Recently Goldsmith Jewelers of Utah hosted a private social media event for Utah bloggers. Their objective was to increase foot traffic into their store and it was a smashing success.
Janet Meiners Thaeler “Newspapergirl” pictured left wrote an excellent article about this social media marketing event for Open Forum, American Express. Jyl Patte of Mom it Forward helped coordinate the event with Sprout Marketing.
You might consider your own campaign for your business. I recommend this type of marketing because it’s a win for everyone involved–bloggers get to see what you do firsthand and then report and share with their communities offering some sort of review, a coupon, and perhaps even a giveaway, companies get to reach a new audience they have never met before and potential clients trust the voice and experience of the blogger to bring them a good recommendation.
If you do this type of campaign, just make sure you consider the objective is clear of what you wish to accomplish and make sure everyone who is involved in planning the event understands (that you want to increase sales, build visibility online through new press,etc.) so at the end you can see how your time and dollars benefitted. You might hire a consultant to support you in your campaign if you don’t know other bloggers in your industry or are not savvy with social media networks such as Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter.
Janet,
This is a very informative post – thanks for sharing. May I ask a question?
I can see how this strategy would work for retailers trying to reach the average, or maybe not so average, consumer. There are many success stories about this. Have you seen any success stories where this strategy has been used in a B2B or wholesaler enviornoment? I’m curious for your thoughts on this.
I know the simple answer is that if there are enough people blogging in that space then it may make sense. I’m curioous for your thoughts on other successes and how you might approach such a situation.
Thanks,
Ken Kaufman
Ken Kaufmans last blog post…7 Core Responsibilities of the CFO
Sorry, I meant to address this to Kelly, not Janet.
Ken Kaufmans last blog post…7 Core Responsibilities of the CFO
Ken, thanks for your comment, I absolutely agree that this could work with a service or B2B wholesale environment. In that case you would seek to show value/demo/experience in person with some type of incentive for participation.
For example right now I’ve been offered to try a year of a tech-related service that I really need/want for free in exchange for a product review. Since the company is local they could have made the same offer but had us all come into their office for a pizza night and to show us how their product/service worked we all have fun meeting each other in person and then we go home with their service to try out. I actually think whenever you can get people to meet the company staff in person it’s good and whenever there is food and other cool people invited, plus some kind of giveaway, everyone’s happy.
My husband sells high end home theatres, he can’t give one away, but we have movie demo nights all the time and even if people don’t buy the $25k system they might think of us for speakers, etc. demo is always awesome…I’ve even been to soccer and basketball games in box seats for companies who I’ve never heard of because of what their offer was and then I got to know them there.
There’s lots of ways to get people to talk about you, what’s a good fit for your biz?
Kelly,
Thanks for your quick response to my post. Again, you have shared very valuable information. I currently have two clients that sell B2B that need to use the concepts you described to get some traction and online buzz for their products. Both of them are in high-tech, and the offer for free services as you described would be a perfect fit for them. One of them is creating a new category in a pretty well-defined market that will take a lot of education to the market on their very different product, so they are probably going to need to write some white papers and become speakers at conferences and trade shows where their target market is a predominant is presence. In fact, there may even be an opportunity to have one or two biz schools in the area take an academic research approach that will validate their new market with even more credible authority.
No matter how we look at it, your original content and your response are a critical component to any marketing campaign – get the influencers onboard, and then let them do what they do best – influence others to the product or service.
As for my biz, that is a whole different story but still is very relevant. Maybe we can chat about that another time. Again, thanks for the quick response and take care!
Ken Kaufmans last blog post…7 Core Responsibilities of the CFO