Contest Outreach Strategy
-
Hello Mozzers,
I've just started a contest in my own SEO blog, in which people will receive a full website audit, a keyword research plus competitive analysis, and an on-site audit.
What I want from it is two things:
- Get a few testimonials for my upcoming SEO consulting services;
- Get more FB fans.
As I know that my blog won't get too many tweets and shares per se, I have to manually outreach bloggers so they may tweet about my contest.
What I've been doing up until now is saying:
"Hey, my name is Ivan, I've got this blog and I'm running this contest. The prizes are these ones. I know your Twitter audience may be interested in this, so, could you tweet this? Thanks".
In the email I already give them a tweet with the URL and everyhing, so they don't have to do anything, but copy and pasting.
What're your opinion on this strategy? Do you recommend doing something else, like a more indirect approach, to contest outreach?
Thank you very much!
Ivan -
I would worry less about what your communication to them says and more about identifying the market. To get a 20-40% return on who you contact, you're going to have to put in some major work into who these site owners are and if they want or need help. This isn't a numbers game, it's a market identification game.
If it were me, I'd spend time on a few web design and website development forums looking for people who are asking questions about their site or have concerns, and then develop conversations with them. Step away from this being about you and make it about them.
Hope that helps!
-
Ivan,
I'd say that one audience that is likely to respond favorably to your contest would be small companies with new websites. Such an audience is most concentrated around lower-end and new web designers who are willing to make relatively inexpensive websites for clients in order to establish a client base.
Those types web designers are rarely at the top of the search results for "web designer [your city]"-type searches because their domains aren't established enough to rank highly. That means that if you do a search like that, you're like to find those rising-star web designers down past page two or three (along with the falling-stars who have had their time in the sun and have dropped out of page-one due to unsustainable SEO tactics--there are a lot more of those than there used to be). If you contact those low-ranking web designers with your contest, they may be happy to to ask their clients to tweet something to you in order for a chance to win.
-
Peter,
Thanks for your answer.
To clarify, when I say "what I have been doing up to now..." I mean one day lol. I've just started doing this, I've no experience with contest creation.
Well, in fact, I've just got one reply of one prospect, so from the 10 emails sent, I've got 1 answer. That's a 10% effectiveness. I'm thinking on sending around 30 emails, so we'll see in a few days.
I hope to get a 20-40% success rate, just because I'm trying to get one tweet. We'll see in a few days.
About what you say, it's true that what matters is having a nice social following. But that takes a lot of time. Imagine that if I take a client (not this case), and they don't have too many followers, it's the same situation that I've got. Even if my client had lots of followers-fans, if they don't have good engagement rates (what Avinash Kaushik calls applause rate, amplification rate and conversation rate), then that doesn't matter at all.
Anyways, thanks for your answer!
-
Hi Ivan
You say "what I have been doing up to now..." which suggests you have already been doing this. What success have you seen on bloggers being willing to tweet to their followers your offer? If you have already offered this to quite a few bloggers, then you should already have some indication on (a) the percentages of bloggers who are willing to tweet for you and (b) the take up rate from their tweets.
I would be interested to hear if it is proving successful for you.
My strategy if wanting to offer these free audits is to build a list of contacts myself through my own outreach in social media. It's not a quick strategy but something you need to build and grow over time. Go on to the social media channels and engage with people, listen and try to answer their questions, share with your own followers any good things they are sharing. Then, as people build up more trust and authority in the places you are engaging people will begin to respond to you more and be more willing to share the good things you put out.
I hope that helps,
Peter
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Facebook Contests
Hey Moz Community, I've been reading some articles that Facebook no longer likes if Business Pages run contests on their Pages. I was thinking about doing something super simple with a "Like, Comment, and Share" type of an entry. Does anyone know if this is still allowed - I can't seem to find a concrete answer. Even the guidelines for Facebook seem a bit vague. I could always take the contest offline and use a landing page on my website to generate traffic but that also doesn't help with my social following. Thoughts, insights all welcome. Thanks!
Social Media | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Which is best for SEO: Dedicated landing pages for contests or templated page URL?
A colleague and I were having a discussion about this and wanted to get insight from the community about this. Most often we run contests on social channels, but for some we place them on our e-commerce web site - particularly those which have a universal appeal to customers since these also tend to be included in our e-mails. So our question is with regard to any links built to those contest pages, is it better to: have them point to a unique page, Example: domain.com/customer-appreciation-contest OR A reusable page/URL that can continuously be repurposed and updated for new contests. Example: domain.com/contests We discussed pros/cons of each but am curious if anyone here has insight or source that definitively advises which method is best. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Social Media | | ATShock1 -
Facebook experts, I need help: is this 'strategy' idea legit or nonsense?
