A lot of local companies have started to allocate some of their marketing budget towards blog marketing. One of the popular ways to tap bloggers is to do outreach events with the hopes of getting them to write about your product. You obviously can’t force them to write unless it’s a sponsored post and even if it is you still can’t control what they will say about your brand. The real challenge in doing blog marketing is matching the right blogger for your brand. There are different levels of commitment and each level gives you varied mileage and effort.
I’d like to call the first level “Shallow”. This is when the blogger really isn’t that interested in what you have to say or offer. This happens a lot these days because the definition of blogger event success by a lot of agencies is the total number of warm bodies that attend the event. When the interest of the blogger isn’t that high there’s a good chance that they won’t bother writing. If ever they do it will be a very mechanical in impersonal article and they won’t even bother promoting it on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Want a good example? Invite a tech blogger to a high fashion event. That will almost always spell disaster.
The second level is “Interested”. This is when your brand falls under the niche of the blogger. For example, you’re a newly opened Chinese restaurant then the obvious thing to do is go after Food Bloggers. Interested bloggers will most likely attend your event and they will take pictures, eat the food, and write the entry. However unless your food is mind blowing don’t expect them to go all out in spreading the word about your restaurant on their social networking sites.
The highest level is when you find bloggers that are genuinely interested and are fans of your brand. Without your prompting they talk about your products and they are happy and excited each time they get word from you about a media event. They’ll write pre-event articles and announce your activities in advance on their blog and on their social networking sites. They’ll probably tweet during the actual event and maybe even after. Post-event they will write several (not just one) article and upload their own photos.
It will be difficult to find bloggers at this level especially if your agency doesn’t spend time to get to know and read the articles of the bloggers they invite to your events. I strongly suggest that don’t leave everything up to your support groups. As professionals we need to find out who are the influencers are in the online space with regards to our respective industries. Find the bloggers by doing some searches on Google and by subscribing to alerts services like Google Alerts and Social Mention. Also remember that you don’t need big events to know the bloggers. You might want to invite a couple of them out for coffee so that you can gauge their level of interest and you can move on to bigger and greater things after.
wow…great article
Thanks Thony!
Blogger Events etc are becoming common but do the businesses behind these know what they are doing? You just can’t invite bloggers and expect interest. Yes like you said they have to be interested but even more they have to have an audience that you are interested in targetting. Random invites to bloggers will not get you anywhere. Inviting or getting posted about by 1 prominent blogger is better than 10 posts by blogs with small audiences.
Another thing is tracking, you have to have a way to track the success of any blog advetising/post etc or else its just based on guesses, get the # of hits to that post, the # of comments, feedback etc. Internet based media should always be measured accurately
I just see a lot of businesses having blog events, it makes the whole thing seem so commercialized, noone will believe the bloggers anymore who flock to every blog event where they can get freebies. One reason I like reading blogs is that they are personal and not sales motivated.
Solid points Andre. Thanks for the comments! I agree with you especially on the part about getting success metrics in place.
Thank YOU! Finally someone said it!
Actually with all the ever increasing demand for a blogger.. and lots of blogger nights and events.. they have become zombies (also happy to have the give-aways) and the quality of the write ups are getting lower. I think sooner or later it will have an effect in the blogging industry and people will not read anymore but this will end up as online exposure.
I have been offering blogger night event for my clients but in return no one bothered but we gained ranking on Google. But on the business side this strategy is more cost effective as compared to advertising.