Almost all major YouTube channels have, at some point, hosted a giveaway. Giveaways are fun, interactive, and engaging campaigns that can produce huge growth.
The main benefit of a giveaway is its ability to boost subscribers, engagement, and views instantly. A boost in any of those can directly translate into more income and massive sponsorships. Let’s take a closer look at a few YouTube giveaway examples.
Table of Contents
YouTube Giveaway Examples
Everyone from Dude Perfect to James Charles is hosting YouTube giveaways. While many of these kind-hearted YouTubers may love giving away free stuff, there are some real benefits behind their actions. Here are the two main benefits of YouTube giveaways: They increase channel subscribers and engagement.
The Dude Perfect
Dude Perfect / YouTube
The Dude Perfect merch giveaway (pictured above) is an excellent example of how YouTube giveaways generate subscribers and engagement.
To enter the giveaway, users had to subscribe to Dude Perfect and share their giveaway announcement video. This means that all entrants to the giveaway will become Dude Perfect subscribers and will instantly engage with them by sharing the video.
The result of this simple giveaway is insane. Their giveaway video has more than 59 million views and 100 thousand comments.
The giveaway was also hosted at the launch of their new series. Giveaways are excellent campaigns for creating hype around the launch of a new product or service.
James Charles
On August 28, 2020, James Charles announced a $100,000 Giveaway in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel. Users had to subscribe to James’s channel and follow him on all of his social media accounts to enter.
This is an excellent strategy for using a single YouTube giveaway to grow your subscribers and followers on other social media platforms.
Source: Social Blade
In the month that followed the giveaway announcement, James’s channel peaked in new subscriber acquisitions, the highest being 600 thousand new subscribers in just a week!
Now that you understand the benefits of a YouTube giveaway, let’s go over how you can host your own giveaway to boost subscribers and engagement.
Hosting a YouTube Giveaway
The concept of a giveaway is simple: You sponsor a prize, ask people to subscribe to your channel to enter, and then pick out a random winner. However, there is a lot that can go wrong, especially without proper planning. If you want your giveaway to exceed your expectations, then you will have to carefully plan and execute these three crucial areas of your giveaway:
- Your goals
- Your prize
- Launching and promoting the giveaway
By carefully planning the above, you will have a better idea of structuring and promoting your giveaway. Let’s take a closer look..
Determining Your Giveaway Goal
For most brands, hosting a YouTube giveaway is a means of boosting its channel subscribers. However, you can use your YouTube giveaway to achieve other (or multiple) goals, as well. Going back to the James Charles giveaway, the entry method required users to follow James on all of his socials.
Source: Vyper
His giveaway helped him grow his social media followers, as well. You, too, can host a giveaway that achieves multiple goals. Some examples of popular goals include:
- Growing email subscribers: Ask users to submit their email addresses to enter your giveaway.
- Increasing website traffic: Direct traffic from your YouTube video to your website to fill in the giveaway entry form.
- Software or app download: You can insert a link to the Play or App Store in the description below your YouTube video and request users to download your app to enter the giveaway.
Once you have decided on a goal, you can then carefully structure your giveaway to achieve that goal. If you want your giveaway to attract a large targeted audience, you will have to choose an awesome prize.
Choosing a Prize
When a person announces a giveaway in their video, the first thing a viewer wants to see is the prize. The prize is one of the most crucial aspects of a YouTube giveaway. People can be hesitant to submit their personal information to enter. Some people will only subscribe to your channel if your giveaway is “worth it.” Offering a prize that your audience finds valuable is the best way to convince them to take action and enter.
Source: Vyper
Lew from Unbox Therapy (above) gave away 106 smartphones. This campaign has since generated more than 14 million views on the announcement video.
You could say that his video received a massive amount of views because of how massive the prize is. So, if you want similar success with your YouTube giveaway, you should also offer a huge prize, right?
Using a generic prize like an iPhone might seem like an excellent way of attracting a broad audience. However, it’s possible that most of the leads you attract will only be interested in the iPhone and not your brand. An iPhone may increase the number of participants, but it will also generate a huge amount of poor-quality leads.
Finding Your Audience
It’s always best that you choose a prize that will attract your target audience. For example, the popular gaming franchise, Fortnite, can attract an audience of passionate gamers by offering gaming consoles and controllers as their giveaway prize.
Source: Vyper
Such prizes are almost exclusively desired by gamers and will attract that crowd. It won’t necessarily attract other audiences, like photographers or health-conscious people. If your brand wants to target photographers, then you will have to choose prizes like drones or photo-editing software.
Still, having trouble deciding on a prize? Perhaps you can ask your customers what they think will be a great prize for a giveaway.
Launching a YouTube Giveaway
Launching a bonafide YouTube giveaway is as easy as filming and uploading a new video to your channel. When creating your giveaway, always ensure that the giveaway video has the following:
- A thumbnail with the prize
- A video that shows off the price
- Dates related to the giveaway
- The entry method and how a winner will be chosen
- All of the above information placed into the description box under the video
Source: Vyper
Once your video has been uploaded, your current subscribers will discover it and enter the giveaway. By asking people to share your video, you will increase your chances of getting more people to watch it. If you feel that not enough of your subscribers found your video, you can create a post on YouTube to announce your giveaway.
Promoting a YouTube Giveaway
Solely relying on the YouTube platform may not be enough. Remember, Giveaways are massive campaigns that can attract audiences from any platform. Because of this, it’s recommended that you promote your giveaway on all of your existing marketing channels (social media, email, blog, etc.).
Social Media
You can share your YouTube giveaway on all of your social media channels to get your followers to come over to YouTube and subscribe.
Alternatively, you can simply create a post (like the one above) with instructions on how to enter. If you use a Twitter automation tool, you can easily schedule tweets that will be published during the course of the campaign.
Giveaways are the perfect excuse for you to email people you know. You can send out the following emails:
- An announcement email informing people about your new giveaway
- A reminder email to let people know how much time they have left to enter
- An announcement email officially naming the winners while also thanking everyone who entered
All emails can have links to your website or a page with more information on the prize. This is the perfect opportunity to increase website traffic.
If you don’t have a website, you can always insert links to your YouTube channel to drive traffic over there. Using an email marketing service will be ideal in scheduling the above emails so you don’t forget to send them out during the campaign.
Blogs
Blog posts are excellent for giveaways because of the amount of information you can insert into a post. You can easily embed your YouTube giveaway video into a blog post.
You have more options to promote your YouTube Giveaway when hosting it on a blog. You can use chatbots, banners, and pop-ups during the campaign to inform visitors about your giveaway.
If you don’t have a blog of your own, you can submit a request to be featured on a relevant blog. Alternatively, you can collaborate with a blog to co-host your giveaway.
The benefit of partnering up with other brands is that you can both help each other promote the giveaway.
Source: Vyper
In the giveaway above, Complex teamed up with Overkill and 43einhalb to host a giveaway that was featured on the Complex blog. Each brand shared the giveaway on all of their socials while also tagging each other. Tagging a partner in your post will help your audience discover and follow them. They can also tag you in their social media posts so their followers can discover you.
TL;DR
YouTube giveaways are viral promotional campaigns that can easily integrate into your channel and social media. Giveaways are fun and make for excellent content.
Hosting a giveaway has proven to be very beneficial for YouTube channels looking to increase subscribers and engagement. Brands sponsor prizes that participants can potentially win once they have subscribed to their YouTube channel. Some brands take things even further by structuring their giveaways to generate email leads and social media followers.
By Jack Paxton
