leads that would then be interested in staying on as readers (a portion of my revenue comes from website advertising and sponsorships) and potentially purchasing affiliate offers I promote.

So that list growth was crucial.

Creating The Giveaway Step By Step

It was nearing the end of October and I wanted to hustle to take advantage of the Fall craze. Since my readers are about 95% comprised of women, you and I both know Fall is a PERFECT time for Fall themed things for women to get excited about.

I’ve decided on running a big hosted giveaway called “Fall Favorites Giveaway” where I give away some of my “favorite” products to one lucky winner. I wanted the value of the giveaway to be in the $400-$500 range.

The products weren’t even really Fall-related. But who cares? Give it a name of “Fall” and it’s already got to have more appeal than any other regular “Awesome products giveaway” right?

Step #1 Planning the giveaway

When planning a giveaway, it’s important that you know what you want to ultimate goal of the giveaway to be. One of the most common mistakes I see bloggers and entrepreneurs making is not being clear on what the main GOAL and objective is of any campaign.

This is especially true for giveaways.

I’ve done giveaways as requested by some sponsored brands on my blog before, but Because they weren’t done strategically the giveaways didn’t really grow my list. They might have added a few social media followers but honestly? Nothing to write home about.

Plus, because there were no goals to meet, a giveaway was a success only determined by vague terms such as comments left on the blog post or overall entries in a widget.

My goal here was purely to GROW THE LIST.

Step #2 Getting A Prize

Now that I had a goal, I had to decide on the prize itself.

I already knew I wanted it to be a Fall Favorites Giveaway theme but what should I actually give away.

I wasn’t planning on spending any money on the products themselves. So what could I do?

Simple. Tap into the power of partnerships.

Since I’ve already had many partnerships and sponsorship from various brands reaching out to me, I simply collected all of the contacts I had for these various companies and started reaching out to them individually, letting them know about the opportunity.

I also sourced other companies I could support and would like to see featured in the giveaway.

Anything as long as it was something I would actually get behind and it was aligned with my brand mission – being healthy, happy, and mindful.

I tracked the entire thing on a spreadsheet and did not stop the outreach until the total prize of the products confirmed reached at least $400.

Step #3 Setting Everything Up

First, I created the giveaway page on my website as a landing page to ensure that no leads would be getting away as well as minimizing the distractions from having other things going on.

I used a plugin called KingSumo Giveaways which integrates with WordPress and has all the features you need for a successful giveaway.

There are lots of different software out there in the market for giveaways but I recommend picking one you can host yourself.

When it comes to technical stuff I’m useless, but the plugin took care of it all of that for me including some awesome viral features.

In the past, I hosted most of my giveaways either on social or on a blog post, making it harder for the readers to actually opt-in due to distractions.

For most of those giveaways, I used Rafflecopter or another plugin to host and generate the entries.

While those were easy to handle, it didn’t have that true “viral component” within it that encouraged participants to promote it. Plus, it would live on a blog post ONLY – making it easier to miss even when you were scrolling through the blog post.

Next, I also created a post on my blog so that the RSS readers were able to know about it and I outlined exactly what was included in the giveaway, the details around why I’m doing it (because I love Fall! Duh!) and the details such as when it starts, ends and how to enter.

The blog post then had a call-to-action that directed the readers to the landing page to sign up and enter from there.

Again, I did not want people to enter directly from the blog post – I simply used it as a way to drive my RSS subscribers to it as well as having another place to talk about the giveaway.

Since this post also had more details and a bit of a backstory, I felt it was a better way to get more people to know what it’s about.

Also, I didn’t wanna put too much information on the landing page as to not distract people – they were able to navigate back to the blog post to learn about the prizes there.

Step #4 Promoting The Giveaway

I did not intend to do heavy promotion of the giveaway mostly because Sensual Appeal is more of a side business. I love it but the initial passion has dissolved over the years.

So I wasn’t planning on spending a ton of time or money on it.

If it worked, great. If it didn’t, also great. It’d help me learn more and make my decision on the direction that much easier.

The promotion of the giveaway was broken down into 3 components-

1. Social media & email
2. Website
3. Partners

Twitter Giveaway Promotion

I promoted the post everywhere I normally promote on social media. I had a Twitter plan and scheduled tweets that included some outreach on both of my Twitter accounts.

Using Sprout Social (you can also use HootSuite or this tutorial), I scheduled tweets to go out on my blog Twitter account.

I also used my personal Twitter account for an extra boost (and it probably helped that I had 15k on my personal versus 2.4k on the blog’s).

Another third-party tool I used for Twitter was ManageFlitter, where I was able to do some semi-automated outreach to people I felt might be interested in participating or knowing about the giveaway.

You can also do the same with this Twitter tutorial.

I basically found people who have used hashtags related to health and food and looked like real people (not spammy accounts) and I scheduled out tweets to go out to them (mentions, not direct message) to let them know about it.

Yeah, I reached out to a good amount of people this way.

Many people entered from my doing this.

It’s just important that you only do 4-5 tweets like this in a row and no more.

Try to break it up with some other tweets that are about other things so when people check out your feed, they see that you aren’t just some spammer.

That’s what ManageFlitter allows you to do, it spaces these tweets out.

Facebook Giveaway Promotion

I created graphics for Instagram with text over it that talks about the giveaway and used relevant hashtags and then shared the post onto my Facebook page too.

