Marketing·
You have one thing to give away, and the choice looks simple: pick something people want.
But a prize does several jobs at once. It decides how many people enter, it tells everyone what your product is worth, and it decides who comes through the door.
Four thresholds worth borrowing
A prize filters when it presupposes something.
The thing you already have. Give what it keeps needing: cat litter, bike tubes, wiper blades, sewing thread. Worthless without the cat, the bike or the car, and it takes a recurring cost off whoever has one.
Not every consumable works this way. Printer ink, coffee pods, a filter that fits only your machine: a small amount of those reads as cheap bait, so give enough of it to be worth winning.
Or give the machine as the top prize. If it takes anyone’s refills, more people want it, and it sits in a home with your name on it for years. If it takes only yours, you have added a buyer.
The practice. Give what gets used up by doing the thing: guitar strings, yarn, climbing chalk, film. It means nothing to anyone who does not do it.
The stage. Give what a household needs only for a while: a year of diapers, a newborn photo session, a local move. Sharp, but it expires.
The place. Give something that has to be used where you are: a haircut, a class, a table for two. For a local business this is the strongest filter, and usually the cheapest.
When nothing filters
Some things cannot be made to filter: coffee, chocolate, gift cards, headphones. Then the filter moves to the entry. Ask for something only your customer can produce: a photo of the machine on their counter, or the shelf where they keep it. The prize stays open to everyone, the door does not.
How tight to make it
A tight filter gives fewer entries and better ones. A loose one gives numbers.
A brand that already has an audience should filter hard, because the job is to find the buyers inside it. A business that opened last month may need numbers first, and a leaky prize is a fair price.
Give everyone a sample
The grand prize goes to one person. What everyone else gets is the bigger decision.
Make it a sample of what you sell. It costs little and puts the product in the hand of someone who might buy it.
Sampling usually runs the other way: you hand things out at a table and most go to people who will never use them. Here everyone holding a sample has already told you they have the machine, the habit or the cat, because that is what the prize filtered for.
That is a sample list you could not have bought.
When you cannot hand out the product
Nobody samples a refrigerator. When what you sell is too big to try, give something that goes with it and gets used: storage containers, not a fridge magnet.
The test is whether it will be used. Containers get opened every day. A magnet does very little for them, and what it does all day is advertise for you. That trade is easy to see, and it turns the gift into a favor you asked for.
Make it good, too. For most of these people it is the only thing of yours they will ever hold, so its quality becomes their idea of yours.
Then put your name on it. An unbranded gift buys goodwill and nothing else, and one carrying another company’s logo means you paid to advertise them. Keep the mark small enough that it still looks like something they chose.
Give it out over time
A year of something does not have to arrive in one box. Send it monthly and one prize becomes twelve deliveries: twelve reminders, twelve chances to post again. A single box is one good day, then silence. Twelve months is also long enough for the product to become a habit, and the habit is the only part that outlives the prize.
Let them choose
Offer three prizes and let each entrant pick which one they are playing for. The choice costs you nothing, and it tells you what people want: which flavor, which size, which color. You were giving something away anyway, and this way it answers a question too.
What you are really doing
The prize is a question, and entering is the answer.
Choose it well and every entry tells you something you never had to ask: they own the machine, they play, they have a toddler, they live ten minutes away.