How to Boost Your Toy Brand with Effective Giveaway Strategies

04-APRIL-2024 Power of Giveaways 

Jason Hsieh: [00:00:00] Hello. Good afternoon. This is Jason Hsieh, the founder of Toy Launch. In today’s training, we’ll be talking about winning hearts and minds through the power of giveaway in toy marketing. Thank you everyone for joining today. Please comment below in the live stream on YouTube and let me know where are you tuning in from as part of our webinar training today.

I’m going to go right into today’s presentations as we have more people joining us today for the webinar. First of all, for today’s webinar goal, we’ll be covering different skills that is required for any toy business to learn about giveaways, how to use giveaways to enhance your brand’s visibility, how do you increase sales, how do you establish a strong market presence in today’s toy industry through social media, through all the other different strategies I’ll be mentioning as part of today’s training. The webinar agenda is really break down to four different part. First of all, [00:01:00] we’re going to be talking about understanding the power of a giveaway, exploring the concept of a giveaway and their impact for toy marketing. We’ll be also talking and discussing some psychology behind consumer behavior and how the giveaway is actually Influencing purchase decision.

And then the second thing we’ll be talking about is how can you design and craft your own giveaway campaign for your own toys brand to gain additional social media followers, to gain additional email people’s emails, and also building your own customer base and how do you leverage social media for maximum impact and something you need to understand is giveaway is just one small piece of the puzzle of all the other digital marketing that you could do for your own brand and you really want to incorporate it around all your other strategy, your email strategy, your texting strategy, your Amazon strategy, if you are currently selling on Amazon, and if you are selling through your own [00:02:00] website, you should incorporate into your overall marketing channels. 

The last thing I’m also going to talk about is example of tools and resources that you can use in order to run and set up a giveaway fairly quickly. That’s different tool that we use and also going to share. And then I’m also going to recommend a few software that we have tried in the past here at Toy Launch with all the different toy brand that we manage. 

So before I dive in today’s training, let me first reintroduce myself. Again, my name is Jason Hsieh. I have been in the toy industry since 2017. How it started for us is my son was diagnosed with autism and ADHD while we used to live in Tokyo, Japan in 2013. My wife is Japanese and I’m Taiwanese. I do speak Japanese and Chinese as well. English is my third language, so I still have a little bit of accents, I’m still working on that, but the thing with Japan, just like all the other [00:03:00] Asian country, that’s a huge taboo around disabilities, especially for an invisible disability like autism and ADHD.

The problem that me and my wife was facing when we were living in Japan back in 2013, when our son got his first diagnosis when he was three, we couldn’t find the resources and the help that we needed to help our son to give you an actual example. In 2013, we used to live in Tokyo, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. But we can only find two therapy centers to go to in the entire Tokyo metropolitan area. So that was a really bad situation for me and my wife. So we decided to move to the United States in 2015, seeking for better resources, seeking for better opportunity for our son. But only to find out after we moved to the US, is the US medical insurance one of the worst in all the advanced country combined. Because, as the medical insurance here in [00:04:00] US, it does not pay for a majority of the therapy that we needed for our son. We are talking about $100 an hour therapy that require 10 to 15 hours a week of intense one on one behavior therapy. It’s often referred to as ABA therapy, or Applied Behavior Analysis. That’s the name for the official therapy that we needed for our son. On top of OT’s Speech and a whole bunch of other therapy. 

That’s why I started LakiKid, our in house brand in 2017. I’m top of my day job. I used to work in the corporate finance for over 10 years in major corporation, like Toshiba, that’s one of my previous employer. I started my toy brand out of a personal need. So currently our in house toy brand, LakiKid, we design sensory toys, fidget toys, weighted toys, and other type of toys designed for kids, just like my son that have learning differences, that’s different, and we create and design our toy to fulfill a need that I am trying to fill [00:05:00] with my own son, with our own family. As you can see on the slide here, this is my family. This is a picture that was taken a few years ago. We have three kids. My oldest his name is Keanu, he’s turning 14 this year. He’s the one that is on the autism spectrum. So that’s how I got started into the toy space. And currently As a company in toy launch, we’re not just a digital marketing company. We also partner with a lot of different vendors. We are also a Klaviyo partner, we are Shopify partner, we are also a partner with Amazon ad, we also partner with PICFU, one of the advertising or AB testing experimental, software slash website that we use. We are also a proud member of Astra and also women in toy, because my business partner, which is my sister. She is part of the organization the women in toys organization. We are also part of United inventors association as a company. What we focusing on is helping other toys brand, just like us to be successful in [00:06:00] today’s digital marketing landscape.

As digital marketing is changing really, rapidly. And that is not just for digital marketing. For Amazon, which is something we specialize in for Facebook, it always changed for Google is always changing. And that’s why we are trying to commit to doing a monthly webinar on different topic every single month to help and share some of our knowledges, share some of our experience of what is currently working and what is currently not working in digital marketing for toys companies.

There are three principles in our toy marketing system that we deploy when we work with any kind of client. 

Principle number one, is it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on, either you’re on Amazon, you’re on your own websites through Shopify or WooCommerce. You want to make sure your listing, your store is fully optimized for maximum conversion. One of the KPI we usually look at for Amazon is you want to make sure you are [00:07:00] converting at 10%. Means out of 10 people that visit your page on Amazon, one people out of 10 should be buying from you. If not, then you have a lot of work you need to do on your listing and on your storefront. 

The second thing we usually work on when we work with any client of ours is we also work on profit optimization. It will be good to sell on Amazon or through your website or whichever online channel you are currently selling on. But if you are not making a profit at the end of the day, it defeat the whole purpose, right? So that’s something we also work with our client really closely on. We actually do a free profitability audit as well for any client that want to speak with us. That’s one of the first thing we do. 

The last thing we do is ongoing optimization as part of our overall strategy, like ongoing AB testing, different images, testing, different videos, testing, different copywriting to really highlight the major benefit and the feature for the toys and for the [00:08:00] product that we are trying to advertise.

