The pitfalls of offering giveways in your photography business
Image by: @ibnualyafizi
Some of you who are members of my private Facebook group may know that I am doing a 365 Live Challenge in that group that started January 1st. The other day, I spoke about giveaways and figured I would share the information here as well.
Giveaways are similar to other tactics like contests, raffles and pay what you can, of which I write about here. While they may generate some short term buzz, most of these kinds of tactics don’t work in the longer term and can even harm your longer term business goals. I know. It’s tempting to speed things up and sometimes it’s more of a matter of desperation to book and generate income. But please consider these elements before going ahead:
Compliance
When I worked at one specific marketing agency, we serviced a large account: P&G Beauty. We produced a quarterly print magazine and hosted a website. We held monthly contests/ giveaways online and I was responsible for ensuring compliance with head office legal regulations and that the initiatives were registered with the appropriate governing body (check your local laws on gaming and lottery) and all fees paid. Why all this hoopla? Because there are consumer laws to protect against false claims, scams and fraud. Social media platforms such as Facebook also have their own sets of rules, on top of local laws.
Not running a contest or giveaway properly can get you banned from a platform. You may also feel that failure to register your tiny, little giveaway in your small community isn’t a big deal - you’ll fly under the radar and these rules only apply to big and visible corporations. But it only takes one disgruntled person who didn’t win, or felt your entry process was unclear or unethical, to report you. This happened in my community. After I left marketing agency and was working at a small nonprofit, I learned that another local organization had run a casino-night fundraiser some years prior. Held in the basement of a community library no less! Someone within their network didn’t agree with using gambling as a means to raise funds and reported the event. The police showed up and put an end to the evening since no paperwork had been registered with the government and — yes, this happened — the Executive Director arrested. While I don’t believe she served any jail time, she now has a permanent criminal record.
If you’re going to run a giveaway, be careful and ensure you know and follow the rules. And this leads me into my next point:
Giveaways attract people who like giveaways
If I’m going to spend time and effort to create and manage a marketing campaign, I want to be sure that I’m going to get some great traction with it. But things like contests, raffles and giveaways are often appealing to those who want to win something and the thrill of the game trumps the actual prize. They’ll take what you offer but their loyalty is to their wallet — meaning trying to get something for free and avoid spending money — rather than to you. You will incur cost to acquire that customer because your time is money (notwithstanding any government fees to register your giveaway if applicable) and if they take their prize and leave, then you must ask yourself — could you have spent that money on a different sort of campaign that might have encouraged a more loyal-minded client to be captured?
There is administration time and then there is also fulfillment time. Correspondence, shooting the session, editing and delivery and perhaps even some difficulties as people who get things for free may be more demanding. If they are gone to the next giveaway (and there are other giveaways because other photographers just like you who thought it might be a good idea are doing it!) then these clients can coast on free photo giveaways without ever having to settle down and pay for a session, let alone return to you. You may have some good photos for portfolio or marketing use. But again, perhaps all that energy could have been placed into a better fit client who would have also yielded portfolio and marketing photos but also come with a network of like-minded people and who might refer and become a repeat client.
The reasons and economics behind giveaways
When larger corporations run giveaways, they are not for exposure — they’ve got big ad budgets for that. They are to collect information. Many photographers think of the exposure piece - get their name out there but fail to leverage the information collection part, because they are focussed on producing images for social media channels that resulted from the giveway as the means of finding new clients.
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Proctor & Gamble are a beauty products retailer. They have huge scale, and keep costs of production pretty low because of the high volumes they are able to produce. Their gift basket for a giveaway may cost them a few dollars at most (with labour, product, packaging and shipping). A drop in the bucket.
But P&G will receive hundreds, if not thousands of entries into their giveaways because they are a known brand, and have big ad budgets to advertise and direct people to their website to enter. The prize they actually sent out was inconsequential - they’ve made a consumer happy and that’s pretty much that. But it was a means to an end. For these smaller giveaways, there was never any press around the winners because it wasn’t the goal to profile the win for marketing purposes. The real prize was to gain large lists of names, emails and phone numbers for future email and text marketing and ultimately — sales.
If they had even a 2-3% uptake on the subsequent email campaigns and provided offers like coupons, then they would stand to be able to increase their revenues with each giveaway that FAR outweighed the cost of the gift basket prize. And it’s a gift that keeps on giving, because consumers need to re-buy shampoo and other care products on a frequent basis. They also have multiple brands under their umbrella, giving those who love giveaways options of many products to try, all within their business umbrella. What they may lack in brand loyalty is made up of sheer volume and incentives like coupons.
Our small business is a vastly different model and structure. As a photographer, you might spend hours to shoot, edit and deliver, which is a much higher cost relative to the size of the business.
For small community photographer on their own, spending time to administer a giveaway, having the value of the prize to be quite expensive relative to the size of the business, and having a naturally less frequent user of services (maybe people might do photos twice a year at most), the whole thing starts to have diminishing returns.
What to do instead
As sole business owners of a small business, we need to be more careful to weigh the pros and cons of whatever strategies we employ in our businesses, and play the tape forward as they say, in order to see if the short term outcomes are worth the longer term possible consequences.
It may be hard to do, but playing a longer game might suit us better. Establishing community partnerships, hosting well-branded headshot or mini marathons (done right, not cheaply!) to expose new prospects to our services, and offering a lead magnet of some useful and valuable information in order to get an email address are suggestions that all nurture a more local, more connected relationship. And unlike P&G, we are not in the commodity business, but in the business of people.
What are your thoughts on giveaways? Have you had success?
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