When you’re running a giveaway, you’re always trying to find ways to get completely new entrants: People who are in your target audience but who don’t yet know your brand. Today we’re going to talk about how using partner promotions both increases your standing in your industry and brings in all kinds of new entrants—for free.

The Power of Partnerships

Your business’ reach—your email subscribers, your social media followers, etc.—only goes so far. And, sure, you can use paid marketing to increase that reach, but paid marketing can be expensive and difficult to master.

Luckily, there’s another way. By creating strategic partnerships with businesses who have a similar target audience as yours, you can extend your reach quickly, easily and virtually for free.

Think about it: When you run a giveaway alone, you send it to your current audience and hope they’ll promote it as much as possible.

But when you run a giveaway in partnership with another brand, you both promote it. When members of their audience enter, you get that subscriber info! (And vice versa). Plus, you get the benefit of their audience reach as well.

How to Set Up Partner Promotions

The first thing you need for a partner promotion is, obviously, a partner. Start looking around for businesses or blogs that seem to be a similar size to yours and will have a similar audience.

For example, if you’re a small online business that creates hand-crafted scarves, a small online business that creates hand-crafted jewelry could be a great partner.

Reach out and suggest that you run a giveaway together. Ideally, you would both provide a prize for the giveaway; in the above example, the prize could be a scarf and necklace.

The key is that you both agree to promote the giveaway to your email and social media audiences (hence the “partner” part of partner promotions).

Then, create a giveaway through Promosimple just as you normally would.  You don’t both have to create a giveaway; we’ve made it easy for you to create just one form and share it with your partner.

Remember to create a headline that’s very specific (“Enter to Win Jewelry and a Scarf” instead of just “Enter to Win”) and use a great picture of your prizes.

Either in your rules or in your giveaway description (or both), let entrants know that by entering, they’ll be signing up for both of your email lists.

Then, when you’re done creating your giveaway, click on the Publish tab. You’ll find your embed code there to add to your own site. For your partner’s site, you can either send that code or, to make it even easier and safer, send the link you’ll find in the Share Your Entry Form with Others.

If you’re both using our WordPress plugin, all you need to share is the campaign ID.

Then, share your giveaway with your audience while your partner shares with theirs!

At the end of your giveaway, download the CSV of your entrants and share them with your partner. You’ll both have seen twice the number of entrants for a fraction of the effort. Win!