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April 3, 2007
The Do's and Don'ts of Marketing to Bloggers
by Elise Bauer
Article cross-posted on elise.com.
Why is marketing to bloggers a good idea? Inbound links from blogs improves Google rank, which increases traffic from search engines. Exposure from bloggers can land a company's website on a social bookmarking site like Digg or Del.icio.us, driving thousands of new visitors to the site. Bloggers are perceived to be more "authentic" than traditional media, making them disproportionately influential given their size. They can also be highly targeted, engaging the very audience that a marketer might want to reach. But bloggers are a more fickle bunch than most traditional media people. Marketing to them appropriately can yield great results; approaching them the wrong way can backfire.
As someone with a well-trafficked blog and a high Google rank I get bombarded with marketing requests every day. "Your site would be great for my SEO, would you please link to it?" "You obviously love food. I would love to send you some of my ice cream for dogs and you could write about it if you wanted to." (Both real examples.) Most pitches receive a cursory glance and get deleted without a second thought. A few get a response from me, especially if the pitch is respectful and polite. Even fewer get the response the marketer was hoping for.
So, what's the trick?
If you are considering reaching out to bloggers, here are a few guidelines that may help you be more effective in your approach. Note that marketing to bloggers is sort of like selling vacuums door-to-door in a neighborhood where almost everyone knows each other, and most are chatting with each other over their fences. In any strong blogging community there is a lot of back-channel talk going on. This can work to your advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you approach the bloggers in the first place. Now for the guidelines, let's start with the "Don'ts".
Marketing to Bloggers Don'ts
- Do not send obvious form letters. Did you know that we bloggers share the form letters we receive from marketers with each other? We do. This is a great way to get nowhere with the very people you are trying to influence. It also demonstrates that you have done practically no research whatsoever on your audience. Form letters result in promoting pork sausages to vegans or pitches for ready-to-eat cheesecake filling to gourmet scratch cooks.
- Do not ask for links, unless you are willing to pay for them, at which point the conversation turns to advertising policy and rates. This whole reciprocal link thing might be barely tolerable on a blogger-to-blogger level, but is considered annoying spam when it comes from a company pushing products.
- Do not leave blog comments plugging your products. Talk about generating ill will! It's called blog spam. As a blogger I don't really care that you think my readers would be interested in your ready-made lemon syrup. I'm not interested in allowing a company to promote its products on my blog without my permission. If you abuse comments, eventually you'll generate such bad feelings that people will start writing in their blogs about how your company is spamming the blogosphere. Then the next time someone looks your company up in Google all they'll see is a litany of complaints. Not exactly the intended result, eh?
- Do not come on too strong. If you send out product, you can follow up with a "did you receive it?" but not a "when are you going to write about it?" Do not insist on anything. And if someone doesn't want to promote your product, please don't argue with them. Thank them for their time and move on.
- Do not put the blogger on your mailing list (unless they have requested it.) This should be obvious, shouldn't it? But clearly it isn't as getting put on some random marketer's email newsletter or mailing list happens all the time. Bloggers hate it.
Marketing to Bloggers Do's
- Start by creating a targeted list of bloggers. Use tools such as Technorati, BlogPulse, or Alexa to help find blogs that speak to your target audience. Note that although the biggest blogs may be more influential, they tend to get hit up all the time for marketing requests and may not be that responsive. So don't ignore a blog just because it has 20 inbound links (as accounted for by Technorati) and not 200. It may be just the blog you want.
- Know the blogs you are approaching. Before you email a blogger with a pitch, read through the last two months of their posts. Really. At least that. Understand what they care about, what they write about. You'll get a much better feel for how your pitch will be received if you know who it is you are pitching to. Learn the name and gender of the blogger; it may not be immediately obvious. Address the blogger by name instead of just "Hello" or "Dear Webmaster". Check to see if the blogger has posted a review policy. Many bloggers simply will not do product reviews; you risk annoying them if they have a published policy that you have ignored.
- Treat the blogger with the same respect you would a professional journalist. It's good manners. Many bloggers have a lot more influence than you would imagine, yet they are often treated as if they are inconsequential. If you treat them well, you will be rewarded in kind.
- Be open to constructive feedback. If you send out a pitch and it's off the mark, most likely you will get more than a few angry emails back. If you are lucky, someone will take the time to offer polite, constructive feedback as to how you could reach out to bloggers more effectively. Listen to this advice. Consider it valuable consulting that you would normally have to pay thousands of dollars for and here this very nice blogger is giving it to you for free. Treat that blogger well. Assume you know nothing about marketing to bloggers, because believe me, unless you are a blogger who gets pitched all the time, you don't.
