How To Promote Your App With Giveaways

Promotional giveaways are one of the most fun, engaging, and cost-effective ways to promote your app.

A promotional giveaway is a campaign where people can win a prize by completing specific entry actions. Run highly effective giveaways that will help you build exposure, connect with a new audience and drive valuable user actions including app downloads, email signups, social media engagement and so much more.

You can run many types of promotional giveaways — from quick social contests to more advanced campaigns. Take a look at some of the best options you have at your disposal:

Hosting a giveaway on your social feed is a simple way to generate buzz and build awareness for your app. This type of giveaway involves posting your giveaway directly on social media and allowing their audience to follow your page or like, comment on, or share your post.

Lots of these giveaways ask participants to tag their friends in a comment as it's a great way to expand the giveaway's reach.

While this approach quickly boosts social media engagement and attracts potential customers, it has its challenges. 

Running giveaways directly on social media limits your reach and makes it harder to manage entries or choose winners. Most importantly, these campaigns rarely drive long-term actions like app downloads or email signups — both essential for growth.

To take your giveaways beyond simple likes and comments and drive more impactful actions like app downloads and newsletter sign-ups, consider using a platform like Gleam. 

Gleam lets you customise your contest to meet marketing goals, making your competition more effective at a lower cost. Plus, Gleam automatically checks entry authenticity, fairly picks winners, and all in all will streamline your entire campaign management.

With Gleam's powerful giveaway software, you can cut right to the chase and directly incentivise downloads from the app store by offering up an awesome prize and getting people to download your app for a chance to win.

You can even award extra entries to people who share your campaign with friends, allowing you to kickstart download referral chains which can drive massive app adoption.

If your app costs money to download, you will have to be mindful of No Purchase Necessary laws in certain countries which prohibit you from requiring people to make a purchase to enter a giveaway.

Luckily for you, Gleam will automatically add a Free Alternate Method of Entry to giveaways in any country where they are legally required so you can keep driving downloads without worrying.

Another awesome type of campaign you can run is an App Recommendation Contest where app users can share a written post, photo, or video recommending your app on social media and submit it to your campaign.

This is an outstanding way to kickstart online conversation about your app, generate word-of-mouth marketing and collect tons of authentic, engaging user-generated content that you can display on your website and in your own marketing materials.

Try out this powerful template:

This is a practical strategy that turns your audience into active promoters, with the added benefit of gathering a library of real-world images or videos that highlight your app's great features.

So, now you've set up your giveaway, you've got to spread the word to maximise engagement and participation!

Social media is the best place to spread the word about your giveaway and target potential customers.

Promoting your giveaway on social media is an essential strategy for maximising reach and engagement. It is a no-brainer considering it is completely free to do and you can tap into a huge audience.

Try creating and sharing posts about your giveaway with lots of visual elements to reach your followers and encourage them to enter your giveaway and help spread the word with shares, likes, and comments.

Another awesome feature you can use in a Gleam campaign is the Viral Share action. Viral Sharing is a powerful action that allows users to share your giveaway on their social media to earn extra entries. 

By encouraging participants to spread the word, you tap into vast networks beyond your immediate audience, driving more entries and boosting the contest's visibility with minimal additional effort.

Partnering with influencers can be an awesome way boost your giveaway's visibility.

Make sure you find influencers with an engaged and active following. It is important to only partner with influencers whose followers match your target audience to spread the word about your giveaway. 

You can then pay them to create engaging content, from in feed posts to stories, encouraging their audience to participate in your giveaway.

For a cheaper approach, have a go at teaming up with genuine users or fans of your app who can share their excitement about your giveaway with their followers in exchange for a discount or free product from you. This way, you still reach more people, but at a much lower cost.

Add a popup to your website to instantly tell visitors about your giveaway, encourage quick participation, and reach users who may have missed it on social media.

Regular newsletters can highlight new features, offer exclusive content, or share useful tips related to your app. You can also use your mailing list to promote your giveaway.

To effectively promote your app giveaway through your mailing list, quickly highlight what participants can win and how to enter, and try offering an exclusive perk for your email subscribers to encourage participation. 

You always need to make sure you're including a concise call to action. Plus, send a reminder or two before the giveaway ends, but keep it minimal to avoid annoyance. 

You can then offer a discount code as a thank you to everyone who entered your giveaway, especially if they took the time to spread the word on their own social media channels. 

You can either give a discount code to everyone via a social media post, or only for the people that entered via email.

This is a nice way to keep up engagement after your giveaway is over and encourage downloads and purchases, even if they didn't win the prize.

Once you've set your giveaway up, you need to encourage people to enter by offering an awesome prize. Here are some ideas!

Offer winners exclusive access to premium or paid features within your app for free. 

You can give out a free subscription upgrade to the winner. For example, a year's worth of the premium subscription for free is always a brilliant prize.

Smartphones, tablets, or smartwatches that enhance the app's usability or experience are a fantastic prize that's relevant to your app.

Gift cards to popular online stores related to your app or vouchers for your app can attract a wide audience as people can choose exactly what they want.

If your app uses a currency system, offering it out as a prize is a great idea.

Offer an all-expenses-paid trip to an event related to your app's theme, like a tech conference, gaming convention, or a workshop with an industry leader.

Personalised sessions with experts or celebrities in your app's field are sought after, and exclusive prize that will be sure to increase participation.

Giveaways are one of the most accessible and effective app marketing tools available — but their true power comes when combined with a clear strategy. Whether your goal is to drive app installs, boost customer acquisition, or increase long-term user retention, promotions like contests and referral campaigns can help you hit those targets fast.

As a business owner or marketer, your ultimate goal is revenue growth — and by leveraging community engagement, influencer support, and reward-based experiences, you’re not just attracting users — you’re retaining them. With the right campaign, app marketing becomes less about spend and more about momentum.