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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Outreach - Guest Blogs & Articles
Hi I know how old hat guest blogs are - but is all lost for high quality articles being placed on relevant sites? I am trying to decide where to put my offsite SEO efforts - we have no outreach strategy at present. Do I ignore articles altogether & focus on SEO/Social campaigns? Or try and do both? It's only me internally, we are looking to outsource some of the work but not all. Help! Thanks!
Social Media | | BeckyKey0 -
Facebook Outreach Tips - what to say
Hi, I've been shown how to do facebook outreach in my home town. I am a weight loss hypnotist. I was shown how to do outreach to possible home town clients using the facebook search feature. I go to the search and type in "Friends who like weight loss" And I get a couple of friends who have liked a major weight loss site After I've done that search, I look to the right in facebook. It has a bunch of dropdowns. I choose the same search parameters except I change it to "Live in Boise" (my town) and "Not my Friend". I get dozens of facebook users who live in Boise and are not my friends and are interested in weight loss. I can message these people (less than 30 a day) Here's the problem: I don't want to spam them. How do I get these people interested in my weight loss hypnosis program (I could really help them) by sparking up a conversation and not spamming. Everything I can think of saying seems manipulative. I don't know how to start a conversation and invite people to come in for a free sample session. My free sample session is 30 minutes and is free just to see if the client and I are a good fit. My website is bobweikel.com if that helps. How do I do this with the utmost integrity? Thank you.
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Is Link Earning the same as Blogger Outreach?
Hello all - is there a difference between link earning (from Rand's WBF post) and blogger outreach? Little confused 🙂
Social Media | | Seabrook0 -
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 -
What is the best app for running a photo contest?
We sell vinyl wall decals. Our product lends itself to social media. We are going to run a monthly contest for the best/most creative customer photo. What is the best app for this?
Social Media | | katazoom0 -
Increasing likes on Facebook - Strategies
What local strategies has anybody used in the past to boost the local likes of a Facebook page. The business concerned is a home improvements company covering a geographical area of the UK. What I would like to do is try and increase the number of likes from our potential target audience in cities and towns that we cover. I don't think Facebook ads are the right choice as many users just ignore them, but would be interested in online and offline marketing strategies that could be used to boost numbers to our Facebook page. The reason this is so important especially in the home improvement space is that most projects are awarded on word of mouth recommendations, so Facebook is the perfect platform.
Social Media | | ocelot0 -
Please help me improve this link building strategy
Link building is challenging. Can you guys read my process below and offer improvements: This is for marketing an article that is good for target websites for humanitarian reasons. It helps their readers in a way that they really need it. Not to say that all of these target websites are going to want to reference my article. I'm looking for A. The target website to write, or let us write, a blog post around my article, of course with a link to the article and no other links to my website (unless they want to) or B. For our article to be listed in a resource section when appropriate How I'm doing this now: 1. We're starting with a well written, authoritative article with attractive images, graphs, and even a fancy javascript display area that's useful. The article is 3500 words. There's a big image link at the bottom that goes to the article in PDF version. Due to some hosting problems, the pdf version is disallowed in the robots.txt (it won't help to get links to it) There's 2 versions of the article, the one I'm marketing has all of our ecommerce menu and such removed, so that this version has minimal commercial parts in it. There's also a commercial version, which we are not pushing, and the non-commercial is rel cononicaled pointing over to the commercial. The non-commercial article has only one external backlink so far, and the commercial version has no external backlinks yet. We're just getting started. 2. First I like on facebook and follow on twitter. I spend some time with the target site's facebook page and like several recent posts, sharing one or two things to my own facebook page. I then retweet two good recent tweets put out by the site's general twitter account. BTW, we don't have very many twitter followers yet for our twitter account. 3. Then I read their newest blog post. I read it thoroughly. Sometimes I don't pick the newest if there is another recent one that is more similar in topic to our site. I spend some time putting together a thoughtful and helpful comment for that blog post. I submit the comment. I then go on FB and carefull post how I found the blog post helpful and place a link to their blog post. A lot of these sites, though, aren't accepting blog post comments but I always post on their facebook page. 4. I wait a couple of days in case my activity gets noticed. At that point, I go to linkedin and look for people that work for the site. If I find a content/marketing director, or if it's a small site and I find the owner [still not very good at this part], I search google for their email address and/or twitter account. I'm successful in finding a specific person only about 1/3 of the time. These sites also often have phone numbers. 5. I send out either A. a tweet to a specific person asking if they need help with content, or B. An email to a specific person like: Subject: Do you need help with content that is very useful to [niche audience] [their first name] I hope you are doing well. [add sentence here referencing something I learned about them, I don't know how to do this part well yet] I'm writing you because we have some content that is useful and important to [niche audience]. It's an article about [our article name and link]. We're wondering if you'd consider, since it would be very beneficial to your audience, to write a blog post explaining and citing that article. We think our doing this would add to [niche audience] quality of life. Sincerely, Bob Weikel
Social Media | | BobGW
Co-owner
[website] If I don't find a specific person, I write an email as similar to the above as possible and send it to their general email address or contact form. I send one email, wait 2 or 3 business days, send another email, wait 2 or 3 business days. Then I call. I ask for "Marketing" or whoever is in charge of their blog [I haven't done much of this and am not good at it yet] or if it's a small company I might talk to the owner. Sometimes I only send one email before calling, especially if I think email's a lost cause. I never leave voicemail. I always keep calling over several days until I reach someone. When I call and get someone, I say something like, "Hi, I'm Bob from [website]. I was wondering if you would be interested in some content that would be beneficial to [niche audience]." I know there is a lot of room for improvement. I'm looking for a 10% success rate. Thanks.1 -
Social media strategy
Hey everyone, I know is this is a bit of an old strategy, but what do you think about building social profiles (blogger, tumbler, wordpress, etc) with a keyword in the url for link building and SEO? Outdated strategy? Unnatural? Has it worked for you recently? Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
Social Media | | jhinchcliffe0