10 Creative Facebook Giveaways To Jumpstart New Business

Are you a small business owner who wants more attention for your business? (Who doesn’t?) Look no further than a creative Facebook giveaway idea to bring in new customers.

Why? Because, simply put, giveaways work. They give your business:

Potential customers’ emails
More Facebook page likes
Better engagement on your Facebook page
A reason for consumers to think about you now and in the future
Increased word of mouth marketing
Needed relevance in a competitive age
Improve ad conversions

Even I’ve seen thousands of subscribers added to my personal brand email list through giving away an Apple Watch, Amazon gift cards, and my books.

That’s why I promise if you properly execute a Facebook promotion, you’ll fall in love with it and make that a core staple of your marketing budget going forward. Don’t be surprised when this happens to you.

Because it’s magical when you can put money into marketing and receive double the return on investment, or better. A Facebook giveaway easily has this potential—not to mention the potential for 1,000% returns.

Let’s check out these 10 examples of how to get the most out of a Facebook giveaway.

Odds are one of those ideas below will also work well for your business. So feel free to copy a winning campaign, or get inspired to pull off a related promotion to get more customers.

Creative Facebook Giveaway Ideas

1. Free food for new customers

At least three times a day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—people have food on their mind. And when you consider all the moments spent thinking about what you’re going to eat next or conversations with friends about different food spots, it’s obvious we love to eat!

For this reason alone it makes sense why free food giveaways do well.

So any restaurant who cares about marketing should consider doing a free food giveaway to attract new customers.

One of these ideas would do extremely well for your restaurant:

Give away one free burger, sandwich, wrap, etc. to new customers who enter their email on your sign up form (give them a digital coupon to bring to your restaurant)
Run a promotion where contestants enter their email and one lucky winner gets free lunch for a month straight

Besides the brand awareness and emails you gain, this also gets new people to your food spot, where they can try different foods, get a feel for your atmosphere, and potentially get them hooked to come back for more.

The key here is to make the meal free.

Discounts are proven to subconsciously lower the value of your food and it makes the offer less attractive, which hurts the giveaway results and the entire objective of this campaign.

2. Trip or vacation

You know how much people love vacations? Go to the average office cubicle in the United States and I guarantee one of the most frequent topics include taking trips.

You’ll hear stuff like:

“I can’t wait until next month’s trip to Greece.”
“How was your vacation? I wish I could go on one.”
“Do you know how many vacation days we get this year?”
“Ben just went on a two week trip to Europe, you don’t get how jealous I am.”

Point being if your giveaway prize is a trip to somewhere cool, the contestants will come. You won’t have a low entry problem.

While you could offer the fancy 10 day island getaway experience, you don’t have to. A three day staycation trip to somewhere attractive will also do the trick.

Technically any company can do this, but travel-related companies will do the best with this one.

To execute this: Collect emails to enter. Draw one winner. Maybe have smaller prizes or explain there will be future trips contestants can win.

And continue to communicate with this email list going forward by providing value and occasionally mentioning your product or service for sale.

3. One year of free gifts

This is the best Facebook giveaway in my opinion. Here’s why.

When you run a giveaway where contestants enter their email in hopes of being the one person who wins a year’s worth of free service (haircuts, food, manicures, pet grooming, etc.), the awareness explodes like fire on gasoline.

People sign up by the masses, they tell their friends and family, and the performance goes above and beyond a business owner’s expectations.

Plus with a little Facebook ad boost behind the giveaway, you could end up spending $50 on the ad and reach 20,000 new people in your local area.

Of course you need to follow through and give away a year’s worth of free service, which will cost you a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, but the net profit will be through the roof. See our Facebook ads case studies for an example.

Don’t think you’re excluded from this if you’re a product company though. You can team up with a service company that fits what people with your product need or like to do, and it’ll be a match made in heaven.

For example, because I think it paints a clear picture, a car dealership (product company) could partner with a local car wash (service company) to offer free car washes for an entire year to a lucky winner from a drawing of new car buyers.

That’s how you want to be thinking if your company doesn’t offer any typical services.

And if you’re on a tight budget, it by no means has to be a free year of service. It can be 6 months, 1 month, or 1 time.

I just believe in the marketing idea “go big or go home.”

4. Fun experience

Who doesn’t love having fun? Especially when it means trying something new? Take advantage of this to run a giveaway where you offer a fun experience as the prize.

For fun experiences, think gifting the contest winner with free:

Whitewater rafting
Skydiving
Horseback riding
Kayaking
Camping
Sailing
Bungee jumping
Hot air balloons
Helicopter ride
Parasailing

The ideal businesses to go for this include outdoor, apparel, and lifestyle companies whose brand goes hand in hand with nature and or activity.

Technically any company can offer this, but the relevance and future customer loyalty works better when the company is in the same space.

Because then these companies can do email marketing with their validated email list to offer their products or services. That’s a solid high-level strategy for short-term and long-term benefits.

5. Catered event for a party

What can a restaurant gift besides food or drinks? A catered event where they bring everything needed for the guests to have a good time!

You can run a giveaway where one lucky contestant gets a catered event 100% paid for by your company.

