A company focused on children’s books, games and activities needed an effective launch strategy for a new product focused on the Grandparent-Grandchild market. We helped them augment their PR strategy with a blogger outreach effort designed to help spread awareness. The result was a number of articles and blog posts published about the company with over 400,000 unique visitors per month. The secret – know your blogger.
Here’s a simple fact: Bloggers want you to tell them great stories. They need the content. The problem is, most people simply assume their product or service is the story.
GrandCamp Adventures is a company built by a former IBM executive and a branding guru that designs products for a unique and somewhat hard-to-reach market. Their stories and activities are designed with the help of developmental experts to foster better relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. To augment online advertising and traditional PR tactics, we recommended launching a blogger relations / outreach effort. Typically, this has a few direct benefits:
- Increased awareness among target market
- Direct traffic to website
- Opportunity to build social media following
- Long-term SEO value
Sounds great, right? Then why are so many companies bad at it?
People forget that most bloggers didn’t start as professional journalists. They sometimes have other jobs or even if they are journalists, they may have other beat assignments. This means the old-school method of just plastering press releases all over creation won’t work. It also means you have to approach bloggers as if they were people.
Who to talk to?
Our first step was to build the influencer list. There are a lot of tools to help with this, both free and paid. We used a bit of both, but if you don’t want to buy a Cision membership, you can use Google Blog Search, Klout and Technorati to do the initial prospecting. Next, we wanted to quantify our list to make sure their traffic, inbound links and subscriber lists were large enough to warrant our attention. There’s no perfect way to get 100% accurate info, other than to peer into each site’s analytics dashboard, but you can use quantcast and Compete to get a pretty accurate estimate.
Once we completed our list, we segmented the bloggers into tiers. Tier 1 would get a lot of individual attention. Tier 2 would get product and Tier 3 would get an email and press release. How you break this up depends largely on the resources you have. If you can afford to put everyone in a blimp for the superbowl, they’re all Tier 1.
Getting Tier 1 Attention
Tier 1 bloggers are popular. Lots of people read ‘em and lots of people send in their crap. I had one editor tell me, “we literally get over 100 products per day and yours was the only one that got a phone call today.” So, how did we break through? We treated the outreach effort like a friendly ad campaign.
First we performed our initial blogger relations etiquette dance. There’s a lot of information on how to reach out to bloggers. Brian Solis has an ebook out there about it somewhere, I think. Next we dug deep into each Tier 1 blogger looking for something we could leverage for an introduction.
For example:
Family tree in packaging sent to one of our targeted bloggers. Names have been blurred.
One blogger’s emphasis on family history became evident throughout her posts. So, we decided to tie the product’s ability to connect grandchildren with older generations to this blogger’s motivator. I spent a day digging around and eventually found an old MySpace account she hadn’t cancelled from when she had been a teacher. From this, I found a picture of her with a few students. One of these students had a sweatshirt with the school name. Next, I found a picture of her standing next to a similarly aged man. Clicking on this photo I was able to find his profile and get a first name. Plugging the blogger’s name, the school name and husband’s name into Ancestry.com revealed a few hits on family trees. I hired a genealogist to track the family history all the way back to when it came over from Ireland. We then took the family tree to one of our illustrators and created a large framed version to send along with our product. The result? Three separate articles about our client and products on a website with a very high monthly visitor count.
Every Tier 1 blogger received some sort of individual effort. And while we didn’t get every target we were going for, we did find one out of four bloggers were willing to pick up our story. Story being the key word. We didn’t just send the product and talk about how it is new or unlike anything anyone has ever seen. The story about a product, from a blogger’s standpoint, has to resonate personally and emotionally. If so, you’ll find bloggers joyfully writing about your product, as we found with the blogger focused on family history. Just remember, stunts like this should not be one-off ventures. Rather, you should imagine that you’re starting off a relationship with a blogger with a bang. You provide them epic content, they provide you with attention.
Long-Term SEO Value
There is a reason Blogger/Influencer Relations was ranked the #1 most effective social media tool in the Marketing Sherpa 2011 Social Benchmark Report. Yes, as soon as a blogger publishes a story about you, you can get all sorts of attention, awareness and traffic. But even after the initial fervor dies down, those inbound links don’t go away. In fact, links posted on NYT.com or dailycandy.com can deliver value to your website long after the initial posting. Each article that mentions your company or product and includes a link back to your site builds tremendous SEO value. I asked my friend John Sherrod over at Search Discovery to explain why. Here’s what he said:
Search engines have sophisticated algorithms that measure many factors in determining the relevance and quality of a website or web page. One of the signals that helps search engines evaluate relevance is how other websites link to, or reference, a given website. Links from credible, authoratative websites and popular blogs have a positive impact on SEO because they influence the credibility and authority of the referenced website. At a high level, the links from one website count as “votes” for another website within the logic of a search engine.
A good comparison would be the references one provides on a resume. Given two resumes that reflect equal experience and background, the resume with the most authoratative references will stand out as superior. A reference from a college professor or the CEO of a large company, for example, will be much more influential and indicative of quality than a reference from someone’s neighbor or best friend.- John Sherrod, Director of SEO
In other words, if a site with a good Google quality score – like About.com – publishes a link to your site, it’s a bit like having a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. It’s a nice bonus for an effort designed to be one of the main outreach arms to an effort traditionally designed for inbound purposes. If you have any questions about launching a Blogger Relations effort, I’m happy to answer as best I can.
