Interactive Promotions Together With Blogs Create a Winning Combination

A couple of weeks ago I shared with you some exciting news that I have been accepted as a contributing author with ADOTAS... a publication focused on the online advertising and media industry. Adotas has a daily email newsletter that reaches over 100,000 advertising professionals monthly. I'll have a monthly article that will run on the 2nd Tuesday of each month with the first one scheduled for tomorrow, Feb. 12th. So, I thought I'd give my readers a first peak at the article. Here it is:

The explosion of social media over the past year has captured the attention of both advertisers and consumers. Marketers are now looking more and more at social media to help reach their target audiences. Advertising on social media, especially blogs, has become very popular and there now are variety of blog networks available that can help facilitate this process. However, the jury is till out whether any significant ROI can be obtained through this media channel.

Now that we've turned the calendar page into the second month of 2008, it appears that there are several trends pointing to the fact that 2008 may be the year promotional marketers and bloggers finally start to connect.

First off, blogs are very powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it.

Technorati is the recognized authority on blogs and they currently track close to 113 million blogs with over 175,000 new blogs appearing each day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second. Recent stats estimate that 39% of American adults regularly read blogs, which equates to roughly over 8.6 million readers absorbing user-generated content over traditional media.

Interactive promotions have also seen increased usage by marketers to not only drive traffic to their website but also to build their brand. Just take a look at some of the recent promotions that were associated with this year's Super Bowl. Doritos executed it's second annual Crash the Super Bowl contest in which they ran a :60 ad that consisted of a consumer generated music video created by the contest's winner. Pepsi launched its biggest promotion ever with a Justin Timberlake ad promoting their new Pepsi Stuff loyalty program. Unilever's Sunsilk hair care brand kicked off its Life Can't Wait consumer-generated contest promotion featuring Madonna, Shakira and Marilyn Monroe. Plus P&G's Tide brand created a My Talking Stain promotional micro-site that invites consumers to submit their own stain ad and play Be the Stain instant win game for chances to win.

Survey results released by Jupiter Research last year showed that when consumers were asked which where their top online activities, 50% of those answered participation in contests or sweepstakes. The only activities that scored higher involved email, search, product research/buying and online billing/statements. These further stats demonstrate even more the value of online promotions:

• 80% of consumers have entered an online sweepstakes
• 70% of consumers say they're influenced by promotions
• 68% of consumers actively participate in promotions
• 88% are seeking out more promotions than they did last year
• 81% of consumers say they have made a purchase due to a promotion
• 89% of consumers like to receive promotional messages online, 47% in-store, 33% direct mail, 25% phone, and 6% via text message
• Promotional incentives can more than double email open rates and improve click-through rates by as much as 1000%

Now while advertising on blogs has yet to provide measurable results for marketers, interactive promotions, such as online sweepstakes, user-generated contests and instant-win games, have supplied definitive results. These types of interactive promotions are one of the most powerful ways to motivate interaction on the Internet. By putting the right incentive in front of the right audience you can get then to act and once you have their personal information this then enables the start of a dialog for a permission-based, data-driven relationship thus allowing you to deliver personalized and relevant offers.

Interactive agencies, such as industry leader ePrize, are booming and are further proof that interactive promotions are successful. Last week ePrize announced their 2007 sales results in which they saw a 38-percent growth in net sales to $49.6 million. On top of that they added 174 new clients and launched 1,366 promotions nationwide last year, nearly 70-percent more promotions than they launched in 2006.

So, what we now have is a great opportunity to combine the benefits of interactive promotions with social media into what I'm calling Social Sweeps.

Blogs are powerful socializing tools that can connect people from all over the world and help to build relationships. This is an extremely strong benefit and by integrating a promotion into a blog it provides that added value along with the excitement of a chance to win. Bloggers tend to like giveaways and contests and they also like being asked to evaluate products that are relevant to their readers. So we are now witnessing marketers approaching bloggers and offering to give them product to try as well as to use as a prize in their own giveaway. This appears to be a growing activity and a win-win situation for all:

• The marketers can get some very targeted awareness and publicity
• The bloggers can attract more people to their blog
• The readers have a chance to win something that's very relevant to them.

Blog outreach programs are a popular method for marketers to connect with bloggers and they're starting to provide some level of success. These programs can however be a time-consuming process and therefore should not be thought of as a one-time event, but more as a way for a brand to build long lasting relationships. Having a core group of influencers can pay off big in the long run for both the brand as well as for the blogger.

If considering executing a blog outreach program you need to keep in mind that contacting bloggers is quite different than just sending out a PR release as you would with traditional media. With a blogger you generally have a window into her personal life so mass emailing should not be used and instead every email should be personalized. Here are a few participation options that you could offer a blogger in a Social Sweeps outreach program:

• Invite them to write a review on your product/service and publish it to their blog
• Offer to send them product or give them access to your service and ask them if they would then share their experience with their readers (hopefully it will be a positive experience)
• Give them extra product and suggest that they conduct their own sweepstakes giveaway on their blog. Provide some direction on how to best execute this.
• Offer an interview with a spokesperson from your company so that they could publish quotes on their blog 
• Invite them to inform their readers about the national promotion that you are launching and offer to prove a hyper-linked logo or widget that will direct their readers directly to your company's/brand's website or promotional micro-site.

Additional options may also include:

• Supplying the bloggers with a special promotional code that they could share with their readers that would provide a "blogger discount" towards the purchase of your product or service for a limited time.
• Invite a few bloggers to be on a panel of judges for a national user-generated contest that you are conducting. 

Interactive promotions are highly measurable and most of the time can be very effective when integrated with the right incentive, however they certainly won't achieve your defined objectives if proper awareness of the promotion is not created. While we realize that brand advertisers still require volume and scale, utilizing a blog outreach program as a way to get the word out about a new interactive promotion may be a much more effective "€œbuy"€ than online advertising. This Social Sweeps strategy may in fact be an ideal way in 2008 to reach those niche parts of The Long Tail.

Comments

[Michelle]

This is pretty exciting! My blog is rather new, so this type of marketing would really help me gain traffic and readers. I hope that advertising agencies do embrace this new type of promotion and begin using it more--I know I would love to see blog-only discounts and contests offered through the blogs that I read.
Thanks for the article--great read!

[Donna DeClemente]

Hi Michelle,
I'm glad you found this information useful. I've made a note of your blog and will add it to my list of "Mommy Bloggers" for the next time a marketer asks me for help in targeting this audience. Good luck with your blog. It looks like you're off to a great start.