Going back to today’s main topic, which is the role of giveaway in today’s toy market. In the giveaway, that’s really serve a few main purposes. Number one, brand awareness. How can you build brand awareness through giveaway? And actually giveaway is one of the really effective and cheap way to get your brand out there. Because the primary objective for giveaway in the toy marketing is to enhance the brand awareness and make it fun to engage with your audience. In today’s webinar, I’m going to share and talk about a few live example of a giveaway we are currently doing for the month of April.

Month of April for me, because I’m in the autism space with special needs, Autism Awareness Month is April. So this is a big month for us, for my in house toys brand. We’re doing a big giveaway called Autism Awareness Giveaway, which I’m going to show you some of the live example of the [00:09:00] giveaway we are doing and how we are structuring it right now.

The second purpose is for the role of giveaway in today’s toy market is engagement. How can you engage with the target audience? As we all know, majority of the buyer were talking to moms. I’m also going to show you some data in today’s presentation on the current data consumer in US for toy market. Giveaway provide an excellent opportunity for toy company to engage directly with your audience through all the different social media channel. You can simply post on Facebook, on Instagram, on any other social media channel you’re currently on and just engage with your followers. Engage with them, it’s another way to really get them to know your brand a little bit better and get them to really be excited about being participate and in some of your digital marketing effort. 

The third main role for the giveaway in today’s toy marketing is enhanced brand royalty and also advocacy. Giveaway can serve as a powerful tool for [00:10:00] enhancing brand royalty because you are giving away free product for them to participate, for them to like and really believe in your brand and what you stand for and creating that relationship with your royal fan base is really important for the long term success of your toy brand. And of course you can also engage with influencer and engage with other partner, which I’m also going to talk about in today’s training on how can you utilize influencer and tie that in as part of your giveaway strategy today.

The next thing I want to talk about is, why giveaway? One of the major, I think objection I get when I talk about giveaway marketing is Oh, the giveaway people is is not as engaging. It’s just not as a big, good of a quality list, which, could be true because sometimes when people are opting in to giveaway, they will give you a email they don’t check as often, which could happen. But the main thing about [00:11:00] giveaway, first of all, is Reciprocity. The principle of responsibility suggests that people is compiled to give back when you’re giving them something in return. They feel like a sense of obligation to make a purchase from the brand in the future, and also it gives a sense of exclusivity as far as giveaway goes, because having a limited or exclusive giveaway can really tap into your current existing customer base and really try to make them feel special because you could be doing an exclusive giveaway for only your Facebook follower or only your Instagram follower. So now you give them another reason to follow you, for them to like and engage with your social media content, for them to sign up for your newsletter, that’s a lot of different way you can really create a community around your brand by incorporating giveaway as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. The third reason is [00:12:00] also because it creates additional emotional connections. Giveaways have the power to invoke a positive emotion in consumers, such as joys, excitement, and also gratitude. And those emotional response can really create additional memorable experience that associate with your toy brand. Which is why you make the giveaways so powerful in that way when it comes to the psychology of the consumer’s behavior. You can also influence the purchasing decision in various ways to running a very successful and well organized giveaway campaign. 

The next slide I want to talk about is the mechanic of the giveaway. There is a lot of things you need to think about before you set up your first giveaway campaign with your own brand. First is, define your objective. Before launching a giveaway, clearly define your objective. Are you aiming to increase the brand awareness? Are you trying to drive more website traffic? Are you trying to grow [00:13:00] your social media following? Or are you simply just trying to boost sales? Understanding your goal will really help you to shape your giveaway campaign and your overall promotion strategy for your giveaway for your toys brand. Second is, you select the right price, choosing the price that will be appealing to your target audience and that align with your brand in the case of a toy giveaway, considering offering like popular product. The most popular toys in your like product line or you can offer exclusive like merchandise as part of the giveaway. Those are some of the idea of the potential prices that you can do and the typical benchmark is you want to make sure the price is very appealing and you want to, make sure you also show the volume. For example, the giveaway price is worth $100, worth $200. Our giveaway we’re running for the Autism Awareness Month, every single week we are giving away $500 worth of toys and prizes for our audience.

[00:14:00] So the bigger the prize, the more engagement and the higher chance you can get people to be more engaged and really want to join part of your giveaway campaign. The third part is determine the entering mechanism. Are you going to have a landing page set up, which you can just collect people’s emails and maybe phone number as part of the giveaway? Or you can also have a set up, which is all common on this post on Instagram and for every single person that comment, you also get an entrance to part of our giveaway. There’s many different ways to do it. Of course, there’s some give and come, there’s always advantage and disadvantage depends on the entry mechanism that you want to use. But that’s also the third thing you want to consider before you run your giveaway campaign for your toys brand. The fourth thing is, set a duration. You want to have a start time and the end time for your giveaway. A typical giveaway usually run for 30 days or a month. For us, we’re doing for the month of April. Every single [00:15:00] week usually toward the end of the week, Friday or Saturday, we’ll pick a winner and announce the winner on our social media channel in, our emails and announce the winner. That’s another way for you to re engage with your email list, with your social media follower by making that announcement of the winner as part of the giveaway. The fifth thing you want to do is create a clear rule and clear guideline on how exactly people can get the giveaway. That is really important as well. You want to make sure it is very easy to enter. You want to reduce the friction as much as you can. So you can get as many people joining your giveaway as possible.

