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Small Business Promotions | The Mystery Giveaway Strategy

Mystery Gift giveaway promotion post imageToday, let’s talk about another idea from our growing catalog of small business promotions.  The “Mystery Giveaway”!

A mystery giveaway promotion is an easy promotion for your small business and provides an element of fun!

As the name implies, the item you’re offering is a complete mystery to the customer.  When the offer is a known item as an incentive, it gives customers the opportunity to decide if they want the free item and is it worth whatever is required of them to get it.  However, when the item is a mystery, you can build up the excitement without the customer passing judgment as to their desire to have said item.  They already want it simply because it’s free!  That makes this technique extremely powerful for any business.

What Kind of Mystery Item Should You Give Away?

There are a few different approaches you can take.  First, you can just give away something small and mildly useful. It should make your customer smile, but be fairly inexpensive.  For example, an odd electronic gadget, or a small book of quotes related to your industry.  If you’re a restaurant owner, free meals for a month or longer (one per week), is often a successful giveaway promotion for a restaurant. Or, on a grander scale, you could give away something that’s extremely useful, slightly more expensive and very impressive. The idea is to exceed the customers’ expectations. This generates a lot of goodwill and gets people talking about your business.

Mystery giveaway items can often come from stock piles of merchandise or leftover discontinued items.   This is a great way to make space for new products. It may be a good idea, before sending your old merchandise out as freebies, to make sure that the customer hasn’t actually purchased that item in the past.

Free Giveaways versus Purchase Bonus

You can use your giveaway in many ways. Generally speaking, you don’t want to just offer a mystery giveaway item to just everyone. You could limit your contest to regular customers, or to a specific group of people depending on the specific promotion. This kind of giveaways usually cost money to create.  So, you will want to be a little selective.  You can use it as a feeder for a sweepstakes, a contest, or even as a way to grow your list. For example, everyone who gets 50 likes on their contest page gets the mystery bonus.

You can also use a giveaway promotion as a purchase bonus. Whenever someone buys your product, they get the mystery item as well. Perhaps, you can even have a random rotation of mystery items.  This is a teaser because people never quite know what they’re getting.

Multiple Mystery Items: The Grab Baggrab bag image
Finally, you can give away multiple mystery items, grab bag style, by giving away a bunch of small things instead of one big thing.

The mystery item can add a great deal of style to your free giveaways. It can be used to build up excitement about a product or a launch or simply to clear your space of older merchandise. There’s a lot of room for creativity when you’re using this technique.

More Small Business Promotional Ideas:

If you are looking for more ideas on promoting your small business, be sure to download our free ebook: How to Increase your Local Businesses Sales.  You can find it by clicking here or completing the form on the left side of the top of this page.

Happy Marketing!

 

Video Marketing Campaign Strategies for Local Business Success

As a local business owner, are you tapping into the power of video marketing and social media marketing as a combination to get the word out about what your business offers?Video Marketing for local business

Most local business owners are not!

Why?  Because:

Most business owners don’t know how to do it themselves and further, wouldn’t know where to start.

and/or…

They “think” it’s too expensive to have it done for them and they are not sure of the return on their investment.  The good news is that video marketing is not like buying airtime on TV.  The costs are much lower and the ROI is trackable through the use of analytics.

If you aren’t using video marketing, you’re missing out on one of the most powerful ways to promote yourself and your business.

Video can help you to get more publicity.  Google, and other search engines L.O.V.E. video!  As a result of that, they will rank your videos higher in the search engine rankings and highter rankings means you will be able to generate more traffic and potentially, more sales to your website.

The numbers don’t lie.

If you search YouTube, you’ll find their statistics quite startling:

“People are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube”.

If that doesn’t give you a clear picture of the sheer number of people watching video, perhaps the following numbers will mean something to you:

An amazing 52% of web traffic is now video and 70% of internet users watch video online!  The average YouTube visitor spends 27 minutes a day watching videos!

It’s not hard to see what these kinds of numbers can mean to your business if you are video marketing.  It’s really a no-brainer yet most local businesses don’t seem to be taking advantage of it.  Video, has the ability to set you above your competition and combined with social media, well quite frankly, it’s an almost unbeatable combination!

As I mentioned above,  search engines such as Google, Yahoo and all the others love videos and give them special attention.  Just by creating a few quick videos and posting them on top video sites, such as YouTube, can be a very fast way to get a top listing for the words that your potential customers would search for you by.  For example, if I was searching for a local dentist and since I live in Charleston, I would search the words “Charleston Dentist”.  A video that was made by a local Dentist that had been properly optimized for this term would rank higher in the search results  and I would be able to see that a video was available from a local dentist.  Based on the statistics above, 70% of those searching that term would prefer to see a video over just reading some text.  Video and social media have really helped me get my own as well as my clients messages out.

Another big benefit to using video is that it can help build an email mailing list very quickly.  You may have heard it said that “the money is in the list” and this is true.  E-mailing your list of subscribers not only keeps you at the top of their mind when they need a product or service that you offer, but it gives you the opportunity to make offers for specials, limited quantities, discounts, or other things that you might want to offer to your subscribers.

To discover how your business can get started using Internet videos combined with social media sites to promote your own business, products, and services contact e-Edge Marketing for a free consultation.

During your consultation, you will learn:

  • Why video is a proven way to establish yourself as an expert authority in your industry and market your business online.
  • How to start your own online TV show with zero risk and a very low investment cost.
  • Marketing strategies for using online videos to get attention for your business and create buzz about your business on the Internet.
  • How using videos can grow your e-mail marketing list.
  • How launching your business’s online video campaign can make it easier to get publicity offline from radio and/or TV shows and leading magazines and newspapers.
  • Don’t look the way you look on camera?  We’ll show you how effectively use videos without actually appearing on camera.
  • How cost effective video marketing can be.

Don’t hesitate!  You are losing new customers to your competition everyday and we can help you to stop that.

Contact e-Edge Marketing today.  Call Toll Free: 866-945-9707

To your video success!

Leigha

Real solutions and proven strategies for marketing YOUR local business.
Serving small businesses throughout the U.S.

Strategic Internet Marketing, Reputation Management & Video marketing