- Offer to send product, no strings attached. If you have a book you're promoting, offer to send it to the blogger. Don't suggest that the blogger write a review. If she likes it enough, she might. Or she might recommend it to another blogger who ends up writing about it. Don't underestimate the social power of reciprocity. By giving a gift, if the receiver likes it, he'll likely find ways to make it up to you. This is also why some bloggers don't accept gifts or promotional product. They don't want to be indebted to anyone. So, if a blogger says no, don't take it personally.
At the end of the day it all comes down to the Golden Rule, treat bloggers the way you would like to be treated yourself. Unlike you, the marketing professional, who probably gets paid to reach out to them, most bloggers do what they do purely for the joy of personal self expression. They pour hundreds, if not thousands of hours of their lives into their personal blogging outpost. Respect that and you might get somewhere with them.
Have more examples to add to the list? Please let us know in the comments.
Posted April 3, 2007 | Permalink
Posted to Web Marketing
Comments
Excellent tips about marketing to bloggers. Three other things I suggest adding to your list of "Do's":
1. Make sure your marketing message is highly RELEVANT to the blog topic and theme (somewhat of an expansion of your point #2)
2. Find out if there is a legitimate way you can help the blogger...how can your marketing message or company bring value to the blog?
3. Provide a testimonial or referance someone else that is blogging and who has "accepted" your marketing message-approach.
Posted by: RSS Ray | April 6, 2007 3:04 PM
Hi Sridhar - Great point. If someone with an obviously commercial site leaves a "great post" comment on one of my posts, I usually don't approve the comment. I think they are just trying to get some traffic off my site. Comments should be useful or interesting and relevant to the post.
Hi Ray - I absolutely agree with your point about making sure that whatever you are selling is highly relevant to the blog's content and audience. Not sure I agree with your 2nd and 3rd points though. I'm often getting pitches with a "here's how our product/announcement/service/contest can benefit your readers/blog". I think this approach can be presumptuous. It assumes that the marketer knows my blog and audience better than I do. Now, if by helping the blogger you mean having the marketer offer to send me products to try out, that's something else. Regarding testimonials, they only help if I know and respect the blogs mentioned in the testimonial. Better yet if I'm friends with the blogger they're referencing. Otherwise, pointing to some random blogger, who cares? Just because someone's pitch is good for Josephine Blogger, doesn't mean it's good for me.
Posted by: Elise | April 6, 2007 4:18 PM
Hi Elise,
It my item #2 I too get the kind of "pitches" that you describe. There are several ways that a marketer can "help" a blogger...product or service trial,testomonial, some type of cross marketing, etc. Regarding the testimonials, they most obviously work better if the blogger knows the person providing the testimonial. However, they can also be quite effective IF they come from a source of high authority and respect concerning the subject matter. Because someone's pitch was good for Josephine Blogger, and Josephine is well respected, her testimonial could be of high value when evaluating the marketer.
Posted by: RSS Ray | April 7, 2007 3:01 AM
Ms. Bauer:
The rise of bloggers and their influence has many company executives and public relations people looking for answers. The task is made more difficult because most of us are looking for new ways to deal with what we see as a new phenomenon, when, in fact, the answer is in the past.
Your point about selling vacuums in a place where everyone knows everyone else and they talk every day is more than apt, it is a mandatory insight. We may be anonymous to each our neighbors today, but there was a time when we knew as much about them as we did ourselves.
Despite the fact that most of the 60 million bloggers are read by the people who write them, those that emerge as influential draw upon their ability to connect with a community. They are not so much a podium, but a roundtable where participation matters.
The best blogs are like the local diner, school board meeting or late night poker game; people are there because they want to be and don't want to be lectured.
The question is not, how do you deal with bloggers? It is: Can you become a contributing and, therefore, authentic, member of the community?
That is the hurdle for those of us who seek to influence -- we have to be willing to engage. The lessons for that are ancient.
Posted by: John Berard | May 3, 2007 4:30 PM
Very timely post, Elise, with great points. A slight variant of your #3 (do not leave blog comments plugging your products) are commenters who post a simple "I agree with everything you say..." really as a way to get a link back to their site. I look for (and to try submit) comments that have insight unto themselves.
Posted by: Sridhar Ramanathan | April 4, 2007 10:25 AM