This is what they looked like-

You can make your own graphics like this using smartphone apps or Canva. Here’s a list of some of the best picture quote apps.

I don’t know how many subscribers I got from that exactly but I did get a decent amount of engagement from it on both Instagram and Facebook, so I’m sure I got at least a hundred or so.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt. Any type of promotion helps.

I also shared the giveaway in a few Facebook groups where some people were hanging out that might be interested.

There were several Facebook groups I’d already belonged to that I felt could be interested, mostly related to blogging, healthy living, healthy blogs and food.

When sharing in Facebook Groups, it’s important to be careful and cautious of each group’s rules – not everyone is so keen on self-promotion. And you might get banned, so be careful.

However, if you position it right without making it look very promotional, it works.

It’s a bit of trial and error and it surely won’t work for every single audience but it’s worth trying because I know a LOT of the people came from Facebook.

A couple of days into the giveaway, I’ve decided to throw some money at it to see what happens.

So I created a Facebook Ad for $50 that was congruent with Facebook advertising practices.

Since I run Facebook Ads pretty much every day, it’s not something I had to spend a lot of time figuring out. I ran the ad for $50 and since I saw it generating good traffic, I added an extra boost of $10 to finish it off.

I wish I had the screenshot of the ad, but I used a different account that I no longer have access to since I handed the blog off to someone else.

The one thing I wish I’d done is a conversion goal versus a clicks to website goal. I think I had trouble figuring out how to put the conversion pixel on the giveaway landing page.

Matthew will show you how to advertise your business on Facebook effectively with his personal strategy.

Partner Brands Giveaway Promotion

I also relied on some of the brands promotion support in the form of tweets to bring in extra traffic.

At the beginning of the giveaway, I told them it’s live and shared the link with each of the partners as well as a pre-written tweet for them to use on their social media.

I then did the same thing around the end of the giveaway, asking for a final push.

Here’s a sample email I sent to the sponsors-

Not everyone promoted, but those who did were definitely great in driving a couple extra eyes to the page.

Email Newsletter Giveaway Promotion

Lastly I also let my current tribe know about the giveaway through my newsletter and due to the viral component, it gave my current readers more of a reason to share it with their friends.

Here’s how that email looked-

I emailed them twice about it. Once in the beginning and once around the end.

Website Giveaway Promotion

The website played a big part of the promotion.

Since I get about 100k pageviews per month on Sensual Appeal, I knew I had to leverage that traffic and direct it toward the giveaway.

I did that by having the initial blog post written on the blog so that my RSS subscribers were also able to see it as I mentioned above.

This is where I was directing most of the traffic through all of the promotion tactics I mentioned above.

I also included a simple image in the sidebar of the blog as well as installed scroll-triggered box (WordPress plugin) with an image that, when clicked, would direct the user to the giveaway landing page.

It was basically just the same image I’ve been promoting everywhere else.

So whenever a person would visit my website and scroll down to about 40% down the page, a box on the bottom right would pop up with the giveaway promo.

These were all directing people to go to the landing page and enter the giveaway.

The Results Are In

So let’s take a deep dive into the results of the giveaway.

I got a total of 2,178 contestants and a total of 7,779 entries.

People could get extra points for referring someone else to sign up for the giveaway as well so clearly plenty of people did that.

That grew my list from a little over 1k to 3.3k in less than 14 days. Pretty impressive, right?

Cost Per Lead

Now, we have to think about costs.. you might be thinking.. man, she had to spent a lot of money on advertising for this one, right?

Not quite. In fact, I initially only spent $50 on a Facebook ad for this.

Then I added $10 extra because I saw how effective it was and wanted to have it carry through till the end with a bang. That’s $60 total.

That comes out to paying a little over $0.02 per lead.

Obviously, not every single person came directly from the ad but when you think about the monetary investment in this campaign, per lead… that’s literally what it comes out to.

WHEN HAVE YOU EVER PAID SO LITTLE PER LEAD?! Two cents! Well, if you have, then awesome, kudos, but I haven’t so I was beyond happy.

Social Media Community Growth

The campaign also saw lots of new interest to my profiles on social media.

I picked up quite a bit of growth-

• New Facebook Likes: 560
• New Twitter Followers: 534

Social Media Engagement

Signing up is one thing but was the engagement genuine?

Were people actually engaged and interacting with my brand on social media?

Oh, indeed they were. Here’s a nice look (and an interesting number) as to how many tweets I got during that period.

• Tweets: 999
• Retweets: 53

Wrapping It Up

So there you have it – behind the scenes of a successful giveaway!

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Just remember that-

• You don’t need to spend a ton of money to get awesome results. The most important thing is the plan of action, having an awesome prize that people actually would LOVE to get, and a way to encourage the people who are indeed interested to do the heavy lifting (the promotion itself) for you.
• You don’t need to be a graphic designer or spend money on any great designs. You saw the landing page and the blog post. It’s not beautiful. I spent maybe 10 minutes putting that together. Not rocket science.
• Obviously, not everyone will stay on the list that got on the list. There will ALWAYS be people who only sign up so they can win and then unsubscribe. That’s fine, let them go. Your job is to make sure your prize is related to what you already put out and make the stay enticing enough for them to want to stick around after all.

Read more: http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/budget-lead-generation/#ixzz4OrC5FJH3