The next thing is, promote a giveaway. Obviously, because you just set it up and no one know about a giveaway? Obviously no one’s going to sign up. So spread the word about your giveaways through various marketing channels to maximize reach and participation, utilize your website, utilize your social media, your email newsletter and your partners. Those are all the different ways to really [00:16:00] promote a giveaway. And make sure you have eye catching visuals and compelling copy and have a clear call to action to capture your audience’s attention and drive more entrants for your giveaway. The next thing is I already mentioned earlier is, select and notify the winner. How often are you selecting the winner? Is it every Friday? Is it every Monday? Is it every week? Or is it only at the end of the giveaway? It’s something that you also want to consider. My recommendation is, the more frequent you can announce the winner, the better. That’s why we do it weekly. That’s why we announce the winner on a weekly basis. Because it gives you another reason to reach out to your entire list because you are announcing the winner and guess what? Everyone that entered the giveaway want to be the winner. So they’ll be looking out for the email that you’re sending. They will be looking out for your upcoming social media post to see, oh, am I the winner? Am I the winner? And that is a very good way to re-engage with your list. As we all know, [00:17:00] with the social media nowadays, with all the algorithm change, it’s really hard to get a lot of organic reach in most of our posts, either on Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media channel, because all those social media channel is pushing you pushing the business owner like us to pay them to get more reach. So make sure you’re announcing the winner on a more frequent, on the higher frequency. That’s also going to help on your social media marketing effort. The last thing is, obviously, you want to deliver the prize. You want to actually ship out the prize to the winner. And also, you can follow up with the winner and say, Oh congratulations for winning this month’s Autism Awareness Giveaway, would you mind taking a picture or even a video showing us your reaction of receiving and winning the giveaway. This is another user generated content you can use with your social media, with your email. Guess what? The winner of this month’s giveaway, this is a video of the winner and this [00:18:00] is all the prize they get.

This creates even more excitement for your audience, for more people to enter, because they see there’s actually people receiving it. That’s also unfortunately with social media, that’s a lot of scam going on because sometimes they will run a giveaway, but they never really send out a prize. Of course, you don’t want to be that. Honesty is, number one when it comes to digital marketing. So it is very important to make sure you also deliver the prize to the winner based on your promises. And of course, for those of you that have questions, please feel free to put any question that you have on today’s training in the chat on YouTube, and we’ll try to get toward the end, we’ll have a dedicated Q& A session to answer any of the questions that you may have about running and using giveaway as part of your digital marketing strategy for your toy brand.

The next thing I want to dive a little bit deeper into is knowing your audience. I’m pretty sure a lot of the business owner, the toy entrepreneur that’s watching today’s call, you have a good idea of who your audience is already. [00:19:00] Like first thing, if you haven’t already, you should definitely conduct a market research and really trying to define your buyer persona and try to identify what is the main social media channel that your audience is usually on. For us, for our in house brand? Majority of our followers is very active on Facebook. So Facebook is actually one of our main social media channel when you come to giveaway we also have a dedicated Facebook group just for giveaway, it’s called sensory deal. That’s part of our Facebook group for running giveaways and running special promotions. And then you want to identify the pain point and needs. Hopefully the product you’re giving away can really feel that gap. The product you want to give away is something that can really feel the pain point of the problem they are trying to solve.

What is your target audience main desire and their main goal? By positioning your brand as a helper to help them in their hero journey. [00:20:00] For those of you that haven’t read a book, I will 100 percent recommend this book is a good book talking about like digital marketing and like creating brand is called story brand by Donald Miller. In his book he talked about the consumer psychology, and he talked about how we as a company, we want to position ourself as a mentor, as someone that can guide the consumer through their own hero journey. And you want to position yourself as not a pushy salesperson, but as their friend and like recommending them to different product that you currently offer, different toy that you’re currently offer. How can those toy, it could be educational toy, you could be a sensory toy, it could be whatever toy you’re selling. How can you position your brand as a guy, as a friend, as someone that’s really trying to help them with their best interests in mind. That’s really important to identify then when you come to picking your price, you want to make sure that the price you are giving away as part [00:21:00] of your giveaway campaign can a hundred percent align with your consumer’s major pain point and needs.

And the next thing is obviously you want to study the consumer behavior. You can do that through social media. You can look at your stats on Facebook, Instagram or whatever the channel you are mostly active on and look at how often does your followers engage with you. Unfortunately, most of the social media account we audited is very low engagement because a lot of the toy brand, they don’t know how to do social media marketing correctly and they are just sending out like, Oh, we have a new product, we have another new product. All they do in their social media feed is trying to sell. The idea here is, not try to oversell. You want to make sure you share as many value as much as you are selling. You actually want to share more value than you are selling. So instead of just promoting about the product, you can promote a blog post. You can promote the giveaway, you can promote different educational content that’s relevant to your brand. And studying that, studying how the consumer [00:22:00] behavior engaging with you on different social media channel is really important pivotal and very critical for your long term success for your toy brand. So that’s why the last thing I listed here is to monitor the social media conversation. Is your follower like messaging you about the giveaway? Is your followers or your email list is replying and asking more questions.

Those are the things you should be actively monitoring on an ongoing basis to create a truly engaged social media campaign as part of the giveaway. And this is some actual US stats. I got this from some of the Google research I did. Current average American child receive more than $6,500 worth of toys in their lifetime and an average US household owns more than 71 toys. I can speak to that, I’ve seen my household, we own more than, we definitely own more than 71 toys. Just my son [00:23:00] alone, he has 50, 40, 50 Lego sets. I’m 100 percent on the high end of the stats because I have three kids, I have my oldest is 13, then my middle one is 10, and our youngest is 6.

We have a lot more than 71 toys in our household and average US families spend about $581 a year on buying toys. And this is a really interesting data that I want to share because as everyone is watching today’s training, we all own and own toys different type of toys brand. It could be a board game, it could be an education toys, it could be like sensory toy like us. This is the type of research you really want to do for your own audience as well.

The next thing I want to talk about is, choosing the right toys for the giveaway. I mentioned it in the training earlier. Finding and understanding your buyer persona, identifying the pain points and studying the customer behavior that all lead to choosing [00:24:00] the right toys. What is the toy you’re going to give away? Of course, I know some brand we talked to, maybe they don’t have a lot of toys in their current catalog yet. Then they may not have a lot of choice because you maybe only have one or two products that you can give away. But for those of you that have a big catalog with like a hundred or a couple of hundred different type of product inside your current offering as a toy brand is you want to choose the right toy for the giveaway.