Your customers are always having parties. So imagine how excited they would be to win a free catered event.

Think about offering this promotion for one of these events:

Super Bowl party
Corporate meeting
New Year’s Eve get together
Birthday party
Graduation party

And this isn’t limited to food establishments. A catering company, bar, alcohol brand, dessert store, or others can do a giveaway like this to get their name out to new audiences for a limited cost.

This is a great way to build good will among local people and stay front and center in potential customers’ minds.

6. Your best-selling product

What’s the one product you’re known for? What do people come in and ask for the most often?

That’s when you know you have a popular winner that more people want. And this makes for the perfect Facebook page giveaway offer.

If you’re feeling generous, make it 3, 5, or 10 lucky winners.

Because assuming they enjoy the product as much as other people, they’ll spread word of mouth to their friends and families who will want to buy it.

This word-of-mouth marketing is likely worth it alone. But when you consider the customer information you’ll gain from this product giveaway, it’ll be a home run for your business.

Try it out and see how will this does for your brand awareness and future sales.

7. In-store gift card

The gift card promotion is a proven method that has worked seemingly forever. If it’s not broke don’t try to fix it, right?

Why I like this gift card idea is it gets new people into your store. Sure, they might only spend the limit of the gift card, but there’s a good chance they buy extra stuff. Or they buy your products with the gift card and appreciate them so much they become a lifelong customer.

Getting a lifelong customer out of a gift card giveaway is a heck of a deal you’d take every single time.

How do you do this? I’d go with at least a $50 gift card to get people excited. If you want to really go for it then offer $100, $250, $500, or $1,000 in-store credit.

But the dollar amount and how many gift cards you give away is up to you and what makes sense for your business.

It’s obvious, but keep in mind the higher the gift card amount, the better the audience response and giveaway performance.

8. Holiday-related gift

Tying your Facebook contest to a holiday isn’t a revolutionary idea but it’s a tactical move that is sure to produce results.

Sometimes sure things are the best to bet on.

Example gifts for holidays could be:

A travel company gifting a vacation for Easter
A fireworks company giving out fireworks for 4th of July
A costume company giving away outfits or decorations for Halloween
A local store offering a 20 pound turkey for Thanksgiving
A wrapping paper company giving away free wrapping paper for Christmas

Again, don’t think you have to sell something that relates to a holiday to get involved.

A restaurant can offer free food to moms and dads on Mother’s day and Father’s day, respectively. A dentist can offer teeth-whitening on any holiday for contestants who enter their email.

Get creative to use that brain of yours to tie together your giveaway with a holiday for extra effect. Often people spend more around holidays, so this is a good opportunity to bring them in for free and then hopefully they buy other products or services you offer.

9. Tickets to an event

Expensive tickets to a concert, symphony, play, movie, or sports game are some of the most desirable giveaways out there.

These are prime events that the whole city would love to attend. The kind of stuff that sells out in minutes does even better.

The way your business can leverage this desire is to find a way to buy these in advance and offer them as a giveaway prize to get people signing up to your email form.

Or maybe your company already has a private box to the local college or professional sports team? Offer the chance of going to the big game and bringing 10 other people.

Doing this will humanize your brand and make it feel like you’re more part of the community than doing an event that only promotes yourself.

10. Multiple prizes through partnerships

There’s no reason you have to run a giveaway all alone. It may be extremely advantageous and profitable to partner with different companies in giving away prizes to contestants.

The contestants win by having more chances to win and the potential to take home different prizes. And you win by leveraging the audience of different brands with your own brand to create a bigger giveaway.

At the end, just share the leads between the partner companies and yourself. Everyone wins this way.

This shouldn’t be that hard of a sell to get other companies involved. Heck, you can probably find a partner on the same strip or street as your brick and mortar shop.

Get them to market this giveaway to reach a larger audience and more impressions.

And maybe working together with companies gives you an in for a future project where you can deliver what they’re looking for to make some money.

Quick tip: I wouldn’t partner with businesses in the same space as you. A hardware store shouldn’t partner with another hardware store, otherwise it minimizes the intended effect and brand awareness you want to generate. They’d be better off partnering with a garden store.

Don’t Wait, Start Growing Your Business

To recap, here are 10 effective Facebook giveaway ideas for your business:

Free food for new customers
Trip or vacation
One year of free gifts
Fun experience
Catered event for a party
Your best-selling product
In-store gift card
Holiday-related gift
Tickets to an event
Multiple prizes through partnerships

Once you’ve narrowed in on your promotion, there’s nothing left to do except for you and your team to implement it!

Because I’m sure you know the reward only comes from action. You don’t get any new customers or revenue from thinking of good ideas, only from implementing one of these giveaways.

I challenge you plan a promotion this week and then go live with it next week. After all, the best way to learn is through doing and analyzing the results.

What do you have to lose in the grand scheme? Not much at all.

But what do you have to gain? A world of new customers, money, and future opportunity.

I’d say that’s 100% a trade worth doing. It’s win now, or set up a future win for your business, based on what you learned.

Just remember to tell me thanks when this drives in a ton of new business, wink wink.