Hi guys, I have a friend who works in a large university where each faculty has their own Facebook page. The pages are rarely maintained and experience very poor levels of engagement. The university's main Facebook page has a very large following (195,000+ likes), but again, the engagement is very poor - on average each post gets about 20 likes, 2 comments and 1-2 shares if that. Now, my friend works in one of the faculties and doesn't happen to have a Facebook page (his particular faculty is concentrating their efforts on other areas of inbound marketing). However, the social media manager for the university is insisting my friend’s faculty create a page and contribute to a wider ‘campaign’ being undertaken at the uni - however my friend is not convinced (and neither am I) that the logic behind this campaign makes sense. Here's how the campaign has been described: 1. The main university page (with 195k likes) posts a generic image ('whats happening this week at the uni'), which asks people to ‘look in the comments’ to see what's happening among all the different faculties 2. The faculty pages all at once submit comments on the post about 'what's happening' in their area 3. The faculty pages 'like' the main image post, share it, and like the other comments left by faculties The social media manager says this campaign approach will ensure the main post gets into the feed of the 195k followers (and more) and increase the reach of the other faculties’ pages because of the high level of 'engagement' and 'aggregation' on the post. My friend and I feel this idea is flawed for a number of reasons: 1. Routinely it’s the same people and faculties engaging with the post - so the vast majority of the 195k won't be reached virally anyway 2. The 195k have demonstrated they aren't engaged, due to the poor prior performance of the page – it’s unlikely the posts even make it to their feeds organically 3. The image is generic (it is literally a picture of a building which says 'what’s on this week') and doesn’t entice people to take an action - you can't see the comments as they're collapsed in the feed, so unless users actually are compelled by the image to click into the comments the post is useless 4. The message isn't targeted - a number of random faculties provide comments to the post, so it's very possible what's offered by the faculties isn't relevant to the wider audience. Anyway, I'd really hope someone with a deep understanding of Facebook could help provide some clarity on this campaign proposal. It seems like a flawed methodology which advocates manufacturing engagement and an ineffective use of time and resource. Many thanks
Social Media | | cos20300 -
Authorship without Google+ - Ideas and strategies
Hi everyone, I am currently coaching several companies on Content Marketing, Authorship etc and how to implement these techniques at an institutional level - more here. My question is - Can an author reap the benefits of authorship in all search engines simultaneously without linking to Google + and becoming entangled in the Google Circles phenomena? I know don't laugh. 🙂 I know it seems like an ignorant question, but there must be a way. Is there a possibility of doing this with Author Schema's http://schema.org/Article? Will Google treat them the same way as Google +? My clients are not happy about getting so entangled with Google + and leaving out the other search engines. Thanks Carla
Social Media | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Social media marketing strategy for an ERP company?
Hello Everybody, We are an ERP company and want to get into social media marketing. We have decided to use Google+ over Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Any ideas what we can do besides regular updates and getting our clients link to us? Regards
Social Media | | IM_Learner0 -
Facebook Contest: Fan or Not?
Let's say that I manage a Page for a company, and I run a contest through a "Promoted Post". Does every single Like to that "Promoted post" will be counted as new fan? My objective is to increase the fans number of the page, which is your best practice to achieve that through a Facebook contest? Many thanks.
Social Media | | YESdesign0 -
What are the strategies in Link Building? How to increase referral traffic?
Guys please help me to increase reference traffic for a dry topic website such as automotives, insurance, real estate. I tried social bookmarking and networking but I did not find any difference I even did Blog commenting forum posting but it did not make much difference to me It increased my search rate but it not helped in my referral traffic. So please suggest me better strategies in Link Building for dry topic websites
Social Media | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Best strategy for optimizing Facebook annotations in Bing & Yahoo
My website has a page on Facebook with around 32K connections, these are not showing up in Bing's serp annotations because Bing is not associating my page with the website. Unsure why because I have closed loop links and used their Page Like Box to generate those 32K connections. I have Facebook insights and Bing webmaster tools authorized for the domain Does anyone know how I can ensure Bing makes that connection? If that's not possible, would it be more advantageous to drive likes to my sitewide domain or specific pages? My testing on Bing suggests the domain level like is most likely to trigger annotations, even for deeper pages with no specific likes. http://ministry-to-children.com/ http://www.facebook.com/MinistryToChildren
Social Media | | Tony-Karib0