Make sure whatever the age of the audience you are trying to target is aligned based on your research. Make sure it’s also giving enough play value as part of the giveaway that you’re giving to your followers. Then the next thing is, Finding and creating a scene that’s relevant to the brand. Because everyone can be running giveaways, but it’s more fun to make it more timely. For example, for us, like I mentioned earlier, this month we’re doing an Autism Awareness Giveaway, which is this month is Autism Awareness Month. So you can tie the [00:25:00] scene of your giveaway to an event, to some sort, it could be a company anniversary, it could be 10 year anniversary and we’re doing a giveaway, or it could be back to school giveaway, it could be christmas giveaway. You can always come up with different themes and different idea, and then that way all the prize that you are picking for the giveaway could be cohesive with the main theme that you choose for your giveaway campaign. And last but not least is also packaging and presentation. You want to pay attention to the packaging and presentation of the giveaway toys. The better you can package the toy into the same group, the better people can perceive the value of winning and entering your giveaway as well. So that’s a few things I will highly recommend for you to consider as a part of choosing the right toy for the giveaway. 

And here’s some creative idea for your toy giveaway. Number one is, you can do an interactive virtual toy fair or virtual toy demonstration [00:26:00] of the toys or the product you’re giving away. This is actually the exact strategy that I’m testing right now this month as part of our Autism Awareness Giveaway. Every single week, multiple times a week, I’m going live on Facebook, YouTube, and other social media channels and invited the brand I’m partnering with to do a live demonstration of their product. This way people can actually see the product in use because we are demonstrating the toy they’ll be winning. This is another like very interactive way to engage with the audience, and I highly recommend it because livestream is like really, easy to set up. And for those of you who want to learn more about livestreaming and learning about the setup, at the end of the webinar, you can book a time with me and I can share some of my strategy that we are doing for live streaming.

What do we do before the live stream? What do we do during the live stream? What do we do after the live stream to really trying to engage with the audience? The second creative idea for a toys giveaway is you can [00:27:00] collaborate and have a co-branded giveaway. For us, for our Autism Awareness Giveaway this month, we are collaborating and partnering with a total of, I believe nine other toy brands, including ourselves, of course. And this way, everyone can pitch in. All the participating brands, they can be promoting and sharing the giveaway on their own social media channel. They can also be promoting and sharing this giveaway with their own email list, so everyone wins. All the participating brands at the end, you share the list with everyone that is part of this collaboration and say, okay, out of this month’s effort, we got a total of let’s just say 1, 000 people sign up. We have 1, 000 emails. Then we share those emails with all the other participating brand, and then they can choose on the campaign they want to do to re-engage with the people that signed up for the giveaway. That is an excellent and very low budget way to get your names and get more entrants to the giveaway, because you’re just leveraging all the other partners [00:28:00] resources on social media or with your email list and really trying to make more engagement by doing that. The next thing is you can also give away toys subscription box. That is if you have a subscription box services. I know not everyone that’s listening or watching half that, but you can also partner with a toy subscription box. I know that’s a lot of different toys subscription box company out there, and they always reach in, reaching out to toys brand like myself and say, Oh, we have this upcoming subscription box we would like to have one of your product to be part of May’s or April’s box. And you can partner with them and say, Oh, we’re giving away subscription, like maybe one year worth of the toys subscription box and guess what? One of the months also have your own toys in it. So that’s a good way to partner with the toy subscription box company as well. If you currently don’t have your own toy subscription box already set up for your own toy brand, I know some toy brand I talked to, they also have a [00:29:00] toy subscription box that’s 100 percent in house, but not everyone have that. So that’s another creative idea of the potential.

The next thing I want to share is actually some live case study of the autism awareness giveaway we are currently doing right now. And let me pull up a different screen and I’m going to explain the autism awareness giveaway we’re doing right now, live. So what we’re doing this month, this is our autism awareness month giveaway over $500 value. As you can see on this landing page I know it’s small, it say Celebrate Autism Awareness Month. Join us to have some fun. From April 1st to April 30th, 2024, we’ll be choosing one lucky winner of the entire gift bundles every single week. The winner will be announced every single Friday. And you have the day, April 12th, April 19th, 26th, and all that. Winners are limited to residents of the United States, so that’s also like a minor rule. Then we ask people to sign up by entering their [00:30:00] first name, last name, and emails, and also their phone number. And this is what they’ll win. They’ll be winning a Calm Down Corner Kit. This is from LakiKid, which is our in house brand. And they’ll be winning our partner brand’s product as well. Hedgehog shout a big shout out to Hedgehog House. They have a very wonderful product, they have Fidget Computer Mouse. Also participating in this month’s Autism Awareness Giveaway. And we also have brands like HandiThings, that Create product to help kids with handwriting, they also have a silent fidget toys. And also we partner with brands that create blackout bed tent to help kids with sleeping issue, which is very common for the kids on the spectrum, including my son have a hard time sleeping or falling asleep as well. And then we also partner with like board game company, Be Savvy is one of our partners. We’re also featuring them on as part of our giveaway campaign. Then, we also partnered with a brand that sells STEM toys, water toys, and also Bene World is one of our partners [00:31:00] as well. They have a different stuffed animal with a book and with a token system to really teach kids about kindness, respect, and different positive behavior through their product. And we also have other partners that’s more sensory specific. This is a partner of ours that’s designed sensory product for kids with sensory issues. This is one of the compression tube that Sommerfly provide. And then the last partner we have is, EyeConnect Craft. They design 3D tunnel craft kits, they have a wonderful product as well. So this is an example of a live giveaway that we are currently running for the month of April and this, I want to share it as an additional inspiration of a different potential idea of the scene that you could do as part of your giveaway campaign.

