One of the fastest growing vectors of digital marketing is blogs. A few years ago there would only be 1 or 2 blog events per month. Now you can easily pick from 2-3 every week! This is mainly because the bloggers here in the Philippines have grown their readership and subscriber base over the years and they really now can be considered influencers in their own respective niches. Blog Marketing is effective but the question you should ask yourselves as marketers is what’s your objective with your blog marketing campaign? Don’t just do it for the sake of doing it. There should be goals in place so that you can actually measure if worked or not.
Branding/Awareness and Driving Sales
First step is identifying your objective. Usually it’s either you want to drive awareness and branding or you want to use it as a sales driver. For awareness, it’s pretty straightforward. You have to make sure that the blogger understands your primary value proposition and product features so that he writes about them properly. If you want something long term, you might also want to discuss direct advertising on the site of the blogger. If you’re low on budget, try proposing an ex-deal of products for the banner ad space. Another interesting execution would be doing blogger contests wherein you give products for the blogger to give away as prizes. If you scale this up and get a lot of bloggers on board, that can definitely help in increasing awareness of your brand.
For driving sales, you have to give the blogger some tools so that he can put a distinct call-to-action in his post about your product. This increases the chances of the blog reader actually going out and buying your product because he/she has an incentive to do so. Some examples:
- Readers that mention the blog while dining in the restaurant get a discount or freebie.
- Readers can print the blog post to get prizes in the store.
- Blogger can give away discount coupons and product trial tickets
What’s important is that you get the blogger to invite his readers and give them a reason why they should go out and visit your store.
If you run a virtual operation, this should be much easier. Just give the bloggers discount coupons (virtual) that they can give away to their readers. You’re just one click away as opposed to retail outlets wherein readers will actually have to go out of their way to visit.
And there you go. Hope this article made sense and helped. 
Hi Carlo,
Sales driver? This is new to me. You can actually induce sales via blogs? Now how do you leverage on blogs to get someone to apply? We’re in the recruitment business, so “sales” would be the act of applying for a position.
Regards,
Ricky
Hi Ricky!
What’s important is that you give the blogger something to work with so he/she has a call-to-action in the post. In this case you can strike a deal with the blogger so that he gets a referral fee for each applicant that gets hired. Process would be something like:
1. Blogger posts job opening on his/her blog, asks applicants to e-mail resume with his referral code.
2. Your company gets the resumes and screens them accordingly.
3. Those that get hired through referrals will get tagged. You pay the blogger his fee.
Of course you can fine tune this and tweak this some more since this is just something that came to my mind while reading your comment.
Hope this helps!
Hi Carlo,
If I am getting this right, you’re suggesting companies to incentivize (in short, pay money) bloggers will promote their products and services will a call-to-action?
Isn’t this tactic somewhat unethical? It’s positive reinforcement but will prevent a blogger from promoting a product/service that sucks just to make money?
- Ruby
Hi Ruby!
The same can be said for bloggers who put ad networks or adsense on their blogs. In fact, adsense is “worse” because the blogger has minimal control what comes up there.
Personally I don’t see anything wrong with it as long as the blogger puts a disclosure on the post or on the ad that it’s sponsored by a particular company.
Ultimately it depends on the the blogger and the company if they can reach a win-win agreement.
Cheers,
Carlo
Hi Carlo,
Let say I am running for political office and I ask you as a consultant, would you also recommend that I spend money and pay bloggers to promote me as a brand?
- Ed
Ed,
I would strongly recommend against doing that. If you want to be on blogs and you want to pay for it, you can put ads through blog advertising networks.
Directly paying bloggers for politics for the purpose of them voting for you and campaigning for you can leave a bad taste in the mouth.
If ever this does happen, I think the blogger should at least put a disclosure statement in his site.
I’d recommend having the Politician invite bloggers over for coffee sessions though
No strings attached.
-Carlo