How to Organize Blogger Contests, Campaigns or Meets

Bloggers are great mediums to reach your target audience. A blogger has a set of readers and more often than not, the readers look up to the blogger for fresh, detailed, or informative content. Sometimes we can also influence our audience buying or consumption decisions through blogger campaigns.

But very few of us know how to run successful blogger campaigns. So here are some tips that will help:

Planning stage:

Decide on an activity. Keep this following checklist in mind when you plan.

• Figure out what the incentive for the blogger is for him/her to write about you. Is it a prize, or is it being privy to information like the launch of a new product or the preview of a movie which is yet to launch?
• Make sure the activity is not just for your brand, and adds value to the blogger's blogging experience and to his/her readers' reading experience.
• The activity should be in sync with your overall social media or marketing activity. Say, if you have a campaign like Stayfree change or Gillettes Shave or Crave, having an activity on similar themes makes a lot of sense. You can also look at exploring blogger activities for launches.

Close on prizes:

Most Blogger campaigns often work only alongside prizes. However, product launches or blogger meets can work without them too. The incentive for bloggers in this case would be to meet fellow bloggers and expand their network or become the first to blog about a certain piece of news or information.

The bigger the prize or bigger the value add, the bigger the level of participation.

Get bloggers to participate:

Take assistance of the blogging community owners like Indiblogger.in and blogadda.com. They run blogger campaigns for brands for a certain fee, working alongside the brand, devising a blogger campaign, and spreading the word of the campaign through their database.

If you cannot afford the above, an alternate way would be to personally search for bloggers and invite them to participate in the blogging contest. Say you are running a contest for food bloggers, you can search on blogger directories like indiblogger and blogadda for food bloggers.

You can also look them up on Twitter lists on listorious.com or search Twitter bios from followerwonk.com.

Close the loop:

Use the blog posts for marketing across your social platforms, let your community know what bloggers are talking about you.

Shooting out prizes or gift hampers on time is essential, since making bloggers wait shows you are not committed to your campaigns or you didn’t appreciate the efforts of the bloggers.

Blogger meets:

The trickiest part for brands can be the offline integration for brand campaigns. However blogger meets are efficient offline-online integrations, wherein the digital world comes offline and gets a chance to interact with the brand for longer duration than they do online.

The important factors to note while organizing blogger meets are:

Venue: a place that is centrally located will always ensure a bigger turnout.

Incentive: What value are you providing the blogger through the meet? If you aren’t adding to their life, they will not attend the meet.

These factors should be taken care of to ensure a successful blogger campaign.

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