And for those of you that’s also thinking about running the giveaway, that is a very easy setup to do because all you need to do is, I’m pretty [00:32:00] sure a lot of us already know 5, 10 other toy brand owner. Talk to your friend, like toy brand owner, maybe in Astra or one of the upcoming toy event, which by the way, I will be also in Astra. We have a booth, our booth number is 3303 in Astra. Just talk to your friend, talk to other people in the industry. I would love to do a giveaway with your company alongside with our brand. That is a very easy way to do a partnership and a co branding giveaway with other toy brands that you know in the toy space and everyone wins. This is a strategy that everyone participating is going to win because we are all in this together, we are all trying to bring more awareness about our brand, about the toy we design, about the tabletop game we design if you have a tabletop games, that’s an excellent way to get it set up.

The next thing I want to elaborate more is really on, leveraging social media. Leveraging different social media is a really effective strategy to amplify your toy giveaway [00:33:00] and reaching a wider audience. Of course, number one is you need to choose a right platform, which I mentioned earlier as part of today’s training is what is the social media platform is your follower most active on. You want to be really focusing on those. Like for us, is Facebook. Facebook is like our most active platform. Second is you want to create compelling visual content for the giveaway. I’m also going to show some example of the giveaway images that our social media team created. Also you want to make sure that you have an engaging copy that when it comes to promoting the giveaway and you want to run and hold some live, event or even Q& A session, which we do as part of our giveaway as well. To go live and just talk about the giveaway, do a product demonstration of the prize they can win. This is another way for you to engage with your social media followers. And unfortunately, most of the toy brand I look at, we are not doing enough social media marketing. You should [00:34:00] be going live at least once a week. I go live like three, two, three, three times. This week alone, I’m going live like four times. That’s how often I’m going live and try to engage with our audience. If you are not doing at least one or maybe one per month, you are just not doing enough of social media marketing as a brand.

That’s something you don’t have to do it yourself. As a toy entrepreneur or a toy business owner, you can delegate someone on your team to do the giveaway on your behalf or to run those live event on your behalf. I just like to do it myself because it’s fun. It’s fun to engage this audience. I actually do some of the giveaway like demonstration with my kids. You can see on my Facebook feed, I do it sometime with my kids. I’ll have my son demonstrating one of the product. I have my daughter demonstrating one of the product. The whole idea is to make it fun because you want to people to see you, because guess what?

Nowadays in 2024, people don’t want to buy from a nameless brand anymore. There’s so many nameless brand [00:35:00] out there on Amazon, on the internet. People want to buy from other businesses like owners, like they want buy from other human beings. So hosting live event and just do live streaming is an excellent way for your followers, for your customer to get to know you, to get to know your personality as an owner, to really show the people behind the brand so they can resonate with your brand even more. And that is a very easy strategy to implement. Of course, some of you may be a little bit afraid of public speaking, but that is a hurdle that you can go over as an entrepreneur. I’m pretty sure each one of us. Sometimes when I talk about live streaming, some people say, Oh, I don’t want to do live streaming, I’m just not good with in front of the camera. Guess what? No one really cares! Just go live, so what? I’m not the best person at doing live streaming. It’s about practice, just do it a lot, then you’ll get used to it. This is part of the thing, that’s why we’re in the toy industry, right? It’s supposed to be fun. [00:36:00] Don’t be afraid, just show off the toys you have, and just show how fun it is to play with the toy that you are selling and you are providing to the audience. I also want to talk about is, you want to create some sense of urgency. Have a countdown, or maybe have a teaser of, Oh, by the way we are going to be picking the winner here pretty soon, so if you haven’t signed up or you haven’t joined, you this is the best time to join because we’ll be picking a winner here in 24 hours. So create some type of urgency. You want to create a sense of missing out. It’s often referred to as FOMO, fear of missing out. That’s a digital marketing term a lot of people mentioned that as part of the digital marketing campaign. You want to create urgency and you also want to create scarcity. Because not everyone is going to win. So you want to create scarcity about the giveaway. And you want to create a sense of urgency around the giveaway so then that way you will have a lot higher engagement.

The next thing is definitely you want to cross [00:37:00] promote your giveaway across different platforms. Multiple platform for our giveaway. We usually will go live on Facebook, we’ll go live on YouTube, sometimes we go live on Instagram as well. The Instagram go live is a little bit harder. You actually need to do it on a phone. So sometimes for my live stream, I will have my webcam set up, which I go live stream on Facebook and YouTube. And for Instagram, I have my phone set up on the tripod then I go live on my phone at the same time simultaneously. So I’m going live on three, four different platform at the same time. For those of you that have TikTok, you can also go live on TikTok where I think there’s a minimum followers requirement you need to have at least 1, 000. I forgot the requirement right now, but they always change. There’s always a minimum requirement of followers that you need to do in order to do to do live streaming. Same as Instagram, instagram also have a minimum followers requirement before you can do live stream. But those are the excellent way to really be only channel trying to be in front of your audience in multiple [00:38:00] different social media channels. And you can also send them email as well on top of the social media channel promotion that you’re doing. Then you can also drive people back to your giveaway page, drive people back to your website. If you haven’t set up the retargeting already, you should be also setting up retargeting on your website. It could be a Shopify store, WooCommerce store. You should have a Facebook pixel install, you should have a Google pixel install so every single time there’s a visit on your page, you retarget them on Facebook, on Google to make sure you can show your brand multiple times in front of your ideal customer, so they can come back and hopefully buy something from you ongoing effort but the retargeting is a whole different strategy, which maybe I will create a future webinar to deep dive into.

Here is some of the example of the giveaway graphic that we created for our Autism Awareness Month giveaway. So for us, because we have so many different products that we are giving away, we create a lot of the graphic for each of the participating brands that [00:39:00] we can use to really promote the giveaway multiple times. So people are not just seeing the same graphic over and over again. Each time we have different graphics we can use, and that’s pretty easy to create. If you have a graphic designer on your team, they can just use Canva, they can use Photoshop. It’s pretty easy to create and it’s just another way for you to really promote the giveaway by posting this on Instagram or Facebook or whichever social media channel that you are actively on. 

