Marketers: 4 proactive ways of reaching out to bloggers
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
There’s been much talk, recently, about the best ways for marketers to engage members of the Twittersphere. This is understandable given the (more than) considerable growth of the famous microblogging service over the past year and a half. In the scramble to achieve success using this hot new medium, many marketers have lost time and dollars trying to decipher the magical algorithm.
Bloggers, however, remain a mainstay of the intelligent marketer’s arsenal. Here are 4 tips to proactively reach out to bloggers without shooting yourself in the foot, hand or, heaven forbid, the head.
1) Set Clear Goals
Know what you want to accomplish. Exposure for an exciting new product? Awareness about an upcoming event? Re-branding or brand maintenance? This will determine which bloggers you want to reach out to and how you may want to engage them.
Know who you want to reach. What’s your target demographic? Who would benefit from what you have to say or what your company has to offer? Which bloggers are the best fit?
Set measurable targets you want to reach. This is the only way to gauge success. You can then adjust your approach as you learn what works for your brand and, more importantly, what doesn’t. Without setting concrete goals, improvement is nigh impossible.
2) Read their blogs
Spend time familiarizing yourself with the bloggers you’d like to engage: who they are, what they write about, and what their readers are interested in. You want to reach out to the bloggers who will get excited about what you want to say. Authentic excitement will add a roundhouse kick of power to your query.
3) Monitor blog mentions
Track blog mentions of campaign or company keywords. Acknowledge bloggers when they make mention of a product, campaign or company and keep a record database of all blog mentions. Observing who’s interested in what you have to say, and why, will help you refine your approach in the future.? Not only are you getting some great karma kickback by acknowledging a blog mention, but you’ve also established contact and began a professional relationship with them, making it a lot easier and much more personal to approach them in the future. There are numerous free tools that can help you track online mentions, including Google Alerts and SocialMention.com.
4) Engage!
Take note of the type of people you are reaching out to! More often than not, bloggers aren’t passionate about a sole topic or product, but rather are interested in the culture surrounding it. Open the conversation with a talk about something they’re interested in. Or better yet, join a conversation they’re already having.
If your pitch is regional, a great way to engage bloggers and their readers is to promote and sponsor a meet-up. For example, last April, we helped plan a social media launch event for our Chip’s Not Dead Yet Memorial Mile campaign. We invited the best Vancouver bloggers for an evening of drinks and food, and a chance to hear what Chip Wilson had to say about the event and his love for the BC Children’s Hospital. We took the time to value our targeted bloggers, wine and dine them, and introduce them to a prominent Vancouverite with passionate views. The event was a huge success, with three quarters of those present writing articles about the event or the launch, not because we groveled, but because they were genuinely interested.
We realize as many traditional marketers plunge into new social media waters, it’s going to be tempting to take a lot of the traditional tools, such as the media release, with them. We hope these five tips help make the transition easier for marketers and agencies, but if we were to stress one thing, and one thing only, it would be this: Treat bloggers with the same respect as you would treat a journalist and with the same care you would treat your customers, because these new media content providers can truly embody both.
September 14th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Interesting way to find some affirmation of something that’s been on my mind the last few days. I decided to check out the guys behind hootsuite, and found this article with a list of points that will encourage me to start making my own community.
Earlier last week I started a writing experiment on my site where people would write a new article every single day to improve their skills. So far only myself and one other person has joined in, even though I’ve been emailing a few other bloggers.
So today, I decided to start looking for a writing community online that I could get involved with an potentially start recruiting people to join my experiment. In the end though, I found (thanks to your article) that the community is already there, just spread out far and wide across the web on various blogs.
So now I’m switching gears and looking for more blogs to subscribe to and join their communities. When I do that, then perhaps they will join mine as well.
Thanks.