Influencer marketing is one of the latest trends when it comes to the advertising industry, and while you might not know that much about it, big brands are already starting to put aside a huge percentage of their yearly marketing budget to spend on it.

Influencer marketing goes hand-in-hand with social media marketing, and some of the most popular platforms to find influencers to market your brand are YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

However, whether you have tried this type of marketing out yet or not, the reality is that influencer marketing is here to stay, and it’s high time that most brands jump on the bandwagon if they want to achieve real success with their brand online. There are a number of different types of video content that brands out there can use to increase their success on YouTube.

However, the methods that seem to be getting the most attention are contests and giveaways. Executing influencer campaigns in the form of contests and giveaways provides an original, unique way for a brand to encourage its viewers to interact with its content and create a sense of credibility.

Campaigns like this have almost unlimited potential to generate awareness around their brand and engage with its target audience on a much more intimate level.

Finding the Right YouTube Influencers for the Job

If you are planning on getting in touch with various YouTube influencers for contests and giveaways as part of your brand marketing this year, then you need to know who to connect with. The influencer that you choose to get in touch with needs to be able to generate active engagement around their existing content.

They should be targeting an audience that is parallel to your brand’s target audience, whether this is in terms of demographic, interests, or needs. Your overarching goal should be to reach as many people as you can through sharing compelling and relevant content.

Think about it; if you are connecting with a YouTube influencer who doesn’t fall within your brand’s niche, then their target audience is going to be irrelevant, and not that interested in entering your giveaway.

Getting Contests and Giveaways Right

Running contests and giveaways on YouTube through a well-known influencer sounds pretty simple, but there are a lot of things to consider when doing so. The first thing is that you need to do is outline the guidelines of your contest, so that you can avoid being penalized by YouTube.

When thinking about running a successful campaign through YouTube, the best part is that you can create a joint giveaway campaign with prominent influencers. These types of campaigns are going to let your audience know that by completing certain social media activities, they can enter to win.

These activities are going to bring value both to the influencer and your brand. This means that both you and the influencer can promote this type of giveaway content. When you execute it at the right time, and target the best audience, these campaigns can end up being extremely effective, as well as affordable.

Additionally, they have a high chance of going viral, especially if you include the refer-a-friend action that participants need to complete in order to have a chance of winning. You also should enclose other guidelines like sharing an announcement of the contest on their YouTube, sharing on other platforms out there including Instagram and Facebook, and emailing.

Another option that you have out there is running YouTube contests through influencers. A YouTube contest is a really good way to generate awareness around your brand, generate leads, promote a particular service or product, and just engage in your community online in general.

How successful these types of campaigns are depends completely on the prize that you are willing to give away. Of course, the more expensive the prize, the more entries you will get. Remember that the prize as basically a gift, which means that the more appealing it is, the more it is going to be valued by people who want to participate.

There are a number of different YouTube contests out there that you can experiment with to bring more brand awareness to your product or service. These include caption contests, contest collaborations, dare contests, challenge contests, customer advocacy contests, connect with a YouTube subscriber, subscribe to win contests, and next video contest.

One thing you need to remember is to analyze the performance of your contest video on YouTube, by monitoring how many channel views, subscriptions, and upload views you get from it. This is going to give you a good idea of whether that type of YouTube contest is well-suited to your brand or not.

Keep in mind that it might take a couple of tries to get it right, but once you do, you will be able to generate a lot of hype around your brand.

Final Thoughts

Running a contest or giveaway on YouTube either on your own channel, or by partnering up with an influencer, is a great way to tap into the benefits of influencer marketing and being on YouTube in general. Remember, YouTube is an extremely competitive space, which means that if you really want to stand out and get notice by your target audience, you’ve got to do something different from other people.

Showing that you’re willing to give away something early on in the game is a great way to generate trust with your target audience, so that you can ultimately build more social proof for your brand. Good luck!