The next strategy as part of your giveaway. You should definitely consider is engaging with influencer in your toy in the space. So that’s the excellent way to expand your reach because influencer usually have a dedicated followings or have an engaged list of fans who trust their recommendation and opinion. By partnering with an influencer who resonate with your target audience, you can also tap into their existing follower base and extend the reach of your current giveaway to a larger audience is a good way to [00:40:00] engagement. Influencer also have ability to generate a higher level of engagement. Of course you want to really examine the influencers own account and their own engagement before you decide who is the influencer you want to partner with.

My recommendation is trying to find influencer that is not too big. Usually, we look for influencer that’s around 10,000 followers. Those influencers are more open to do free promotion for your brand. When you’re talking to influencers that have 100,000 followers, quarter million followers, they will ask you for money. There was okay, we can do a giveaway, but I’m gonna charge you $100. I’m gonna charge you $1,000 for this post. But if you work with a smaller influencer, like a micro influencer that have maybe 5,000 or 10,000 followers, they are more than eager to partner with Toys brand like us. Because they are just so small, like with 5,000 followers it’s a very small account. They are also trying to grow their own followers, [00:41:00] so by partnering with your brand, is also an excellent win situation. The influencer win, you win as a brand, and everyone win, and everyone grow more followers. You also get more engagement, you get more eyeball about your brand, about your giveaway. So try to find those, I would say those sweet spot of influencer that is not too big but also not too small. You don’t want to engage with like influencers that only have five followers and what’s the point, right? So you want to find that sweet spot and you can also delegate this whole process to someone on your team as well.

The next thing is make sure the target audience segmentation matches because every single influencer, if you look at their followers, they have a different type of audience. Some influencer is like very generic, they just do giveaway for all the random product. They’ll do a giveaway for toy, they’ll do a giveaway for kitchen product, then next week they’ll do a giveaway for an outdoor type of stuff. I usually don’t recommend [00:42:00] to engage with those influencer because guess what? Their followers is also not hyper focused or it’s not hyper targeted. You want to target and partner with those influencer that have a very engaged and very focused lists. Those are the best influencers to engage with when you are trying to promote your giveaway as well. Next thing is social proof and validation, when the influencer endorse your toy giveaway, you want to make sure whatever the type of post this influencer is posting align with your own brand’s value. Maybe they post something that you don’t like and you don’t want your own toys brand to associate with the type of the post they usually post. You definitely want to examine and do some due diligence on the influencer before you do the outreach. Look at their social media feed, look at the posts they do, look at their reels, look at their shorts. What kind of video do they usually create? What kind of content do they usually create? Does that align [00:43:00] with the type of value that you want to share with your own toy brand? That is another very important thing to consider. The next thing is, Influencer is also excellent at community buildings. One of my suggestions that’s very easy to do is, if you haven’t already, create a Facebook group for your own brand. Create a Facebook group, just say that you can come up with a name based on the typical audience you’re trying to go after. You can create a Facebook group for all your previous buyer or your current buyers, and put everyone into the Facebook group and then you can do giveaway, you can do promotion, or you can do educational content. Right inside the Facebook group as well, but the other nice thing about running giveaway using Facebook group is now all the people in the Facebook group can also talk to each other. So it’s really a community is now one way conversation where you’re just talking at them, you want them to talk among themselves and talk with each other. And hopefully everyone [00:44:00] is sharing something good or something they like about your brand. If not, that’s also a good place to do market research. If people are saying something negative about your product, that’s a good place to just PM them, send them a direct message and say, Oh, I see you make this post in our Facebook group, talking about the product that you don’t like and some feature. Just reach out to them and get some direct feedback from the consumers. This is also one thing as a lot of the toy brand I talked to, we are not doing enough of engaging with the end consumer, a lot of the toy brand we are just relying. I know, especially the people in, Astra or some people that’s really focusing in traditional retail. You only focus and dealing with a sales rep. You don’t talk to the consumer. You’re just, Oh, I have 50 sales rep that can sell my stuff to retail store. But you know what? You are missing something. You’re missing out on something very important is you have to talk to the buyer that’s actually buying and using your toys to make a better version and make that continuous [00:45:00] improvement for your toys going forward. This is another excellent way to have that direct conversation with the target audience that you are trying to get hold of. That’s another thing I just see a lot of the toy brand is not doing that at all. So that’s a very easy, one that you can also implement if you haven’t already just create a Facebook group, it’s free. Facebook group doesn’t cost you a penny to create. 

The next thing I want to talk about, this is going to be a little bit of a boring topic is legal consideration because unfortunately here in US, there’s a couple of different rule regarding about running giveaway.

You want to be aware of, course, you need to create an official rule and you want to make sure you also mentioned no purchase is necessary as part of your giveaway. You want to have like an age restriction about the giveaway as well. You want compliance with law and regulation, especially now you’re collecting people’s information. For US is not as a bigger deal compared to European Union, because the [00:46:00] European Union, there’s a lot of privacy law that you want to make sure you need to have a disclaimer everywhere on a page and saying that you’re using the data you are collecting correctly. So make sure your compliance with whichever country or platform you are going to be running the giveaway on. US Rule is not as strict compared to EU when you’re running giveaway in EU, there’s a lot of rules and a lot of senior you wanna reach out for and I would definitely do some research about all the different rules and regulation you need to include as part of your giveaways policy or your giveaway rule, especially if you’re running giveaway in EU. The next thing also is, of course, winner selections and notification. Make sure you are choosing a winner and establish a fair message for selecting winners, such as random drawing, et cetera, and record keeping. You want to keep track of the winners as well. Maintain an accurate record and documentation of all the aspect of a giveaway, including the rules and the [00:47:00] entrance submissions, and the winner selection as well. Those are some of the legal considerations that you should also think about as part of the giveaway.

