How to Successfully Attract Pet Owners by Hosting Pet-Themed Product Giveaways

Staying competitive in the oversaturated e-commerce market is a major concern for most businesses. These days, it’s no longer enough to simply offer the best possible version of a product or service. Instead, remaining relevant in the age of instant gratification means knowing how to promote your brand most effectively, as well as being dynamic about how to implement those methods. 

That being said, some brands go all-in on social media advertising. Others tap influencers or establish themselves as experts in their respective fields, lending credence to their online brand identity.

But for practically any business, an effective way to widen audience reach is by holding a giveaway. When combined with strategies like targeted advertising, giveaways are an immensely powerful marketing tool that can generate all sorts of favorable results.

Done properly, it puts products in front of niche audiences who otherwise may not be exposed to them. Giveaways can also attract new customers and increase engagement with existing ones, all while being relatively cost-effective and easy to put together. 

This brings us to pet-themed product giveaways. They’re a great way for businesses to appeal to pet parents, a niche audience that has largely been overlooked by many brands. Given that they’re known for splurging on custom dog hats, toys, clothes, food, treats, and essential services for their fur babies, they’re big spenders that you definitely want to attract to your business. And a giveaway is definitely one way of getting their attention. Here’s how to do it the right way:

Identify the Giveaway’s Goals

Determining the goal of the giveaway can help you figure out what type of promotion would suit your purposes best, as well as how it should be marketed. Examples of strong goals specifically for pet-themed product giveaways can include: 

• generating awareness for your brand or product among pet enthusiasts;
• creating anticipation for a pet-related product or service that you’ll be launching soon;
• positioning yourself as a pet-focused or pet-friendly brand;
• increasing traffic to your website;
• adding to your social media follower count and boosting engagement; and
• catalyzing user-generated content.

Choose a Great Prize

Everyone loves free stuff, but few people will want to make the effort of joining a giveaway if the prize is uninteresting. That’s why choosing a compelling giveaway prize is important, as it will ultimately drive excitement for the event and have a direct effect on the participation level.

Remember: the main purpose of a pet-themed product giveaway is to promote your brand and its products to the relevant audience. Hence, the prize you give away should contribute to those efforts. This means choosing something from your existing product pool that may be of interest to pet owners or animal lovers. If none of your products fit the bill, you can try collaborating with a pet-related brand that can provide customized prizes like canine caps or dog toys.

You can also make people feel more invested in your giveaway by choosing a prize that they perceive to be quite valuable. The general rule is that the prize value should be commensurate to the amount of effort it takes to win it. You can then ask potential participants for only the bare minimum of effort to enter the giveaway, such as by liking and sharing your social media posts. Once you’ve attracted enough people, you can start scaling up and giving away more prizes to drive traffic and attract more participants.

Select a Platform for the Giveaway

Now that you’ve decided on your specific goals and prizes, it’s time to actually conduct the giveaway. While you might be under the impression that hosting it would be as easy as posting about it on your brand’s social media pages, the reality is slightly more complicated. 

In general, you’ll want to post the giveaway on platforms where it can reach the most people. These days, that means using at least one if not all of the big social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

However, you’ll soon find yourself running into a major issue. Broadly speaking, each social media platform has a different set of rules that govern promotions, and there can be serious consequences if you end up violating them. To prevent running afoul of them, you’ll want to carefully the Terms of Service for each platform that you decide to host a giveaway on.

From there, it’s just a matter of promoting your giveaway as much as possible. There are a lot of ways to go about it, including posting on your brand’s social media feeds, sending out an email campaign, sharing the giveaway with pet-related groups, or working with an influencer to spread the word.

Even if your business has nothing to do with animals or pets, doing a pet-themed product giveaway still puts your name and brand in front of potential new customers. As a bonus, your brand could stand to gain a lot of profit by gaining the attention of pet lovers, who are considered to be some of the most loyal and engaged types of audiences out there. Try hosting your very first giveaway and see how it goes.