Blogger Outreach: What Is It?

As human beings, we naturally have a desire to connect and interact with other real people, and in these days of automated everything, this is creating a shift towards what is known as P2P or people-to-people marketing. If you have products to sell, blogger outreach is one of the most useful forms of this type of marketing because it involves real people who have an online following discussing a product they’ve tried out. Given that research indicates people have greater trust in information from friends and fellow consumers rather than in information from brands or on television, bloggers who are trusted and have a good following can help promote your products very effectively.

How does blogger outreach work?

Blogger outreach is a form of influencer marketing. With this type of marketing, a blogger becomes a brand’s ‘influencer’ by trying out or reviewing products and writing about them in a natural and organic way that doesn’t sound like sales spiel – well as long as it’s done well that is!

Successful blogger outreach requires formulating a good match between both parties. Finding suitable bloggers is not always an easy task. It can mean having to trawl the internet for bloggers and contacting them, hopefully getting a response and some genuine interest in your brand, and then deciding whether you will be compatible for an ongoing mutually beneficial business relationship.

So to help make things easier we have provided a few tips below for the development of blogger / business owner relationships.

Ideas for enlisting influential bloggers

• Take a genuine interest in the bloggers you intend contacting. Read their posts, leave comments if appropriate, check out their social media pages and so on.

• Always treat bloggers with respect and recognise that they may have busy schedules of their own.

• Send emails to bloggers individually, rather than en-masse. Offer them the choice of a free product from your site, or some samples to try out. It’s important that this step is unconditional – that is, no-strings attached! If they choose to write about your brand, consider it a bonus.

• Invite bloggers to events where they can learn about your brand and sample products. Consider offering incentives such as freebies or vouchers. Some companies even run exclusive events just for bloggers.

• Find out what you can do to help your bloggers. As for all of us, they want to know ‘what’s in it for me?’

• Develop relationships with your bloggers that are ongoing and long-term – this is about a mutually beneficial arrangement, and not just about marketing products for your business.

If all of the above seems a bit too complex and time-consuming, consider using a blogger matching service, such as Jamballa, to help find suitable bloggers. Jamballa actually refers to its database system as being like eHarmony – except that it’s for matching blogs and brands! Jamballa involves a pay-as-you-go fee for business owners or business marketers, and is free-of-charge for bloggers.

Platforms like Jamballa can be seen as more of a community where bloggers and business owners meet up than a marketing system or method. Other similar services you might be interested in include Brand Meets Blog, and Activate.

Blogger outreach can really improve awareness of your brand and products, which can in turn improve sales. It might be worth trying out, to see if it is suitable for your business!