Okay, the next thing I want to talk about is more case study. So you can also do giveaway, like the one example I just shared, which is a very simple landing page for people just to enter their emails and phone numbers, and they get the entrance or you can make it more interactive. There’s different gamify way of doing the giveaway as well.

One of my favorite platform is called Gleam.io. This is software we used in the past. What this software do is you can create entrance based on social media action. Let’s just say, visit your Facebook page to get one additional entrance, visit you on Twitter, or visit you on Instagram, or visit and subscribe to your YouTube channel. There’s different social media actions that you can have your followers or your buyers to do to get additional entrance, so [00:48:00] it’s almost like a competition in a way. Oh, I got 10 entrance, my friend also only got five and I’m going to beat my friend. It’s just make it a little bit more fun when it comes to the giveaway entrance. This is a strategy we also have tried in the past as far as creating more buzz on the social media, in the digital space by encouraging people. For example, in this example you can also share with your friend for extra entrance or you can enter a secret code, there’s a lot of different fun ways that you can gamify the whole giveaway experiences for your audience. The next thing I want to talk about briefly is the unboxing experience. I’m pretty sure for those of you that’s already selling toys, you might already have an excellent packaging. You already have all that already established, but this is just really a reminder for those of you that haven’t been thinking about the unboxing experience. If you wanna take it to the next level for the winner, you can even write a personal letters [00:49:00] as far as, the unboxing and I see there’s some questions about the giveaway. Feel free to put all the questions into our YouTube channel right now and I’ll answer all the questions toward the end during the Q and A session. I see there’s a few more questions coming in.

And going back to the unboxing experience, you can also include a personalized letter. I know not a lot of people will do that. You can write a personalized letter for the winner. Say, “my name is Jason, I’m founder of LakiKid. Thank you for participating in our April’s Autism Awareness Month giveaway. I just want to personally thank you for being part of our communities and this really means a lot to me and my family and the rest of our staff to have you as part of our community.” Taking that additional step, you’ll be surprised on how much positive feedback you can get from your audience just by writing a small handwritten note to the giveaway winner because not a lot of people do that nowadays. Everything is digital, everything is email. When is the last time you got a [00:50:00] handwritten letter from anyone. That’s something you can also make your brand stand out even more. And you can surprise them. That’s another way to create additional surprise and also create a very memorable impression about your brand. Oh, whoa, the owner actually wrote me a handwritten note? No one really do that. Can you imagine someone like owner of Lego, write you a personal note? No way. No one’s going to do that. So as a smaller toys brand we can do that. That additional personalization we can do as a small and medium sized toys brand and take that to the next level when we are trying to engage with the audience. 

Follow up with the participants is also so important. I cannot stress that even more because you spend all this time and energy setting up the giveaway, giving people to enter, and doing all this announcement. The next thing you want to do is follow up with all the participants. Send them a thank you email, send them an exclusive offer and a discount for participating if they didn’t win. You can just say in the [00:51:00] email, “I’m sorry that you didn’t win the giveaway, but we are doing an exclusive discount for all the giveaway participants for 50% off. You can get one of our toys for 50% off with a one time coupon code for participating.” This is how you turn the giveaway participants into buyers. This is so important. I see a lot of toy brands I talk to, that I consult with, they are not doing the giveaway because they will get all this entrant as a giveaway, but then they don’t follow up with them. They don’t send them emails, they don’t engage with the people. You are doing it wrong man. You have to engage with your participants after they enter into your giveaway and make sure that you’re adding them as part of your weekly newsletter. If you are not sending out email on a weekly basis, why are you even having an email list? You have to send out one email a week, minimum. If you’re not doing that already, that’s something we also do as an agency. We can also do email marketing for a toy company as well. And also [00:52:00] create a royalty program because you can give them points. That’s different tool you can integrate with Shopify to give them points as like a royalty points as part of your royalty program. And then you can send out additional educational content and resources that’s relevant to your brand and to the participant of the giveaway. Those are some couple different ideas that you can set up to really make sure you keep engaging with them so they don’t forget about you and your toys brand after the giveaway. The whole idea is to engage with them so they can be part of your ecosystem on an ongoing basis after they participate. Giveaway, it’s just the starting point to engage with your potential customer, to engage with your potential audiences is not an end point, it’s the starting line. 

So here’s an example of the exclusive coupon that we do for our giveaway participant. At the end of the giveaway, we’ll say, ” thank you for entering the giveaway for a limited [00:53:00] one time only, you also get a free toys. All you need to do is to pay for the shipping.” This is also often referred to as a free plus shipping offer. This is a very easy way to set up, of course, you can set up a whole funnel around it. I’m not going to dive into how to set it up, but this is a strategy you can do. Give a limited one time offer only for the giveaway participant and say, Oh, you can get one of our product toys for free, just pay for shipping. That way you get one buyers and then you can add them to the rest of your follow up sequences, email sequences, SMS sequences. You can also do postcard marketing now because you have their addresses. So now you can do email marketing, SMS marketing, and postcard marketing to your potential audiences. This is super powerful as part of the digital marketing strategy for your toy brand as well. 

Next thing is obviously you want to be measuring success for your giveaway campaign. What is your participation rate? Water was the [00:54:00] entrance conversion rate? How many people sign up? How much engagement you got? How much reach? And how much impression? What is the referral traffic? Are you getting most of the entrants from Google? Are you getting it mostly from Facebook? Where are you getting people to sign up? You want to check that. If you don’t have that set up on your website yet, set it up right away. You need to make sure you set up the Google Tag Manager correctly so you can monitor all the referral traffic that’s going to your website. And also see how much additional people Email lists grow that you see as part of your giveaway effort. And then you also want to monitor conversion and sales, like how many people actually end up buying stuff on you as part of your giveaway campaign. That’s all the different KPI that you want to make sure you are keeping track of. And you want to integrate this giveaway as part of your broader digital marketing strategy. So giveaway, you also link to your social media growth, link to your content marketing, link to your product promotion. It could be also serve as part of your lead generation strategy and also help with brand awareness and [00:55:00] also create that additional audience engagement, create a customer royalty to do event marketing like the live stream I was showing about. And you can also do cross promotion. So that’s a lot of opportunities just by running giveaway that you can really in, make it exciting for your social media followers, for your buyers as well. 

