How to Design the Perfect Promo Graphics for Your Next Contest or Giveaways
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Did you know that Instagram accounts that hold contests grow their following 70% faster on average than accounts that don’t? Contests and giveaways are a proven tactic to skyrocket your engagement rates and get your audience involved with your brand. But if you want to make your contest stand out, you need to make it look good. In this article, I’ll help you learn how to create beautiful promo graphics that will get people excited about your contest.
But first…
Why good design is key to a winning campaign?
Good design can be a game-changer for your contest for many reasons.
For one, social media is dominated by visual content—photos and videos are the most popular types of content on most platforms.
If your promo graphics for giveaways don’t look exceptionally good, they might not get enough traction and visibility in the first place.
Plus, if you want your graphics to get noticed by the right people, you need to make sure they’re on-brand and resonate with your audience.
Design also plays a crucial role in driving conversions. From the colors and fonts you use to where you place your CTAs, it all plays a huge role in getting the audience excited enough to take action and participate in your contest.
Now that we know why design matters so much for your contest, let’s find out how to put these principles into action and create mind-blowing promo graphics for giveaways.
How to create beautiful promo graphics for contests and giveaways
Creating great-looking promo graphics for giveaways is something that you can easily do on your own, even if you’re not an expert designer or work with a professional graphic design company.
You don’t need to use Photoshop or any other complicated software. There are tons of online design tools, like Visme, to help you whip up a social media graphic in minutes.
But if you want to take your design to the next level, here are some best practices to keep in mind.
1. Use high-quality images
There’s literally no excuse to use low-quality images for your giveaway graphics.
Blurry and pixelated photos can make your brand look low-quality and cheap, which is really not an image you want to be stuck with.
There are plenty of free resources to help you find the perfect, high-quality image for your promotional graphic.
If you want to use stock photos, try searching for keywords on Unsplash and Pexels. It’s important to use the right images, so make sure you don’t use something too generic or off-brand.
You can also take original photos for your promo graphics for giveaways. If your giveaway involves a physical product, like a beauty box, you can take an attractive photo of it using a good quality camera.
Here are some quick product photography tips to help you out:
- Use flat lay photography: Flat lays are easy to execute and can help you tell a visual story by thoughtfully combining a relevant backdrop (e.g. a soft blanket) with objects (e.g. baby products and flower petals) that exude a certain mood.
- Use natural lighting: Good lighting is key to taking high-quality photos. If you don’t have access to a brightly lit room, take your stuff outside and shoot in natural light. This helps you avoid unwanted shadows and color issues in your photos.
- Stick to a plain background: When in doubt, go for a plain (and white) background. This will draw maximum focus to your product and limit any distractions in the surroundings. Utilizing a background remover can further refine your product images, ensuring a seamless and distraction-free presentation that highlights your product’s features effectively
If you don’t want to use photography at all, you can also build a promo graphic using text, icons, and illustrations. To do this, you may use Flaticon’s library of free icons to find the perfect icons and illustrations that match your brand.
2. Edit your photos
Look, you can totally upload a simple image with a caption. But that isn’t going to help you get noticed in the unending sea of visuals on Instagram’s Explore page.
What will get you noticed, though, is how well you’ve edited that image to:
Enhance its visual appeal
Convey your message at first glance
For example, you can add filters to enhance the color, depth and other aspects of your image. Use Instagram’s own features or use an external app like Adobe Lightroom or VSCO.
To make it even more prominent, add text overlays, icons and stickers that show people it’s a giveaway or contest graphic right away.
An even better idea is to design around your image so that the text and other elements look like they’re part of the image itself. Here’s a cool example of how that could look like:
Notice how the text elements in the photo above blend seamlessly with the flat lay photography. This is a neat technique to create an eye-catching visual that you can’t help but notice.
3. Choose the right size
Before you start designing your promo graphic, make sure you know which platform you’re going to share it on.
That’s because you need to optimize your image size for each social media platform, or it might not perform that well.
For example, if you try to post a square image on your Instagram story, it will look small and there will be empty space above and below the image.
Here are the recommended image sizes for some common social media platforms:
- Instagram post: 1080 x 1080
- Instagram story: 1080 x 1920
- Facebook post: 1200 x 630
- Facebook cover: 820 x 312
- Twitter post: Min. 440 x 220 (2:1 Ratio)
4. Keep it on-brand
When designing promo graphics for your contest, don’t forget to stick to your brand guidelines.
Every single piece of content that you publish online, including a simple promo graphic, has a certain influence on your brand image.
This will reflect in each element that you use in your design, so do your homework before deciding the colors, fonts, and imagery. If you use a clashing theme in your design, you might risk hurting your brand image.
Lastly, don’t forget to add your logo to the graphic, just like Dove and Guardian did above. This is important because your giveaway graphics are likely to get shared a lot.
Adding your logo will help increase brand awareness and grab the attention of people who already know about your business.
5. Make it interactive
Animated GIFs can offer a refreshing new take on static promo graphics. They’re eye-catching, interesting and just more fun!
Here’s an animated Instagram post template you can edit.
If you’re looking to share an Instagram story about your contest or giveaway, make it interactive using a bunch of Instagram story features.
Add a question, poll, quiz, heart bar or stickers to get viewers to engage!
Another cool idea is to add an interactive promo graphic with links, clickable buttons (CTA) and even hover effects to your web page or blog.
You can easily create one in Visme and embed it using a responsive code to preserve the interactivity features.
6. Use a template
If you’re new at design, it’s a great idea to start with a premade template that you can just edit to fit your requirements.
This helps you save time and effort, especially when you’d rather be focusing on more important stuff, like actually running a successful campaign.
Here’s an editable template in Visme to help you get started:
Note: It’s important to choose the right template to get started. Try to pick one that’s as close to your theme and required dimensions as possible.
7. Be consistent
The final (and key) step to ensuring a successful social media contest is to establish consistency across all the different platforms you’re using.
This not only includes all aspects of your design, like colors, fonts, and images but also the tone of voice of your copy and captions.
It also includes posting regularly to create hype around your giveaway.
Consistency helps strengthen your brand and pulls your entire campaign together. Make sure you don’t ignore this part.
Ready to design your next contest or giveaway?
Designing promo graphics for your contest doesn’t need to be a complicated task. It’s super easy to DIY if you know what to do and what tools to use.
Follow the tips above to create stunning promo graphics that are as effective as they are good-looking!
Which platform is your favorite for running contests and giveaways? We would love to know! Let us know your thoughts, comments, and feedback below.
About The Author
Mahnoor Sheikh is a Content Marketing Manager at Visme, an online graphic design tool. She loves to talk about digital marketing, visual communication and design topics, and is passionate about tea, kittens and traveling with her husband.