Here’s some future trend for the potential giveaway in the future in 2024. I’m seeing a lot of AR, augmented reality as well and you can also make it more personalized and customize the price. Eco friendly is also a big trend right now. And also make it as interactive as possible. That’s a few different trend of the toy marketing for giveaways. 

So now it’s time to answer some of your questions that you are putting in the chat, thank you for joining today’s webinar. I know we have been doing today’s webinar for almost an hour. So I’m just going to go through the comments. For those of you that are still watching the live training, or if you’re watching the replay, you can still comment. One of my team members will be [00:56:00] monitoring our YouTube channel for comments and questions, even after the webinar is finished, so we can still answer all the questions that we’re receiving.

Parker is saying that the giveaways are great, and thank you Parker, for participating in today’s giveaway. Parker is asking, what is the best time of the year to do giveaways? The answer is, Anytime you want. Remember that’s the one slide where I talk about is creating the theme around the giveaway. Whatever the theme you decide to do, that is the best time. For example, my theme is this month is autism awareness giveaway. So April is autism awareness month, april is the best time to do the giveaway. If you are doing a back to school giveaway, then August will be the best time for you to do the giveaway. You can also do a Christmas giveaway, which we have done multiple times in the past for our own brand. We do a 10 days of to Christmas giveaway. We give away something every single day leading up to the Christmas. Every single day you go live and announce the winner, I [00:57:00] did that before. So that’s another way to do it. It depends on the theme, and you want to make sure you time your giveaway based on the theme of your giveaway as well. Hopefully that answers your questions. Let me know if you have any additional clarifications on the questions.

Aqua Blocks is asking, will this be saved on this channel? Yes, all the webinar will be saved on our YouTube channel, and you can also watch the replay on our YouTube channel. All the future webinar will also be live streamed to our YouTube channel. And also creating a Facebook group while watching. Excellent action taker, good job. Go create a Facebook group make sure it’s private. You want to make sure you create a private so it’s gated. The reason is, Facebook group allow you to set up and ask people three questions before they join. One of the question you want to ask is, what is your best email so we can reach out to you for and contact you for any future giveaway or product launch. That’s how you get people’s email from Facebook. Make sure [00:58:00] one of the question you ask is asking for their emails and the other two question you can decide on what kind of question you want to ask. Make sure you ask for people’s email right before they join. If you make it public, then you couldn’t ask those questions. So make sure you change it to a private Facebook group. Let me know if you have any additional questions about the setting. We can jump on a call. I can show you our setting as well. 

Let me know if there’s any additional question, feel free to put it in the comment section. And for those of you that’s watching a replay of today’s training, you can also put in a comment in today’s YouTube video, and one of my team member will let me know and I will also answer the question myself as well on our YouTube channel. 

Thank you so much for participating. I just want to talk about, we also offer free audit for your toys brand. We do Amazon marketing for toys brand. The three audit we do when we’re engaging or talking to toys brand is number one, we do a Amazon competition audit and we’re going to give you a detailed report on all your top 10 [00:59:00] competitors, where are they currently ranking, how well optimized they are. And then what is your chances of getting into that marketplace, gaining a little bit piece of that market share on Amazon. The second piece of audit we also do for all of our potential client and the toy brand that we’re talking to is, Amazon profitability audit, this because Amazon charged so many different fee, there’s Amazon referral fee, Amazon FBA fee, Amazon storage fee, Amazon long term storage fee, Amazon low inventory fee. It go on and on, so it’s really important for you to know as a brand owner or a marketing director for your toy brand, like what is all the fee that’s related when you’re selling on Amazon and we will do a detailed breakdown of all the fee and show you what is your current margin, a gross margin on Amazon. The typical benchmark we’re looking for is minimum 25%. If you don’t have 25% or higher in your gross margin, is really hard to scale and be profitable on Amazon in long [01:00:00] term. So that’s another free audit we provided to all the brands that we’re talking to and that schedule a time to talk to me, myself. And then the third audit, for those of you that’s already selling on Amazon, already doing advertising. We also do an in depth audit for your Amazon advertising campaign. We’ll take a look at your Amazon advertising structure. How are you currently structured? Do you have your auto campaign? Category campaign? Do you have your competitor campaign? Do you have your brand campaign fully set up? Are you utilizing all the different ad type? Are you using sponsor brand? Are you using sponsor product? Are you using sponsors display? We’ll look at all that and give you a list of recommendations. Again, this call is a hundred percent free. There’s no obligation. This is our way for giving back to the toy industry. 

For those of you that are interested, you can visit http://www.toy-launch.com/schedule, or you can find a schedule link right on our homepage, toy-launch. com to schedule a time with myself, where I will spend some time and just go into [01:01:00] your entire business. 

For digital marketing, of course we do a little bit more than just Amazon as well, even though Amazon is our core focus, if you need help setting up the Facebook group that I mentioned, do you need help with email marketing? I can show you some of our processes and how we usually set it up on doing email marketing, or if you need help setting up your own giveaway campaign, schedule time with me, I’m more than willing to share all the knowledge and all the experience that we have as a digital marketing company since 2017. So thank you so much for everyone for participating in today’s webinar. It was my honor to have you, feel free to schedule a time and I would love to hear from everyone that’s participating. Also let us know in the comments for any future topics that you want me to cover when it comes to digital marketing to a toy brand. We are actively trying to come up with monthly topics on an ongoing basis as well. Thank you so much for participating and I will see you guys soon.